Best Social Media Schedulers

Platform: LinkedIn

Sendible

Sendible has spent its whole life selling to agencies, and the product is shaped by that in ways that are obvious once you look at where the effort has gone. The composer is ordinary. The client management is not.

The client layer

Each client gets a dashboard that carries your agency’s branding rather than Sendible’s, on your own domain if you want. They log in, see their content calendar, approve or reject posts with comments, and read reports that arrive under your name.

That sounds like a small thing and it changes the relationship. A client who can see the queue asks fewer questions about whether anything is happening. Hootsuite has never been good at this and Buffer does not attempt it.

Approvals are built around external sign-off rather than internal review, which is a meaningfully different workflow. Planable does the review experience more elegantly; Sendible does the whole client relationship.

Pricing

Creator is $29 a month, around $25 annually, for one user and six profiles. Plans scale up to Advanced at $299 a month for a hundred profiles.

At the top end that compares well with premium alternatives: a hundred profiles on Sprout Social would cost multiples of it. Against SchedPilot Enterprise at $79 for a hundred accounts and ten seats, $299 is expensive, and what you are buying for the difference is the client-facing layer. If your clients actually use it, that is defensible. If they approve posts over email, you are paying $220 a month for a login nobody visits.

At the low end, $29 for six profiles and one user is poor value next to Publer or SocialPilot. Sendible is not really selling to that buyer.

Publishing and inbox

Solid, unremarkable. Calendar, queues, bulk upload, per-network customisation. Coverage spans Instagram, Facebook, X, LinkedIn, TikTok, YouTube, Pinterest and Google Business Profile.

The unified inbox handles comments and messages across client accounts and is decent without approaching Agorapulse.

The interface is the weakest part. It works and it looks its age, which matters when you are showing it to a client who has been using something newer.

Who it is for

Agencies with somewhere between ten and a hundred client profiles where the client relationship runs through a dashboard. Particularly good for B2B agencies, since the LinkedIn handling is thorough.

Not for freelancers with three clients, who should look at SocialPilot Standard at $34 a month for ten accounts and three users. Not for in-house teams, who are paying for a client layer they have no clients for.

Setup and the first week

Sendible takes longer to set up than a plain scheduler because the setup is per client rather than per account. Each client needs a workspace, a set of connected profiles, a branded dashboard, a report template and a decision about what they can see. For ten clients that is most of a day.

Done properly it pays back, because onboarding the eleventh client is then twenty minutes of copying a template rather than a fresh decision about how things should work. Agencies that skip the template work find Sendible tedious, which is a self-inflicted problem.

White-labelling, specifically

This is what you are paying the premium for, so the details matter. You can put your own logo and colours on the client dashboard, serve it from your own subdomain, and send reports that carry no Sendible branding at all. Client login emails come from your domain.

For an agency positioning itself as the client’s marketing department, that consistency is worth real money. For an agency whose clients know perfectly well they use third-party tools, it is worth nothing, and SocialPilot includes white-label reports at $34 a month anyway.

The report builder is the other agency feature worth naming. Drag sections into a template, schedule it to send monthly, and the client receives a branded PDF without anyone remembering to make one. That single automation is why a lot of agencies stay on Sendible despite the interface.

Verdict

Tenth. Good at the one thing it is built for and mid-table at everything else, which is a reasonable trade if you are the buyer it has in mind.

Before subscribing, ask two clients whether they would actually log in to approve posts. The honest answer to that question decides whether Sendible is worth its price over the cheaper agency options.

September 16, 2026
Publer

Publer competes on price and wins, as long as you read the plan boundaries carefully. The gap between Professional and Business is where most of the decision sits.

Pricing, in detail

The free plan gives three accounts with ten scheduled posts each, and excludes X. That last point decides it against Buffer’s otherwise identical free tier for a lot of people.

Professional is $5 for the first account and $4 for each additional one. Unlimited posts, bulk CSV up to 500 rows, RSS auto-posting and recycling. No analytics of any kind, and AI Assist needs your own OpenAI key.

Business is $10 for the first account and $7 each after, adding analytics, unlimited AI and competitor tracking.

Team members are $2 each on Professional and $3 on Business, which is the cheapest way to add a colleague anywhere in this directory. Every tenth account and tenth member is free. Annual billing takes 20% off.

In practice: three accounts is $13, five is $21, ten is $37 because the tenth is free. Ten accounts with analytics on Business is $66.

The analytics gap

This is the thing to understand before buying. “No analytics” on Professional means none: no engagement numbers, no top posts, nothing. You schedule into the dark and check the native apps.

