Marketing on social media is moving at lightning speed, and people are struggling to keep up. Social media scheduling tools prove to be lifesavers in these scenarios.
More than half of the world’s population is active on multiple platforms to be updated with trends and stay connected with people far and wide. So marketers must establish their presence on all of those platforms. And automation is your best bet.
If you take a peek into the skyrocketing social media statistics, you will notice the unprecedented popularity of these social media scheduling tools.
You’ll grasp the reason behind this once we tell you what a social media scheduling tool exactly does.
What Are Social Media Scheduling Tools?
A social media scheduling tool is software that automates your whole content publishing process. Create your posts right there in the tool, pick which social media accounts you want to hit, and set the date and time for each post.
And voila! Your post will be published at the exact time you chose. Thus, your manual work of going to each platform to create and publish the post is eliminated.
In short, you can leave all the tedious tasks to a good social media scheduler. This blog will walk you through some of the social media scheduling tools.
How we analyze and select Social Media Scheduling Tools:
We have compiled the following list of top-notch social media scheduling tools through extensive research and evaluation. Our process involved actively weighing factors like user experience, G2 ratings and reviews, cost, and scalability. We assessed the proficiency of these tools in automation, crafting content, visualization, analytics, and teamwork to rank them. We have dedicated immense effort to curating this list, with the aim of equipping marketers with insightful data for choosing the right tools that will help grow their businesses.
Now, without any further ado, let’s begin!
With so many social media platforms on the market, it’s hard to find one that suits the needs of small businesses—but luckily for you, SocialBee has what it takes.
With affordable plans, an intuitive interface, and a set of impressive features, SocialBee can work wonders for both your content strategy and your social media workflow.
Pros
- Set a posting schedule for social media and have a real-time preview of your upcoming posts.
- Organize your posts into different categories, customize them for each social media platform and then automatically post them on all your socials at once.
- Use the Canva integration inside SocialBee’s post editor to create outstanding visuals.
Douglass Hatcher
At first, I wasn’t sure how legit SocialBee was, but I got to see that they have great analytics, and posts are easy to schedule. So, if you want to post evergreen content and have great analytics, try SocialBee!
Cons
- The app is only web-based and is not suited for enterprises.
- The AI image creator does not function properly
Nicole E
The learning curve is a bit high. It’s not the most intuitive platform, and I think there are still features that I’m not using because I either don’t understand them or don’t have the patience to figure them out.
Best for:
Professionals, Small teams, Small-medium businesses, and Enterprises.
About Hootsuite
Hootsuite is a versatile social media solution for a wide range of users, including solo entrepreneurs, small businesses, large organizations, and marketing agencies with numerous clients.
With its diverse feature set, this tool can manage social media scheduling on every social media platform. It simplifies the daunting task of maintaining a consistent presence across multiple social media platforms simultaneously, allowing users to save valuable time through seamless automation.
While the main dashboard of Hootsuite offers robust capabilities for content management, it may appear complex to newcomers, requiring some effort to master.
When exploring Hootsuite alternatives, it’s essential to consider the tool’s unique strengths and complexities to find the best fit for your social media management needs.
Pricing:
Hootsuite offers five pricing tiers after a 30-day trial, ranging from $99/month to $249/month, catering to different social account and user needs.
Key Features:
- Scheduling and Publishing: Schedule and publish multiple posts simultaneously at your preferred times.
- Engage Customers: Effortlessly manage conversations with followers and leverage AI chatbots for automated responses.
- Social Listening: Stay updated on trends, monitor brand mentions, keywords, and hashtags for valuable insights into public sentiment.
- Social Media Ads: Manage Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn ad campaigns within Hootsuite’s intuitive dashboard.
- Analytics: Access comprehensive analytics data from connected profiles across various platforms, conveniently displayed in a centralized dashboard.
- Team Collaboration: Enhance teamwork by assigning clear roles for efficient workflow and project management.
- Employee Advocacy: Expand your brand’s reach by encouraging employees to share company posts on their personal social profiles.
- AI Writer: Use AI-powered writing tools to streamline the creation of engaging social media post captions for faster and more effective content generation.
We went through a hundred user reviews for Hootsuite, gathered from trusted review platforms like G2 and Capterra. After carefully analyzing each of them in respect to all the features of the tool, we have gathered these insights.
