Metricool Review

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.

Where Metricool comes up

Shortlists and comparisons that cover it alongside the alternatives.

• Best X Schedulers (Formerly Twitter)
• Best Facebook Schedulers
• How to Create Content Based on Posts That Already Worked
• Best Social Media Scheduler APIs