Best Social Media Schedulers

Platform: Threads

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