Best Social Media Schedulers

Tool Category: Agency

CoSchedule

CoSchedule is in this directory because people compare it against social schedulers, and it ranks last because it is not really one. It is a marketing calendar with social publishing inside it, and judging it as a scheduler is slightly unfair to it and useful to you.

The calendar idea

Everything a marketing team produces goes on one calendar: blog posts, email sends, campaigns, events, and the social posts that support them. A product launch appears as a single campaign with all of its parts attached, rather than as entries scattered across four tools.

For a marketing manager who needs to answer “what is going out in March”, this view is genuinely valuable and no pure social tool provides it. The WordPress integration is strong, which matters for content teams publishing on a schedule.

Requeue handles evergreen social recycling automatically, a lighter version of what SocialBee is built around.

Pricing

There is a free calendar tier for basic planning. The social calendar sits at around $29 per user per month, with agency and content tiers above it that climb considerably.

Per-user pricing is the difficulty. A five-person marketing team is around $145 a month, and what you get for the social half of that is weaker than SocialPilot Standard at $34 for ten accounts and three users.

As a social tool

Adequate. It publishes to Instagram, Facebook, X, LinkedIn, Pinterest, TikTok and YouTube, with queues and recycling. There is no meaningful inbox, the analytics are limited, and per-network composition is less flexible than the dedicated tools.

The interface is a project management tool with all the weight that implies. Setting it up is a project, and getting a team to keep the calendar accurate is an ongoing discipline rather than a one-off.

Who it is for

Content marketing teams of three to ten people running blog, email and social together, where the coordination problem is bigger than the publishing problem. If your team has ever double-booked a campaign or published a social post about a blog article that slipped a week, that is the problem CoSchedule addresses.

It is the wrong purchase for anyone whose job is only social. You would be buying a planning system and using the least developed part of it.

Setup and the first week

CoSchedule is the slowest tool here to get value from, and the reason is structural rather than a flaw in the software. A marketing calendar is only useful once everything is on it, so the first week is spent importing campaigns, connecting WordPress, defining project templates and persuading colleagues to log their work somewhere new.

Measured against our usual benchmark, getting seven days of social posts queued across three networks, it took well over half an hour. That is a poor result for a social scheduler and a meaningless one for a marketing calendar, which is exactly the tension in evaluating this product.

The bigger risk is adoption. A shared calendar that three of five people update is worse than no calendar, because it looks authoritative while being wrong. Every team we have seen succeed with CoSchedule had someone who owned keeping it accurate. Every team that abandoned it did not.

If you are trialling it, do not evaluate the social features in isolation. Put an actual campaign through it, with a blog post, an email and the supporting social posts, and see whether the coordination saves more time than the maintenance costs.

The Headline Studio question

CoSchedule also sells Headline Studio, a separate product that scores blog and email subject lines, and it is frequently bundled into the conversation when you talk to sales.

Treat it as a separate purchase decision. It is a reasonable tool for a content team that writes a lot of headlines and it has nothing to do with whether the social scheduling suits you. Buying the calendar because the headline scorer looked useful in a demo is how teams end up with an expensive subscription that two people use.

The same caution applies to the AI features CoSchedule has added across its range. They are fine and they are not a reason to choose a marketing calendar over a scheduler that publishes to more networks for a third of the price.

Verdict

Twentieth, rated 3.7, and the placing is about fit rather than quality. Measured as a social media scheduler it is expensive per user and thin on features, which is what this directory measures.

Measured as a marketing calendar it is decent and has no direct competitor in this list. If that is the problem you have, evaluate it against Asana and Notion rather than against Buffer.

September 16, 2026
Planable

Planable solved one problem properly and built a company around it. The problem is getting a client to approve a social post without a chain of emails containing screenshots and the phrase “as per my last message”.

The approval experience

A post in Planable renders as it will actually appear on the network: the right avatar, the right truncation point, the right image crop, the right character count. The client sees the post, not a preview of a draft in a tool.

Beside it sits a comment thread. Feedback attaches to the specific post rather than arriving as a list of vague notes about several. Approve, reject, or ask for a change, in place.

Clients need no training and frequently no account at all, since you can share a link. That last detail matters more than any feature comparison, because the most common reason approval tools fail is that the client never logs in.

Sendible and Loomly both have approval workflows. Neither is as pleasant as this.

Pricing

Plans start at around $33 a month, and there is a free tier of 50 posts, which is enough to run one client through a real approval cycle before deciding.