For some people that is fine, especially if they already use Metricool’s free plan for reporting. Running Publer Professional at $21 alongside Metricool free is a genuinely good $21-a-month setup and worth considering.

If you want it in one place, Business at ten accounts is $66, which is more than SchedPilot Gold at $35 for twenty accounts with analytics included. That comparison is where Publer stops leading on price.

What it does well

Bulk workflows, mainly. CSV import up to 500 rows is the fastest way to load a quarter of content, and Buffer does not offer it at any price. RSS auto-posting turns a blog into a queue. Recycling repeats evergreen posts on a cycle, a lighter version of what SocialBee is built around.

Network coverage is broad and current, including Threads, Bluesky, Google Business Profile and Mastodon.

The interface is dense. Everything is available, which means everything is on screen, and it is less calm than Buffer.

Who it is for

Anyone with one to five accounts who wants the lowest possible bill and does not need reporting inside the tool. Also small teams, because $2 per extra member is uniquely cheap and Buffer’s equivalent is punitive.

Less suitable once you pass ten accounts and want analytics, where the Business tier stops being competitive against flat-rate plans.

Setup and the first week

Connecting accounts is fast and the first hour is spent finding things, because Publer puts everything on screen rather than hiding features behind a tidy menu. Getting seven days queued across three networks took about twelve minutes once we knew where the composer lived.

Start with the bulk CSV rather than the composer. Five hundred rows per upload, with columns for account, date, time and caption, is the feature that justifies Publer over Buffer more than the price does, and it is the one people discover last.

The features hidden behind the price

Publer includes several things that cost extra elsewhere and are easy to miss on a pricing page.

Recycling repeats evergreen posts on a cycle, a lighter version of SocialBee’s categories. RSS auto-posting turns a blog into a queue without another subscription. There is a link-in-bio page. Signatures and watermarks apply automatically per account, which is genuinely useful for an agency posting client-branded images.

The one to be careful with is AI Assist on the Professional plan, which needs your own OpenAI key. That is either fine or an obstacle depending on who you are, and the pricing page does not make it obvious.

Worth repeating because it catches people out: none of this includes analytics. If you want a performance number inside Publer, you are on Business and the bill roughly doubles.

Verdict

Ninth, and better than that placing suggests for the specific case it serves. At three to five accounts it is the cheapest real scheduler available, and the $2 team member pricing is the best-kept secret in this category.

Go in knowing about the analytics wall. It is the one thing people are surprised by after subscribing.

September 16, 2026
SocialBee

Most schedulers assume you will keep feeding them. SocialBee assumes the opposite: that you will write a body of content once and want it to keep working. Everything about the product follows from that assumption.

How categories work

You create categories such as testimonials, blog posts, product features, or behind the scenes. Content goes into a category rather than onto a date. Then you set a weekly schedule per category: testimonials on Tuesday at 10am, blog posts on Thursday, and so on.

SocialBee cycles through each bucket in order, and when it reaches the end it starts again. Add ten more testimonials and they join the rotation automatically. Posts can also be set to expire after a date, which stops a Christmas promotion resurfacing in June.

Nothing else does this as well. Several tools have a “repeat post” checkbox; this is a different and more useful thing.

Pricing

Bootstrap is $29 a month, or $24 on annual billing, for five profiles and one user. Plans run up to $82 for Pro on annual billing, and the agency tiers, Pro50 through Pro150, sit between $149 and $374 a month for 50 to 150 profiles.

There is no free plan, only a 14-day trial. At five profiles for $29 it is more expensive than Publer at $21 or SchedPilot Silver at the same $21, so you are paying a premium specifically for the recycling engine.

The honest caveat

Evergreen recycling only helps if you have evergreen content. A consultancy with twenty case studies and a set of principles it repeats: perfect fit. A restaurant with a changing menu, a news-driven brand, an agency posting client work: the feature does nothing and you have bought a mid-priced scheduler with basic analytics.

There is also setup cost. Getting categories right and loading enough content into each one to avoid obvious repetition takes an afternoon at minimum. The payoff is real and it is not immediate.

Be careful with video. Recycling the same TikTok or Reel repeatedly is a bad idea regardless of what the tool allows, so the feature is most useful on X, LinkedIn and Facebook.

Everything else

Network coverage is broad: Instagram, Facebook, X, LinkedIn, TikTok, Pinterest, YouTube, Threads, Bluesky and Google Business Profile. The AI assistant generates and rewrites captions and is genuinely useful rather than a checkbox.

Analytics are basic. If reporting matters, Metricool does considerably more for less.

