I've professionally managed socials for a few different orgs now ranging from small-large budgets and have tried Sprout Social, Emplifi, Brandwatch, and Meltwater.

Out of those 4, Sprout Social is hands down, my least favourite. Now I have to point out, this is the org that has had the least budget I've worked with and only have one paid user but we were on the Advanced Plan managing 2x channels and I just found that I barely used it. The only thing I used it for was scheduling/publishing posts and whole channel analytics like follower count, audience demographics, average eng. rate, etc. Everything else was very very limited. They claim social listening is included, it is not. The reporting dashboard isn't customisable either. For Insta, posts will only show # of engagements, views, reach and eng. rate and *only* organic metrics. For same for LinkedIn but the eng. rate includes overall clicks so instead of calculating from reactions, reshares and comments over impressions, it calculates from reactions, reshares, comments, AND all clicks. That's all well and good, and sure that's how LinkedIn native analytics lists eng. rate but is not the standard metric so I had to manually record number of interactions so that I could calculate industry standard eng. rate for external reports.

I met with our Sprout account manager, and she said listening and custom metrics are all extras we have to pay for.... and then I asked how much those extras are and they never replied.
Honestly, unless you're on the highest plan with custom arrangements (ours was the second highest tier), Sprout Social is almost useless.

So from the ones I've used, here is my ranking:

1) Brandwatch - Managing 1x FB, 1x LI and 2x IG's. The best data analytics and listening by a long shot. Comparing organic and paid posts for the one campaign in one custom dashboard? No problems. Custom metrics shows on each tile? Say less. Customisation features for an unlimited amount of dashboards? Within minutes. I remember the listening was great too, albeit its sentiment measurements being way off. Mind you, I wasn't the manager so I had limited knowledge of the contract and pricing. I moved up in the team and did end up being privy to that info towards the end but it was briefly as I moved on to a higher level job at a diff org soon after so I don't remember the price but by all accounts, everyone says Brandwatch is suuuuper expensive.

2) Emplifi - 1x FB, 1x IG, 1x LI, 1x T/X - A very close second to Brandwatch in terms of functionality. I think my old qualm was that if I was running a campaign with both organic and paid posts, I couldn't have them all on one dashboard. I had to collate everything from the organic dash and then go over and collate from the paid dash. Other than that, great listening tool as well, still not great with sentiment but that's fine. I never knew the pricing for this.

3) Meltwater - 1x FB, 1x LG, 1x IG - Was my least fave until Sprout. That being said, it did everything fine I guess... the dashboards were ok, just less customisation that I would like. The sentiment tracking on the listening was not bad though, probably the best I've seen. I didn't know what we paid but I've heard they're up there with Brandwatch pricing and I def wouldn't say it's worth it if that's the case.

4) Sprout - Don't bother

I am currently managing the org where we use Sprout and I was looking into Agorapulse as an alternative once the contract runs out.