Pricing is per user, which is the weak point. A five-person agency is looking at $165 a month for a review layer, and then paying separately for whatever handles analytics. That combined cost is the honest number and it is not small.

What it is not

A complete scheduling platform. Planable publishes, and the analytics are thin enough that most agencies using it run Metricool or something similar alongside. Network coverage is narrower than the broad tools.

Whether that matters depends on how you count. Planable at $33 plus Metricool at $20 is $53 a month and gets you the best approvals and good reporting. SocialPilot Standard at $34 gets you adequate versions of both plus ten accounts and three users. Neither is obviously wrong.

Who it is for

Agencies whose bottleneck is approval rather than publishing, which is a great many of them. If your team produces content quickly and then waits four days for a client to respond to an email, this tool addresses the actual problem.

Also good for in-house teams where marketing drafts and a brand or legal reviewer approves.

Pointless for a solo operator approving their own posts.

Setup and the first week

Planable is the quickest tool in this directory to get a client into, which is the whole point of it. Create a workspace, connect the accounts, drop in a week of drafts, and send a share link. The client does not create an account, does not pick a password, and does not need a walkthrough call. In our testing the gap between signing up and having a client leave a comment on a real post was under fifteen minutes.

Compare that with the approval flows in Sendible or Loomly, both of which assume the client will log into a dashboard and learn where things are. That assumption is where most approval workflows quietly fail.

The two-tool question

Almost every agency using Planable runs something else alongside it, and that is worth pricing honestly before you subscribe. The usual pairing is Planable for drafting and approval, then a second tool for analytics and bulk work.

For a three-person agency that is roughly $99 on Planable plus $20 on Metricool, so about $119 a month. The single-tool alternative is SocialPilot Standard at $34, which covers ten accounts, three users, approvals and white-label reports in one subscription.

That is a $85 monthly difference, and the honest question is whether Planable’s approval experience saves you more than a thousand pounds a year in chased emails and revision rounds. For agencies with slow, opinionated clients it genuinely might. For agencies whose clients reply the same day, it almost certainly does not.

Verdict

Fourteenth on breadth, top three on the single thing it does. The per-user pricing and the need for a second tool keep it here rather than higher.

Use the free 50 posts on your most difficult client. If approval time drops noticeably, the price answers itself.

September 16, 2026
SocialPilot

SocialPilot’s pricing model is the interesting thing about it. Rather than charging per channel or per seat, it sells bundles that include both, and one of those bundles is the best-value team plan in this directory.

The $34 tier

Standard is $40 a month, or $34 annually, and covers ten social accounts and three users. Included at that price: approval workflow, social inbox, bulk scheduling and white-label reports.

Compare that. Buffer Team for ten channels with colleagues is $120 a month. Hootsuite for three seats is around $297. SchedPilot only reaches team seats at its $79 Enterprise tier. For a three-person agency with ten client accounts, nothing else comes close, and this single plan is why SocialPilot appears in most of our agency recommendations.

The rest of the range

Essentials is $20 a month, $17 annually, for five accounts and one user. Reasonable, though Publer at $21 for five accounts adds cheaper team members and bulk features.

Premium is $100 a month, $85 annually, for twenty accounts and six users. This is where it stops being a value play: twenty accounts on SchedPilot Gold is $35. You are paying $65 a month for the extra seats and the agency tooling, which is only worth it if you use both.

Ultimate is $200 for forty accounts and unlimited users. There is a 14-day trial and no card is required, which is more generous than most. No free plan.

What it is like to use

Functional. The calendar works, bulk CSV takes up to 500 posts, and the approval flow does what it says. Nothing about it is delightful and nothing is broken.

White-label reporting included at $34 is worth flagging, because several competitors treat it as a premium add-on and agencies use it monthly.

Network coverage is slightly behind the leaders on newer platforms, so check the current list against your client roster before committing.

Analytics are adequate. If reporting depth is what you need, run Metricool alongside it.

Who it is for

Small agencies and freelancers with two or three clients, plus in-house teams of three where more than one person publishes. That is a large slice of the market and SocialPilot serves it better than anything else at the price.

It stops being the answer past twenty accounts, where flat-rate pricing wins decisively.

Setup and the first week

SocialPilot is straightforward to set up and slightly tedious, which is a fair description of the whole product. Connecting ten client accounts takes about twenty minutes of permission screens. Once they are in, grouping them by client and assigning team members to those groups is quick and works properly.