Pros
- A majority of users find Hootsuite’s content publishing capabilities on multiple platforms quite useful.
- According to 58.44% of the opinions, advanced scheduling made it easy for people to readily plan and post their content promptly and consistently. This saved a lot of their time.
- Hootsuite’s content calendar proved to be very effective in visualizing strategy and easily rescheduling posts from one date to another.
- 64.71% of users agreed that the visual content editing capabilities of the tool proved to be assets for content creation on the platform.
- When it came to managing platform-specific limitations, 43.86% users said that Hootsuite does a good job.
Cons
- Almost half of the user reviews have expressed their dissatisfaction about the steep pricing for the advanced publishing features of Hootsuite.
- 41.56% people faced difficulties in using the tool due to the complex scheduling process involved.
- 2 out of 3 users have faced issues with the live posting capabilities on the tool.
- 88.89% of Hootsuite users have regularly encountered bugs and faced errors while publishing content through the tool.
- While some people think it is an easy tool to use, 11.76% have a hard time getting a grasp on the tool.
Best for:
Businesses, Publishers, Non-profits, Mid-stage startup teams, Higher education, Solopreneurs, E-commerce, and Sports teams.
About Buffer
Known for its simple and straightforward UI, Buffer is a tool for all aspects of managing one’s social media presence. Whether it’s an individual marketer, small agencies, growing start-ups, or well-established enterprises, Buffer caters to the whole lot.
The tool enables users to generate shoppable pages linked to their bios, increasing conversions and sales. Additionally, Buffer provides a free plan, albeit with limited features, which is a good way to try out the tool. The higher plans require a per-channel model of pricing.
Using Buffer eliminates the need to use many tools for managing your social media as it brings all the requirements into one centralized dashboard.
Even as an altogether proficient tool, Buffer falls somewhat behind as the lack of chat support puts a dent in the users’ experience with the tool.
Pricing:
Buffer provides a range of four pricing options along with a 14-day trial period for each. There is a free plan for beginners. Paid plans range from $6 a month for one account to a monthly $120 for 10 accounts.
Key Features:
- Publishing: The tool helps plan, create, and publish unique social media posts from a single integrated dashboard.
- Analytics: View the analytics for each social profile connected to the tool and create comprehensive and shareable reports from those results.
- Engagement: Stay on top of every message and comment from your audience and respond to high-priority conversations using Buffer’s advanced social inbox.
- Collaboration: Onboard and work in tandem with your whole team and even involve clients for a smoother workflow.
- Start Page: This feature of the tool lets users build aesthetic but simple landing pages so traffic from social media can be converted to sales of businesses.
- AI Assistant: Buffer makes the process of creating social media captions way easier and faster with its AI Assistant. This lets users generate content with just a few prompts.
After sifting through numerous user reviews of Buffer sourced from reputable platforms such as G2 and Capterra, we meticulously examined each one, considering all aspects of the tool. From this thorough analysis, we’ve compiled the following insights.
Pros
- The easy-to-use post-publishing dashboard in Buffer was commended by 36.4% of reviewers, requiring little to no training to use efficiently.
- 27.3% of users said that multiple in-app integrations in Buffer helped them seamlessly manage multi-platform publishing from the same dashboard.
- A majority of 60% of users have commented on the bulk scheduling capability, which allows them to plan a large number of posts for various social accounts to be scheduled all at once.
- At least 20% of all Buffer users agreed that maintaining consistency on social media became easier with the help of the tool and its content scheduling capabilities.
- 20% of the reviews pointed out that content tagging was highly effective in categorizing their assets within the storage of the tool.
Cons
- 25% of Buffer users said they faced some difficulties with the publishing features of the tool, even encountering errors and bugs.
- Every one out of three Buffer users faced difficulties in content recycling and reporting older posts.
- Despite popular opinion being otherwise, around 40% of the users have found a few aspects of Buffer’s interface confusing. This makes navigating the tool difficult.
- The scope of improvement in customization capabilities has been singled out by more than 33% of users.
- The users who found content library in Buffer to be lacking in content categorization was a major 28.57%.
Best for:
Mid-sized businesses, mid-sized agencies, and some enterprise brands.