Who it is for

Consultants, coaches, SaaS companies, B2B businesses with a library of blog posts, and anyone whose message does not change much month to month. If you can write forty posts that will still be true next year, this tool converts that afternoon into a year of consistent posting.

Setup and the first week

SocialBee has the longest genuine setup of any tool in this directory, and the payoff is proportional. The work is not technical. It is deciding what your categories are and writing enough content to fill each one.

A workable starting point is five categories with eight posts each: forty posts. That gives you roughly ten weeks before anything repeats, which is far enough apart that nobody notices. Three categories with four posts each will repeat inside a fortnight and your audience will spot it.

Expect an afternoon for that first load, and treat it as content work rather than tool configuration.

The expiry setting nobody uses

Every post can carry an expiry date, after which it drops out of the rotation. This is the feature that separates a well-run SocialBee account from an embarrassing one, and it is the one people forget.

Anything referencing a price, a date, an offer, a staff member or a product version should have an expiry set at the moment you write it. Otherwise the recycling engine will cheerfully promote last year’s Black Friday sale in March, and it will do so on every connected account at once.

Set a calendar reminder to audit the categories quarterly. Twenty minutes, four times a year, is the maintenance cost of the whole approach.

Verdict

Eighth, held back by price relative to what else $29 buys and by the narrowness of its central idea. When that idea fits your business, though, it fits better than anything else here, and the ranking understates it for those buyers.

September 16, 2026
Metricool

Metricool is an analytics product that also schedules, which is the opposite of nearly everything else in this directory. That inversion is why it is worth paying attention to.

The free plan

One brand, twenty posts a month, thirty days of analytics history, and five competitor profiles tracked. That competitor tracking is the part to notice. Buffer does not offer it on any plan, and several tools charging $40 a month do not either.

For a small business posting a few times a week, this is a complete product at no cost, and it is the free plan we recommend most often after Buffer’s.

Two limits matter. LinkedIn and X are not on the free tier, which rules it out for most B2B. And twenty posts a month means twenty in total, not twenty per network, so a brand posting daily to three networks exhausts it in a week.

Per-brand billing

Starter is around $20 a month for up to five brands with unlimited posting and all networks. A brand here means one business and all its profiles, so a company on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, Pinterest and Threads is one unit.

Against per-channel pricing that is a large saving. Those six channels on Buffer Essentials would be $36 a month. Here they are part of a $20 plan that also covers four more brands.

The model reverses for agencies. Eight clients is eight brands, and the higher tiers scale accordingly, at which point a flat plan like SchedPilot Gold at $35 for twenty accounts is cheaper.

X is a $5 per account add-on even on paid plans. It is a small amount of money and an annoying way to charge it.

The reporting

Good enough to send to a client without editing, which is a higher bar than most tools at this price clear. You get per-network performance, best posting times derived from your own data rather than a generic study, competitor comparison, and white-labelled PDF export on higher tiers.

It is not Sprout Social. It is perhaps 70% of Sprout’s reporting for around a tenth of the price, which for most businesses is the right trade.

Where it is weaker

The publishing side is the thinner half of the product. The calendar works and bulk features are limited compared with Publer or SocialPilot. There is no evergreen recycling and no real approval workflow below the agency tiers.

Who it is for

A single business posting across many networks, especially one that wants to know whether any of it is working. Also a good fit for a small agency with fewer than five clients, and an excellent free option for anyone testing whether social is worth the effort at all.

Not the right choice for a B2B company on the free plan, since LinkedIn is excluded, and not the right choice for an agency past five clients.

Setup and the first week

Setup is quick, around ten minutes to connect a brand and queue a week of posts, and the analytics begin populating immediately with historical data rather than starting from the day you signed up. That last detail is unusual and it means the free plan tells you something useful on day one rather than in a month.

The competitor tracking is the first thing to configure. Five profiles on the free plan, and the right five are your two closest rivals plus three accounts you think are doing it well. Reviewing that monthly is more useful than most of the reporting people pay for.

The best-times feature

Most tools that claim to tell you the best time to post are quoting a generic study conducted on somebody else’s audience. Metricool derives it from your own account’s history, which is the only version of this feature worth having.

It needs a few weeks of data before the recommendation means anything, and the honest caveat is that for a small account the sample is too thin to be reliable. Below a few thousand followers, treat it as a hint rather than a finding.

The other thing worth knowing early: Metricool connects to Google Business Profile and to your website analytics, so the reports can show social alongside traffic. For a local business that is a more complete picture than a pure social tool provides, and it costs nothing extra.

Verdict

Seventh overall and first if you rank by value for a single brand. The free tier alone makes it worth installing, and the paid tier is one of the few places in this category where $20 buys something that feels underpriced.

