ArchiveSocialvs
CivicPlus
CivicPlus: The parent vendor, relevant if you want websites, communications and archiving from one contract
ArchiveSocial
Social media archiving that captures public agency accounts as legally defensible open records
As of 31 August 2026, ArchiveSocial's pricing is not published; the vendor quotes on request. Captures every post, comment, edit and deletion on a government social media account in an authenticated, court admissible form. Softwr lists it under Government. ArchiveSocial is made by ArchiveSocial, part of CivicPlus, available on Web.
Overview
What ArchiveSocial does
ArchiveSocial records the social media activity of public agencies: posts, replies, comments from the public, direct messages where permitted, and crucially the edits and deletions that a periodic export would never capture. Records are stored with authentication metadata and can be searched and exported in response to a public records request or litigation hold. The company is based in Durham, North Carolina. The legal position is what creates the market. In the United States, an agency's social media posts are public records under state open records law and federal equivalents, and so are the public comments on them. Agencies have lost cases over deleted comments, and a deleted comment is precisely what a manual archiving process misses, because it is gone before anyone thinks to capture it. ArchiveSocial captures continuously through the platform APIs and preserves the record with a chain of custody, which is the difference between having an archive and having evidence. Screenshots and platform provided data exports fail on authentication and on deletion capture respectively. Ownership matters here for roadmap reasons. CivicPlus, the municipal website and communications vendor, acquired ArchiveSocial in 2021, so the product is now part of a broader local government suite and is sold alongside CivicPlus websites and communication tools. An agency that already runs CivicPlus will find procurement easier and bundling likely. An agency that deliberately avoids CivicPlus should know it is buying from them. Pricing is quoted, typically by number of archived accounts, and as with all government software the executed contracts are public and worth reading before negotiating.
What people use it for
- A city whose legal department has flagged deleted social media comments as a records liability
- A police department that must produce social media records under an open records request
- An agency under litigation hold needing authenticated social media evidence rather than screenshots
- A communications team operating many accounts across departments with no consistent archiving
Related searches
The honest half
Where it falls short
Concrete and checkable, so you can decide whether any of them matter to you. This is the half of a review a vendor will not write about ArchiveSocial.
- Coverage depends entirely on third party platform APIs, so when a network restricts or reprices its API the archive's completeness changes for reasons the vendor does not control.
- Pricing scales with the number of archived accounts, so an agency where every department runs its own page pays repeatedly for the same compliance obligation.
- It archives rather than governs, so it will faithfully preserve a policy violation without preventing it, and agencies still need social media policy and training.
- Since the 2021 CivicPlus acquisition the product is part of a municipal suite, so buyers avoiding that vendor for other reasons are still buying from them.
- The value is entirely insurance shaped, which makes it a perennial target during budget cuts right up until the first records request it would have answered.
Cross-shopped
What people choose instead of ArchiveSocial
Each pairing was judged by two reviewers asking whether a buyer would genuinely weigh the two against each other. The ones that failed were deleted rather than published.
- ArchiveSocialvsGranicus
Granicus: Overlaps on government communications and public meeting record keeping
- ArchiveSocialvsNextRequest
NextRequest: Better fit when the pressing problem is managing records requests rather than capturing social content
Pricing
What ArchiveSocial costs
Taken from the vendor's own pricing page. Prices move, so check before you buy.
ArchiveSocial
On request
- Quoted annually, typically scaled by number of archived accounts
- Additional accounts and platforms increase the subscription
- Bundled pricing common for agencies already buying CivicPlus products
- Agency contracts are public records and disclose comparable annual values
Capabilities
Features
Continuous capture
Records posts and comments through platform APIs as they happen rather than on a schedule
Deletion and edit capture
Preserves content that was removed or altered, which manual archiving misses
Authenticated records
Stores metadata establishing chain of custody for admissibility
Records request search
Searches the archive by keyword, account, date and author for open records responses
Litigation hold export
Produces defensible exports in formats legal teams and courts accept
Multi platform coverage
Archives across the major social networks an agency operates on
Answered, with sources
Questions people ask
Each answer names the page it came from, so you can check it rather than take our word for it.
Why not just export data from the platforms?
Platform exports do not reliably capture deleted or edited content and carry no chain of custody, which is what makes an archive usable as evidence.
Are public comments on our posts records?
In many United States jurisdictions yes, and deleted comments have been the subject of litigation against agencies.
Who owns ArchiveSocial?
CivicPlus, which acquired it in 2021 and sells it alongside its municipal website and communications products.
How is it priced?
By archived accounts, quoted rather than published. Comparable agency contracts are public records.
Keep looking
Where to go from ArchiveSocial
- ArchiveSocial alternativesEvery product people weigh against it
- ArchiveSocial pricingPlans, floors and what the tiers exclude
- ArchiveSocial badgesWhich rules it meets, and the figure behind each
- All Government softwareThe full category
- Best Government softwareThe shortlist, and how it was cut
Best Government software for
Compare ArchiveSocial with
- NextRequest
- Granicus
- Zencity
- Bonfire
- NEOGOV
- AWS GovCloud
- Clariti
- GovPilot
- mySidewalk
- Periscope Holdings
- Axon Records
- DataSF
- Google Cloud for Government
- iCompass
- Mapbox Government
- GovQA
- GovPilot
- GovQA
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Softwr does not host reviews and shows no star rating for ArchiveSocial, because a rating we did not collect is not ours to publish. What is here is the pricing and platform detail from the vendor’s own pages, limitations we could state concretely, and alternatives a reviewer confirmed people weigh against it. Tell us if any of it is wrong.
More on ArchiveSocial
ArchiveSocial alternatives
What people switch to, and what they give up
ArchiveSocial pricing
Every tier, and where the cost actually lands
Compare ArchiveSocial
Put it head to head with anything we hold
ArchiveSocial badge
Its rating, and an embed for your own site
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