The bulk CSV import is the thing to learn first. Five hundred posts per upload, with columns for date, time, account and caption, turns a month of scheduling into one file. Agencies that use this properly get a real hour back every week, and agencies that never open it wonder why they are paying for an agency tool.

The approval workflow in practice

SocialPilot’s approvals are single-tier: a post is either approved or it is not. There is no chain of reviewers and no conditional routing, which is exactly what Loomly charges more for.

For most agencies that is sufficient, because most approval processes are one client saying yes. For a regulated business with a legal reviewer and a brand reviewer, it is not, and this is the most common reason teams outgrow SocialPilot rather than price.

Clients can be given a limited login that shows only their own content, which works well enough. It is less polished than Planable’s shared-link review and considerably cheaper, and for most client relationships that trade is the right one.

Verdict

Thirteenth overall, which undersells the one plan that matters. If your situation is ten accounts and three people, this is the tool to buy and the ranking is beside the point.

It sits here because the tiers either side of that plan are unremarkable, and because a directory ranking has to average across everyone rather than optimise for one shape of team.

September 16, 2026
Loomly

Loomly calls itself a brand success platform, which is marketing language for something real: it treats a social post as a thing that gets drafted, reviewed, revised and approved, rather than typed into a box and queued.

The workflow

A post moves through states: draft, pending approval, approved, scheduled. Different people can hold different permissions at each stage, so a junior writes, a manager approves, and nothing publishes without passing through the chain. For a regulated business or a brand with a legal review step, that structure is the product.

Post mockups render content exactly as it will appear on each network before anyone signs off, which catches the truncated caption and the badly cropped image while they are still fixable.

The post ideas feature suggests topics based on dates, trends and your own categories. It sounds gimmicky and it is one of the few such features that earns its place, mostly because running out of ideas is a genuine failure mode for in-house teams.

Pricing

Starter is $65 a month for twelve social accounts. The next tier up is a large step, landing well over $300.

That gap is the problem with Loomly in 2026. Twelve accounts for $65 is around $5.40 per account, which is not outrageous on its own, but SchedPilot Gold covers twenty accounts for $35 and SocialPilot Standard covers ten accounts and three users for $34 annually. Loomly is asking roughly double for a workflow layer.

And when you outgrow twelve accounts there is nowhere gentle to land. A team needing sixteen accounts faces a jump that makes a switch look attractive, which is presumably why so many people search for alternatives.

Who it is for

In-house marketing teams of four to ten people where content passes through several hands before publishing, and organisations where an unapproved post is a real problem rather than an embarrassment. Pharmaceutical, financial services, higher education, anything with a compliance reviewer.

Also useful for teams that struggle to fill a calendar, because the ideas engine addresses that better than a blank composer does.

It is the wrong tool for a solo operator, for a small agency watching costs, and for anyone whose approval process is one person saying yes in Slack.

Setup and the first week

Loomly takes longer to set up than a plain scheduler and less time than an enterprise platform. The work is in defining who approves what. Get the permission tiers wrong and you either have a bottleneck where one person must sign off on everything, or a workflow that looks like governance while everybody publishes directly.

Budget half a day for that configuration and do it with the person who actually owns the approval, not the person who set up the account.

Once running, the daily experience is good. The calendar is clear, post mockups appear without extra clicks, and the notification emails tell reviewers what needs their attention rather than that something has changed.

What has changed recently

Loomly’s pricing has moved upward over successive revisions, and the entry tier has shifted from something a small business might buy to something only a funded team would. That drift, rather than any change in the product, is why it now sits eleventh.

It matters because the competition has moved the other way. In 2022 there was no flat-rate tool offering twenty accounts for $35, and approval workflows were genuinely a premium feature. Both of those are now available lower down the market, so the premium Loomly charges buys a narrower advantage than it used to.

If you are already on a legacy Loomly plan at an older price, staying is reasonable. If you are evaluating it fresh at $65, compare it directly against Planable for the approval experience and SocialPilot for the price before deciding.

Verdict

Eleventh, rated 3.9, and the rating is about price rather than quality. The workflow is well built and the mockups are better than most rivals manage.

What has gone wrong is the position in the market. At $65 for twelve accounts it sits above the cheap flat-rate tools and below the enterprise platforms, offering less capacity than the first and less capability than the second. If the structured approval chain is genuinely load-bearing for you it is worth the premium. If it is not, Planable does approvals more pleasantly and SocialPilot does them for half the money.

September 16, 2026
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
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
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
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