September 16, 2026
Agorapulse

Buy Agorapulse for the inbox or do not buy it at all. That sounds dismissive and is not meant to be: the inbox is excellent, and if replying is a larger part of your week than publishing, it is the best tool in this directory for the money.

The inbox

Every comment, mention and message across your connected accounts arrives in one queue, and the queue is designed to be emptied. Items can be assigned to a person, annotated internally, answered from a saved reply, or marked as reviewed. Collision detection means two people do not both answer the same comment, which sounds minor until it has happened to you in public.

What makes it better than Hootsuite’s streams is that streams are a monitoring view and this is a work queue. You finish it. Sprout Social’s Smart Inbox is stronger at very high volume; Agorapulse is more pleasant at ordinary volume and costs well under half as much.

Social listening is included rather than sold separately, which is a genuine advantage over Sprout.

Pricing

$79 per user per month. Legacy plans are being retired, which has irritated customers who had been on grandfathered pricing for years and is worth knowing before you commit.

Per-seat billing is the structural weakness. A three-person team is roughly $2,800 a year. Adding a junior community manager costs another $948 annually regardless of how little they publish. Against SchedPilot Enterprise at $79 a month for ten seats, the comparison is stark, though that is a publishing tool with no inbox to speak of and the comparison is not like for like.

Publishing

Competent and unremarkable. Calendar, queues, bulk upload, approvals. It covers Instagram, Facebook, X, LinkedIn, TikTok and YouTube, which is a shorter list than several cheaper tools: no Threads, no Bluesky, no Pinterest at the time of writing.

If publishing is the whole job, you are paying a large premium for an inbox you will not open.

Who it is for

Brands and agencies doing real community management: consumer products with an engaged audience, anyone running paid social with comments that need moderating, and teams where someone’s job title includes the word community.

It is also the sensible landing spot for a team leaving Hootsuite that needs the inbox rather than the compliance apparatus.

It is the wrong purchase for a small business scheduling three posts a week, and an expensive mistake for an agency that grows by hiring.

Setup and the first week

Agorapulse is quick to connect and slower to configure well, because the value is in the inbox rules rather than the publishing. Expect to spend the first week tuning what gets hidden automatically, which keywords flag a message for attention, and who is assigned what.

The moderation rules are the part worth the effort. You can automatically hide comments containing particular words, which for a brand running paid social is the difference between a community manager’s day and a losing battle with spam. Very few tools at any price do this as well.

Reporting

Better than the publishing features suggest. Agorapulse reports on response time and volume handled per team member, which is the sort of thing a head of support cares about and almost no social tool measures. If you are trying to justify a community management headcount, those numbers are the argument.

Content reporting is solid without being Sprout Social. Export is clean, white-labelling is available, and the ROI reporting that ties social traffic to conversions works if you set up the tracking properly.

One practical note before committing: the network list is shorter than several cheaper tools. No Threads, no Bluesky, no Pinterest at the time of writing. If any of those matter to a client, check the current coverage rather than assuming a tool at this price covers everything.

Verdict

Sixth, and it would be higher on a list ranked by inbox quality alone. The reason it sits here is the seat model, which makes the tool progressively worse value as the team that needs it grows.

Trial it against your actual message volume for a fortnight. If two people can clear the queue, it is good value. If you need five, do the annual arithmetic before signing.

September 16, 2026
Sprout Social

Sprout Social is the best product in this directory and it is fifth, because a ranking that ignored price would be useless to almost everyone reading it.

Standard is $199 per user per month on annual billing, $249 monthly. Professional is $299. A four-person team on Standard is more than $9,500 a year.

What you get for that

Three things, and they are all genuinely class-leading.

The reporting. Sprout’s reports are the only ones in this category you could put in front of a chief executive without reformatting them first. Cross-network comparison, presentation-ready layouts, and a level of polish that no $30 tool approaches. If a monthly board pack depends on your social numbers, this is what that looks like done properly.

The Smart Inbox. It handles several hundred messages a day across networks without becoming unusable, with assignment, collision detection so two people do not reply to the same comment, and saved replies. Agorapulse is the nearest competitor and is arguably more pleasant day to day; Sprout is better at volume.

And the contact history, which is close to a light CRM. You can see everything a given person has ever said to your brand across every network, which is invaluable for a support-heavy account and has no real equivalent at a lower price.

The pricing problem

Per-seat billing with no cheap read-only tier is what makes Sprout expensive rather than merely premium. Teams routinely buy seats for people who look at a report once a month, and those seats cost the same $199 as the ones belonging to people who live in the inbox.