About Sendible
Sendible has established itself as one of the go-to social media management solutions of today mainly catering to brands and agencies. The tool helps streamline social media management activities at scale for its clients with effective tools. This lets them harness the full potential of multiple social channels.
Sendible has a wide user base – ranging from medium businesses to mid-sized digital marketing agencies and enterprises. Be it a single individual looking to establish a solid social media presence or a full-fledged social media team looking to optimize their process, Sendible offers a centralized, user-friendly platform.
Its only drawback? Sendible doesn’t score very high on affordability and quality of customer support.
Pricing:
Sendible provides four paid plan options, and instead of offering a free plan, it provides a 14-day free trial period. The plans range from Creator, priced at $29, Traction for $89, White Label for $240, to the last plan, White Label+ plan, which is priced at $750.
Key Features:
- Scheduling: Sendible takes care of all your publishing enabling you to create and schedule posts helping you automate your content creation process.
- Collaboration:Manage tasks efficiently by coordinating with your team members and clients making way for seamless workflows and approval processes.
- AnalyticsUnderstand how your content is performing and get insights on audience behavior with the help of detailed analytics for all your posts.
- White Label: Generate more revenue with fully customizable social media management tools for your clients.
We have gathered multiple authentic Sendible user reviews from G2 and Capterra and meticulously analyzed them in regard to the major features important in terms of use case. Based on this study, we have gleaned the following insights.
Pros
- Many Sendible users, close to 78% of them, have highly appreciated the advanced content scheduling features the tool boasts of, enabling them to streamline their day-to-day social media activities.
- Almost half of the users point out that the automated publishing capabilities make it convenient for them to publish posts on multiple social platforms from a single dashboard.
- Almost three-fourths of Sendible users find content-management functionalities like the content library, content calendar, and visual content editor very useful to centralize their social media management workflow.
- The ability to create posts of multiple types with images, videos, and carousels speeds up the process of content creation and lets them keep their audience engaged with diverse content.
- Sendibles allows users to boost and repost their previous posts as well as tag profiles to them. This capability has been well-received by 20% of the users as it allows them to expand the reach of their content online.
Cons
- 24% of users have faced major problems in creating posts with Sendible.
- 62.5% of the Sendible users pointed out that there are some serious technical glitches in the content recycling feature that hinder them from effectively using their popular content.
- Out of all the reviews, 57% have raised the issue of live posting failing in several instances, which in turn disrupted their schedules.
- Although visual content editing is a popular feature among the users, many have nearly 50% of them have faced problems with it at one point of time, keeping them from optimizing their social media posts.
- 23.10% of the total users have similar opinions about content customization, stating that it lacks depth and flexibility.
Best for:
Mid-sized businesses, mid-sized agencies, and some enterprise brands.
About Agorapulse
Agorapulse is a CRM software that helps agencies and teams work collaboratively. One can engage, listen, collaborate and measure their social media efforts with Agorapulse. It is a multi-functional solution with an effective social media scheduling capability.
It supports all the major social media channels, including Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, and many more, centralizing their management. The intuitive UI is aesthetic and dynamic, equipped with advanced features. From medium-sized marketing agencies to larger organizations, Agorapulse is capable of accommodating all their requirements.
However, considering its pricing plans and the features offered, there are Agorapulse alternativesAgorapulse alternatives out there that will provide a slightly higher value for money.
Pricing:
Agorapulse offers one free plan and four paid plans with a 30-day free trial for each. The four paid plans are called Standard, Professional, Advanced, and Custom, ranging from $49 to $149 for managing 10 social profiles.
Key Features:
- Social Media Scheduling: Personalize posts down to the finest details and optimize them for the best results before scheduling with Agorapulse’s powerful content publishing capabilities.
- Social Monitoring: Keep track of all your mentions/social conversations around your brand or industry and engage with your target audience in an instant.
- Comprehensive Reporting: Understand how your content is performing and make tweaks to your content strategy with details insights for all your posts.
- Social Media Inbox: Manage, interact, and store all your conversations across multiple platforms in one single space.
- AI-Powered Writing Assistance: Adopt smart working with Agorapulse’s writing assistant, which will help you generate creative ideas and captions in seconds.
After thoroughly reviewing a multitude of user testimonials about Agorapulse, gathered from reputable platforms like G2 and Capterra, we meticulously scrutinized each one, taking into account every aspect of the tool. Based on this comprehensive analysis, we’ve aggregated the following insights.
