Best Social Media Schedulers

Tool Category: Analytics

Vista Social

Vista Social’s pitch is breadth at a price that does not match the breadth. It does publishing, a unified inbox, social listening, review management, analytics and approvals, and charges less than tools offering half of that.

What is in the bundle

Listening is the notable inclusion. Sprout Social sells it as an expensive add-on, Hootsuite gates it behind higher tiers, and most tools under $50 do not have it. Here it is part of the plan. It is not as deep as an enterprise listening product, and for tracking brand mentions and competitor chatter it does the job.

Review management is the other unusual one. Google and Yelp reviews arrive in the same queue as social comments, which matters a great deal for a multi-location business and is close to absent elsewhere at this price.

Publishing covers Instagram, Facebook, X, LinkedIn, TikTok, Pinterest, YouTube, Threads, Bluesky and Google Business Profile, with per-network customisation and a reasonable calendar.

Pricing

There is a free plan covering three profiles and one user, which is more generous than most of what survives in 2026 and makes it easy to trial properly rather than on a countdown.

Paid plans start at around $39 a month, and approval workflows arrive at $79. At that $79 point you are comparing against Agorapulse at $79 per user, where Vista Social is not per-user, and against SchedPilot Enterprise at $79 for a hundred accounts and ten seats but no listening. Different shapes of value at the same number.

The trade-off

Nothing here is the best version of itself. The inbox is not as good as Agorapulse’s. The reporting is not as good as Metricool’s. The publishing is not as cheap as Publer’s. The listening is not as deep as Sprout’s.

What you get instead is all of it in one subscription, which for a small team is often worth more than any individual component being excellent. Running three tools costs more than money; it costs the friction of three logins and three places to check.

The cost of that breadth is a busy interface. There is a lot on screen and learning it takes longer than learning Buffer.

Who it is for

Small agencies and multi-location businesses that need more than scheduling and cannot justify enterprise pricing. Restaurants, clinics, gyms, franchises, anywhere reviews matter as much as posts.

It is also a sensible destination for a team leaving Hootsuite that used the listening and cannot afford $99 a seat.

Overkill for a solo creator, who will use a fifth of it.

Setup and the first week

The free plan makes evaluation unusually painless. Three profiles and one user, with no countdown, so you can connect real accounts and live with the tool for a month before deciding anything. Very few products in this directory still allow that.

Configuration takes longer than a plain scheduler because there is more to configure. Listening queries, review sources, inbox rules and approval steps are all separate setups. Getting seven days of posts queued across three networks took about twenty minutes, which is mid-table, and getting the listening and reviews working properly took most of an afternoon.

Review management, in practice

This is the feature that justifies Vista Social for a particular kind of business, so it deserves specifics.

Google and Yelp reviews land in the same queue as Instagram comments and Facebook messages. You reply from there, assign them, and track response times alongside social metrics. For a dental practice with four locations, or a restaurant group, the alternative is checking three dashboards and forgetting one.

The nearest equivalents are dedicated reputation tools costing more than this entire subscription, or the enterprise tiers of Hootsuite and Sprout Social. That is the gap Vista Social is filling, and it is filling it well.

Verdict

Twelfth, and underrated at that position. The free plan means testing it costs nothing but time, and for a business that needs review management alongside social it is one of very few realistic options below enterprise prices.

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
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