Before renewing, count who genuinely needs to log in. Most organisations find two or three people publish and the rest just want a PDF. Exporting a PDF is free.

Listening is sold separately and is expensive. A fair number of teams believe they are paying for listening and are not.

Who it is for

Consumer brands with a real community management workload, in-house teams of three or more whose social output is scrutinised by people outside marketing, and organisations where the reporting has to be defensible.

For everyone else it is an expensive way to do something SocialPilot does for $34 a month. That is not a criticism of Sprout. It is a statement about what most people actually need.

Setup and the first week

Sprout takes longer to get running than anything else in this directory, and that is partly deliberate. Expect an onboarding call, a guided configuration of your approval rules and tagging taxonomy, and a genuine training session for the team. Getting seven days of posts queued across three networks took us close to an hour, against roughly ten minutes on the lighter tools.

That is defensible for what Sprout is. A platform that runs a brand’s entire inbound conversation should be configured properly rather than guessed at. It also means a solo user evaluating it during a 30-day trial will spend the first week setting up and may conclude the product is heavy, which it is.

The tagging system is the part worth investing in early. Tag posts and inbound messages by campaign, product or sentiment from day one and the reporting becomes genuinely powerful six months later. Skip it and you have expensive charts showing engagement by network, which the free tier of Metricool would also have given you.

Support during setup is the best in the category, which is one of the things the price is paying for and one of the few premium features that reliably shows up in practice.

The seat arithmetic, done properly

Because everything about Sprout’s value depends on headcount, it is worth running the numbers rather than reacting to the headline price.

Two people on Standard, billed annually, is $4,776 a year. Four people is $9,552. Six is $14,328. There is no discount for a colleague who only reads reports, and no viewer tier, which is the single most common complaint from existing customers.

Set against that, Agorapulse at $79 per user puts four people at $3,792 a year with an inbox that is arguably nicer to work in. SchedPilot Enterprise at $79 a month covers ten seats for $948 a year, with no listening and a far thinner inbox.

The question is not whether Sprout is better. It is. The question is whether it is nine times better than the flat-rate option for your particular team, and for a team that mostly publishes, it plainly is not.

Verdict

Rated 4.4 on quality, ranked fifth on value. If you have the budget and the volume, it is the best tool here and the 30-day trial is long enough to prove it on your own accounts.

If you are considering it because it looked impressive in a demo, run the seat count first. That number, rather than the feature list, is what decides whether Sprout is a sensible purchase.

September 16, 2026
Later

Later was an Instagram scheduling tool before most of this category existed, and it still behaves like one. That focus is both its advantage and the reason it ranks fourth rather than higher.

What it does

The grid planner is the headline. You drag posts around a mock Instagram profile and see how the feed will look before anything publishes. For a brand whose feed is a portfolio, that is genuinely useful, and nobody else does it as well. Planoly and Pallyy both have versions of it and both are a step behind.

The media library is the underrated part. Once you have a few thousand assets, most schedulers become a directory listing. Later’s stays searchable, taggable and usable, which saves a real amount of time on a busy account.

It publishes to Instagram, Facebook, X, LinkedIn, TikTok, Pinterest, YouTube and Threads. Instagram Stories auto-publish to Business accounts, and land as a notification on Creator and personal accounts, which is a Meta restriction rather than a Later one.

Pricing

There is no free plan. It was removed, and a great many articles have not caught up. What you get is a 14-day trial, then Starter at $25 a month or $18.75 billed annually. Growth is $37.50 annually and Scale $82.50.

Starter is thin on accounts, which is where the pricing bites. A creator running two brands across four networks each is already looking at Scale, at $82.50 a month, where SchedPilot Gold covers twenty accounts for $35.

Where it is weaker

LinkedIn and X feel like afterthoughts. They work, but the composer is clearly built around image-led networks and text-first posting is less comfortable here than in Typefully or Buffer.

Analytics are fine and not more than that. If reporting is the reason you are shopping, Metricool at around $20 does more.

Bulk workflows are limited too. Loading a quarter of content in one go is not what this tool is built for.

Who it is for

Creators and brands where Instagram is the main channel and the look of the feed is part of the product. Fashion, food, interiors, travel, photography. If someone on your team says “that photo does not sit right next to the last one”, Later is worth $25 a month on its own.

It is the wrong tool for an agency with a dozen clients, for anyone whose main networks are LinkedIn and X, and for anyone whose primary need is cheap capacity across many accounts.