Pros
- Around 75% of the users commended the tool’s ability to maintain consistency in posting schedules.
- A significant number of users appreciated the streamlined process and ease of creating different types of posts.
- 7 out of 10 people found the tool’s bulk scheduling capabilities effective and time-saving.
- 66.67% of users say the tool’s content tagging and categorization abilities make the content categorizing and publishing balanced.
- The UI/UX is the key to offering a great user experience with efficient working and nearly 5 out of every 6 users liked the navigation and ease of use.
Cons
- Nearly 63.16% of users faced issues related to the display and formatting of images/videos and were dissatisfied with the overall features.
- 21.05% of users have often complained about the challenges they faced while using the tagging feature in posts. This hindered their ability to give desired exposure to their content.
- According to the opinion of some users, 5.26% to be exact, content recycling features need a lot of improvisation to be more user-friendly.
- There are some limitations in the popular bulk scheduling feature, which was mentioned in more than 28.57% of reviews.
- Nearly a quarter of users pointed out the lack of customization options for the content to be a hindrance in the scheduling process.
Sprout Social is a social media sharing tool quite similar to Hootsuite. It’s more of a corporate tool to access features like smart inbox, in-depth social media analytics, and customized reporting. Sprout Social supports Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Pinterest.
Sprout Social can actually improve your work quality by streamlining your efforts in the right direction. Analytics can be pretty valuable to evaluate your overall social media performance.
Pros
- Sprout Social’s bot builder helps you set up, operate, and manage chatbots within Facebook Messenger.
- This social media scheduling tool can group your team members for better collaboration.
- Sprout Social lets you integrate tools like Zendesk, Hubspot, and UserVoice for support teams to manage user issues without leaving the dashboard.
Eileen Moran C.
The listening stream can be customized so that you can choose whatever profiles/hashtags you want to see at that time. You can reply, assign posts, forward posts, retweet, retweet with comments, all from the news stream.
Cons
- Sprout Social can be highly expensive social media post scheduler with teams, as it charges for every team member/user you invite. (But there are SproutSocial alternatives that provides all the features at a budget-friendly price.)
- For the price it is offered, Sprout Social doesn’t provide integration with visual platforms like Youtube.
- Though the inbox is intuitive, they don’t have a unified inbox. You have to toggle between different social account streams individually.
Verified Sprout Social User
First, let’s get it out of the way. SproutSocial is expensive. It is not at all affordable for most small or medium-sized businesses.
CoSchedule is mainly focused on publishing and known for its content calendar feature. With CoSchedule, you can manage your Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, and Tumblr social profiles.
CoSchedule integrates with blogging tools like WordPress and Hubspot, which helps you organize and publish your blogs right from your Coschedule account. You can also reshare your best-performing posts with a re-queue feature.
But the basic plan doesn’t cover multiple client accounts. You will need a customizable Marketing Suite plan which might be pricey.
Pros
- If you miss out on the social media posting schedule, then it automatically fills in the gap with your top-performing posts.
- CoSchedule has a Kanban Project dashboard, where you can see what your team is working on and their progress at each stage. You can apply custom statuses to workflows based on the way your team works.
Daniella G.
Having the ability to set templates for Social sharing is incredible. It means I can continue to promote my content for weeks after it has been published, and the Requeue feature means it continues to get exposure for as long as I need it.
Cons
- Very basic features in a free plan.
- CoSchedule is very pricey compared to any other scheduling tool in the market, even though it doesn’t have any enterprise-level features like social listening and monitoring.
- CoSchedule doesn’t offer many integrations and collaborations with other tools, which makes it less efficient while working along with the team and streamlining processes.
- The ReQueue feature is great, but it comes with limitations. It only allows you to queue your posts twice.
Verified CoSchedule User
CoSchedule is expensive, has confusing tiers, and has lots of bubbly features that aren’t that helpful. Any smart content marketer isn’t going to put their social media scheduling tool on random autopilot and organize content by “color.” It is simply not a very useful tool after about a week.
Zoho Social is built keeping in mind the needs of a growing business. It helps you work with team members, monitor brand mentions, and manage social conversations. Zoho Social lets you manage Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Google My Business.
This social media posting tool has some amazing feature sets like social listening and SmartQ predictions. Zoho Social suggests the best time to share your posts for more engagement based on your profile analytics.