Setup and the first week

Later is pleasant to start with and the onboarding assumes you are a creator rather than an administrator. Connect Instagram, upload a batch of images, and the grid planner is populated within a few minutes. Getting seven days queued across three networks took about twelve minutes.

The first real decision is how you organise the media library, and it is worth thinking about before you upload three hundred files. Labels and collections work well; dumping everything into one pile and relying on search works less well. This is the feature that ages best if you set it up properly and worst if you do not.

The link-in-bio question

Later includes a link-in-bio page, which is a genuine saving if the alternative was paying separately for one. It maps your Instagram grid to clickable destinations, so a follower who saw a post three weeks ago can find the product from your profile.

It is competent rather than best in class, and it is bundled, which for a creator paying $18.75 a month makes the overall package better value than the scheduling alone suggests. Planoly includes one too.

One thing to check before committing: if your Instagram account is a Creator account rather than Business, Stories will arrive as phone notifications rather than publishing automatically. That is Meta’s restriction and applies to every tool, but people frequently discover it after subscribing to Later specifically for Stories.

Verdict

Fourth, and it earns that place on a single feature done better than anyone else. The grid planner and the media library are real differentiators rather than checkbox items.

What holds it back is the pricing shape. Removing the free plan closed the easiest door into the product, and the tiers step up faster than the value does once you run more than one brand. Buy it for the visual planning. Do not buy it for capacity.

September 16, 2026
Hootsuite

Hootsuite is not a bad product. It is a product whose price assumes you use all of it, bought by a great many people who use about a fifth.

The entry plan is $99 per user per month. There has been no free tier since 2023, which a surprising number of comparison articles have never noticed.

What it does

Publishing across Instagram, Facebook, X, LinkedIn, TikTok, Pinterest, YouTube and Threads, with a calendar, bulk scheduling and approval workflows. That part is unremarkable and works.

The distinguishing pieces sit above it. Streams, the column-based real-time view Hootsuite has had since the beginning, is still the best way to watch several accounts and several search terms simultaneously. Social listening extends past your own accounts into forums, news and the wider web. Paid ads management lives in the same interface as organic posting, which very few competitors attempt.

Then there is the enterprise apparatus: single sign-on, audit logs, role-based permissions granular enough to satisfy a compliance team, and support with a contractual response time. These are the things that make Hootsuite purchasable by a bank, and nothing in the $20 to $80 range offers them.

Pricing

$99 per user per month at the entry tier, with a 14-day trial. Higher tiers add listening depth, advocacy and ads, and enterprise pricing is quoted rather than published, which is itself a signal about who the product is for.

Per-seat billing is what makes this painful. Three people is roughly $3,600 a year. Ten is close to $12,000. The scheduling capability you get for that is comparable to what SocialPilot provides for $34 a month covering ten accounts and three users.

The test worth running

Open Hootsuite and look at which sections you have used in the last month. If the answer is Publisher, and Analytics when a report is due, you are paying enterprise rates for a calendar and a chart.

If you have used Streams daily, or pulled a listening report someone senior actually read, or escalated a support ticket under an SLA, the money is doing something.

In our experience most teams that churn from Hootsuite discover they were in the first group and had assumed otherwise for years.

Where it has slipped

The interface carries a decade of accumulated features and navigating it is a skill rather than an intuition. New team members need training, which is a real cost nobody puts on the invoice.

Removing the free plan in 2023 cut off the pipeline of small users who grew into paying ones, and the tools that kept theirs have taken that ground. Meanwhile the middle of the market has improved enormously. Agorapulse has a better inbox at $79. Vista Social bundles listening from $79. Neither existed in a mature form when Hootsuite set its pricing.

Who it is for

Organisations with a procurement process, a compliance requirement, and a social team large enough that listening and streams get used daily. For those buyers it is a reasonable choice and the alternatives genuinely do not qualify.

For a small team that schedules posts and reads a monthly report, it is one of the worst-value products in this directory, and that gap has widened every year since the free plan disappeared.

Setup and the first week

Hootsuite is the second slowest tool here to get value from, after CoSchedule. Connecting accounts is straightforward; configuring streams, permissions and approval routing is a project, and most organisations do it with a customer success manager rather than alone.

Getting seven days of posts queued across three networks took about thirty-five minutes, largely spent navigating rather than composing. That is a poor result for a tool at this price and a predictable one for a platform built around a decade of accumulated capability.

Streams, which is the part worth learning

If you are paying for Hootsuite and not using Streams, you are almost certainly on the wrong product. It is the feature nothing cheaper replicates properly.

A stream is a live column: mentions of your brand, a hashtag you are tracking, comments on a specific account, a competitor’s feed, a keyword search. Arrange a dozen side by side and you have a live monitoring wall, which is genuinely useful during a product launch, a live event, or a developing problem.

Agorapulse’s inbox is a better work queue and it is not the same thing. A queue is for clearing; a stream is for watching. Teams running a crisis communications function need the second and rarely find a substitute below enterprise pricing.

Before you renew, count how many people opened Streams last month. That number is the honest measure of whether Hootsuite is the right tool for your organisation.

Verdict

Third here on capability, not on value. The feature set is broad and the enterprise credentials are real, so it belongs high in a ranking of what these tools can do.

Rated 4.0 rather than higher because the price only makes sense for a specific and fairly small group of buyers, and because too many of the rest are paying it out of habit. If you cannot name three Hootsuite features you used this month, you are the second group.

September 16, 2026
Buffer

Buffer is the most pleasant social media scheduler to use and one of the most expensive to scale. Both of those are deliberate. It has spent a decade optimising for the person with a handful of accounts who wants to queue posts without learning a platform, and it prices accordingly.

What it does

Connect your channels, write a post, pick which networks it goes to, tweak per network if you want, and add it to a queue. The queue is the central idea: you set posting times once, and new content drops into the next open slot rather than needing a date and time each time. For consistency, which is the actual problem most people have, that model works better than a calendar.

Coverage spans Instagram, Facebook, X, LinkedIn, TikTok, Pinterest, YouTube, Threads, Bluesky, Mastodon and Google Business Profile. Publishing is through official APIs and it is dependable. In practice Buffer fails less often than tools twice its price, and when a Meta token expires it tells you clearly rather than quietly marking posts as sent.

Pricing

The free plan gives you three channels and ten queued posts per channel. X is included, which Publer’s otherwise identical free tier excludes, and that detail decides the choice for a lot of people.

Essentials is $6 per channel per month, $5 on annual billing, single user. Team is $12 per channel, $10 annually, with unlimited users and approvals. Channels 11 to 25 drop to $4 each and 26 to 50 to $3. There is a 14-day trial on paid plans.

So: five channels is $30, ten is $60, twenty is $100. Ten channels with a team is $120. The Agency plan was retired in November 2025, which means agencies now pay the same per-channel rate as everybody else and a lot of them have left.

What is missing

No bulk CSV import. If you batch a quarter of content in one sitting, Buffer turns that into hundreds of individual actions, and Publer or SocialPilot will do it in one upload of up to 500 rows.

No evergreen recycling, so a post cannot be set to repeat on a cycle. SocialBee is built around that idea if it matters to you.

The analytics are basic and always have been. You get engagement numbers and top posts. You do not get competitor benchmarking, and the reports are not something you would put in front of a client. Metricool at around $20 a month is better at this than Buffer is at any price.

Who it is for

Anyone with three channels or fewer, which is a large share of small businesses and most individual creators. At that size Buffer is free, reliable and asks nothing of you, and recommending anything else would be wrong.

It also suits a solo founder with four or five channels who values the interface enough to pay $30 rather than $21 elsewhere. That is a legitimate preference and Buffer is nicer to use than anything at its price.

It stops making sense at around ten channels, and stops making sense sharply if colleagues need access. Ten channels with three people is $120 a month here against $34 on SocialPilot Standard, which includes approvals. That is not a close comparison.

Setup and the first week

Buffer is the fastest general-purpose scheduler here to get running. Sign up, connect three channels, set your posting times, and start filling the queue. Seven days of content across three networks took roughly nine minutes, and none of that time was spent reading documentation.

That matters more than it sounds. A meaningful share of people who buy a scheduler never get it properly running, and the tools that ask least of you in week one are the ones still being used in month six.

The queue, and why it works

Most competitors default to a calendar, where every post needs a date and a time. Buffer defaults to a queue, where you define posting slots once and new content drops into the next free one.

It sounds like a small interface difference and it changes behaviour. The calendar asks “when should this go out?”, which is a decision, and decisions are where consistency dies. The queue asks nothing. You write three posts on a Sunday and they distribute themselves across the week.

If your actual problem is posting irregularly rather than posting at the wrong times, this is the single most useful thing in the category, and it is free.

The mobile app deserves a mention for the same reason. It is the only one in this directory that is genuinely pleasant to draft in, which means posts get written in gaps rather than in a dedicated session that never happens.

Verdict

Second in this ranking, and it would be first if the ranking were for people with one brand and three networks. The free plan is the best entry point in the category and the product is the most polished thing here.

What keeps it off the top spot is that the per-channel model punishes exactly the growth most users experience. A business that adds a second location or a founder profile gets repriced, and the tools ranked around it do not do that. Start here, and move when the monthly bill would cross about $30.