Pros
- Zoho Social offers the best time slots to schedule social media posts with its SmartQ feature (when your audience is most active).
- It has its CRM integrations, where you can engage with prospects and generate potential leads from social media.
- You can create automated reports to deliver to your clients in the format and frequency you choose. You can also include team members in the delivery list and add a personalized message.
Verified Zoho Social User
I like Zoho software for many reasons. The most important one for me was CRM and social network collaboration. It has easy-to-use tools.
Cons
- The analytics and reporting feature is not very impressive. They don’t have a combined analytics feature.
- RSS Feed integration is missing in Zoho Social, whereas all other social media planning tools have this feature.
- Zoho Social is pretty expensive for the features and UI it offers.
Verified Zoho Social User
Reporting is where I’d love to see the most improvement – there is no way to look at combined analytics or get accurate engagement numbers.
eClincher is a great tool that supports social media networks like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, Google Business Profile, and Youtube.
It’s an agency-focused tool that lets you manage your social media campaigns with reporting and analysis functionalities and a convenient unified social inbox.
But this social media scheduling tool does not offer any collaboration feature. It has a learning curve too. Users need to watch a couple of tutorials to understand its functionality.
Pros
- eClincher has a feature to find top influencers based on keyword searches and their top content suggestions.
- It has a centralized inbox for monitoring, listening, and viewing competitor activity updates.
- eClincher has an inbuilt media library that lets you upload images and videos to your own dedicated cloud storage.
Harold G
An important winning point of eClincher is its only control panel, where I can monitor the messages of the social networks that I manage and easily participate with my audience.
Cons
- The user interface of eClincher doesn’t win any awards. It’s not very user-friendly, and it feels dull and outdated. The same goes for their mobile app.
- The unified inbox is a great feature, but it becomes clumsy when using multiple social media accounts.
- eClincher can get quite expensive if you are an SMB or a social media professional.
Angela B.
The price is pretty steep for a small business. The analytics options really are minimal. Quite honestly, it’s not much to go on — the keyword research kind of sucks.
MavSocial is a planner tool that focuses more on visuals to help you achieve your visual marketing goals. MavSocial supports Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Youtube, and Tumblr.
MavSocial lets you engage, listen, analyze, and collaborate. This social posting tool offers stock images so you can make your posts visually appealing. It also has provisions for social listening.
Pros
- MavSocial has a separate digital assets library where you can upload images, videos, and audio. You can create your own digital libraries by giving them tags and descriptions.
- They have their in-house photo market where any media you purchase (or if it’s a free one) stays up in the Mavsocial account, forever saved in your digital library.
- MavSocial has an inbuilt photo editing app where you can edit your photos before posting them. You can also discover which media performed the best. It captures cross-platform engagement for individual media pieces too.
Julie Anne G.
I like the convenience of being able to search for stock images right in MavSocial rather than having to search through a third-party stock photo provider.
Cons
- MavSocial has a pretty outdated user interface and a complex scheduling structure.
- The mobile application is a bit glitchy. Some features are not available on the web version, so using a mobile app becomes necessary.
- It doesn’t have an in-depth reporting feature. You can’t customize your reports in MavSocial.
Sandra G.
MavSocial offers a LOT… but not necessarily what I’m looking for. It was horrific to organize the cloud library. I regularly work with hundreds or thousands of images. Incredibly time-consuming to add metadata to each individual file.
Sked Social is a straightforward social media scheduling tool, designed to streamline the marketing efforts of small businesses. Mainly an Instagram scheduling tool, Sked Social is also capable of supporting other platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter, Snapchat, TikTok, and Google Business Profile.
The tool provides many Instagram- friendly features, such as link in bio and shoppable product tagging, which help e-commerce businesses a lot. Other than scheduling, the tool also is well-equipped to handle other social media marketing needs such as social inbox, analytics and reporting, and team collaboration.
Pros
- The process for setting up and onboarding for the tool is very easy.
- Instagram related features are very strong.
Andrea C.
I love the ability to schedule stories and carousel posts to instagram, while also tracking better and more analytics than it’s competitors. I love thee LinkinBio feature and think it brings a better look overall to that part of our feed. We’ve loved seeing the ease of scheduling and being more organized, while also saving time with templates, bulk creating posts, and the like.