September 16, 2026
SchedPilot

Almost every scheduler in this directory charges you more as you connect more accounts. Buffer bills $6 per channel. Publer bills per account. Metricool and Pallyy bill per brand. SchedPilot charges a flat monthly rate per tier, and that single decision is what puts it at the top of this ranking.

At three accounts it is the wrong choice and we say so below. At twenty it costs $35 where Buffer costs $100.

What it does

SchedPilot publishes natively to nine networks: Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, YouTube, X, Facebook, Threads, Bluesky and Pinterest. All of it goes through official APIs, so nothing depends on a phone notification arriving at the right moment. Threads and Bluesky support is worth singling out, because several older tools in this category still have not shipped either.

The workflow is conventional in a good way. Connect accounts, write once, tick the networks you want, adjust the caption per network where it needs adjusting, then queue or schedule. Workspaces separate one client or brand from another, with five on Gold and ten on Platinum.

The MCP server

This is the genuinely unusual feature and the reason to look at SchedPilot even if the pricing did not appeal. It exposes an MCP server, which means an AI client such as Claude or Cursor can connect to your SchedPilot account directly and draft, schedule and manage posts across every connected profile without a human opening the web app.

Concretely: you can hand an agent a product launch brief and have it return a fortnight of queued posts, sized and worded per network. On the Enterprise plan those agent-drafted posts land in the same approval queue as human-written ones, so a person still signs off before anything publishes.

Nothing else in this directory does this. Several tools have a REST API, which is not the same thing and requires you to write the integration yourself. Whether it matters to you depends entirely on whether you already work with AI agents. If you do not, treat it as a feature you are not paying extra for.

Pricing

Silver is $21 a month for five accounts, capped at 450 posts a month, with analytics, AI post suggestions and API access included. Gold is $35 for twenty accounts with unlimited posting, five workspaces, AI-generated posts and hooks, comment replies and 300 GPT-5 credits. Platinum is $49 for forty accounts, ten workspaces and a Chrome extension. Enterprise is $79 for a hundred accounts, ten team seats, approval workflows and advanced reports.

Annual billing removes 20%. There is a $299 lifetime licence limited to a hundred buyers, which is either irrelevant or very relevant depending on how you feel about subscriptions.

There is no free plan. The seven-day trial needs a card, charges nothing, and cancels in one click, but it is still a card and that will put some people off.

How the maths works out

At five accounts, Silver at $21 ties Publer’s Professional plan on price and includes analytics, which Publer’s equivalent tier does not. At ten accounts, Gold is $35 against $37 on Publer, $40 on SocialPilot and $60 on Buffer. At twenty, Gold is still $35 while Buffer and SocialPilot are both at $100.

That flat line is the product. The eleventh account and the nineteenth cost the same as the sixth, which no per-channel tool can offer and no per-brand tool can either once you have several brands.

Where it falls down

Team seats. They only appear at Enterprise, so a three-person agency running ten client accounts pays $79 here against $34 a month on SocialPilot Standard, which includes three users and an approval workflow. That is a real gap and it is the main reason SchedPilot is not an automatic recommendation for small teams. It becomes the better buy once the roster passes roughly thirty accounts, or the moment approvals are non-negotiable.

No social listening, at all. If you monitor brand mentions across the wider web, this does not replace Hootsuite or Sprout Social and no amount of price advantage changes that.

The 450-post cap on Silver is generous for most people and restrictive for anyone running a high-volume X account. Gold removes it.

It is also a younger product than Buffer, which has had a decade to accumulate small polish, and there is correspondingly less third-party material to search when something confuses you.

Who it is for

Anyone with five or more social accounts and one or two people doing the publishing. That covers a lot of ground: a creator running several brands, a multi-location business, a consultancy with an employee advocacy programme, a small agency where one person schedules everything.

It is also the obvious pick for anyone building AI workflows, because the MCP server removes the integration work entirely.

It is the wrong tool for someone with one Instagram account and a Facebook page. Use Buffer’s free plan or Metricool’s. Paying $21 to schedule three posts a week is a waste and we would rather say that than sell you something.

Verdict

Ranked first because at the size most people in this directory actually operate, it is between a third and a half the price of the alternatives, and it does not lose features to get there. Analytics are on the entry plan. Nine networks publish natively. The MCP server is a capability nobody else has shipped.

Two honest caveats: the seat model punishes small teams below the Enterprise tier, and there is no listening. Neither affects the majority of people comparing schedulers, which is why it holds the top spot rather than despite them.

September 16, 2026