Cons
- Sometimes the publishing of posts is delayed
- It does not allow the scheduling of custom Reel covers
Riley S.
We’ve run into quite a few bugs while using it. There have been issues with content not posting or posting at the wrong time. It can be very hit or miss, although I wouldn’t say this happens too frequently
MeetEdgar is a different solution than other schedulers. It assists you in uniquely scheduling social media posts with its feature of evergreen posting that doesn’t leave your queue empty.
Once you schedule your post on this social media planner, it saves the post in the library to reuse later. MeetEdgar supports Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and LinkedIn. It has a simple UI powered with AI integrations for the successful execution of your social media strategy.
Pros
- MeetEdgar has a posting queue that never leaves your content trail empty. It recycles your evergreen posts forever.
- It has a category-based social media posting schedule. You can group your content into different categories and schedule them accordingly.
Vert H.
Edgar is an evergreen social media content planning tool. You will be able to keep a library of your best content, put them into separate categories, and assign time slots for them to be automatically reshared in the future.
Cons
- Though you can plan social media posts based on categories, you can’t shuffle your posts in the queue to reschedule them for later time slots.
- MeetEdgar has very limited features and supports just 5 networks, due to which it isn’t a one-stop solution for marketers.
- You cannot add team members. There’s no social inbox and in-depth social analytics.
- It just has one pricing plan, which can’t be called affordable for the selective set of features it offers.
Shauna W.
Edgar now has no reporting capabilities.
SmarterQueue is a different solution than other schedulers. This social media planning tool recycles your content, so your queue is never empty. SmarterQueue supports Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Pinterest.
You can categorize your content for quick access. This social posting tool suggests a custom schedule based on your profile metrics too.
Pros
- Easy to assign time-slots to categories. It also recycles evergreen posts automatically.
- You can create variations of your posts for re-queueing so that you don’t have to make unique posts always.
Kristi Porter
The two features I love most are the ability to re-queue previous posts and customer service.
Cons
- SmarterQueue is highly-priced for the features it offers. You can manage only 25 social accounts at a price of $79.99/month for just one user.
- It has no collaboration feature where you can add team members and manage multiple client accounts. It doesn’t offer in-depth reports.
- It doesn’t have a social inbox where you can manage your social conversations.
- Their user interface is neither intuitive nor user-friendly.
Violeta P.
I don’t love how the app looks. It isn’t as pretty or clean looking.
StatusBrew is one of the best post schedulers. It has got a social inbox, analytics, and listening features. There are even advanced team collaboration features with diversified permission capabilities.
It supports social media channels like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Youtube. You can even use Statusbrew for ad campaign moderation on Facebook and Instagram. It also offers security features in its enterprise plans.
Pros
- StatusBrew has decent analytics and reporting features.
- You can target newer audiences based on social listening capabilities.
Greg J
Statusbrew lets us work intelligently on social media. This social media scheduling tool enables us to connect effectively with our audience and makes it more approachable.
Cons
- The UI can be overwhelming, and users need time to understand its features.
- This social media tool has a high starting price and less platform integration.
Verified StatusBrew User
They should improve the UI of the tool for better user engagement. Moreover, they should give a tour guide for beginners who are going to use this tool for the first time.
Best for:
Creators, freelancers, agencies, social media managers and small businesses.
About Later
From starting as an Instagram scheduling tool to evolving into a dynamic social media marketing software, Later has changed significantly. The platform provides its users with an all-in-one dashboard where they can plan their social media content from start to finish for six different platforms.
Later, has been explicitly designed to simplify social media scheduling for creators, agencies, social media managers, and growing businesses. The user-friendly UI of this tool makes Later an ideal choice to take care of all aspects of your social media efforts with ease.
The tool helps its users achieve their business objectives, guiding them to the best time for maximum engagement. But its focus has always been facilitating Instagram marketing, designated features just for the platform.
The streamlined software is ideal for the use of individual social media managers or creators, but Later lacks any structured approval workflows for larger teams.
Pricing:
Later presents three subscription choices, each accompanied by a 14-day complimentary trial period. The system presents a no-cost option, followed by paid levels starting with Starter, valued at $25, Growth at $45, and the final choice, the Advanced option, priced at $80.
Key Features:
- Publish & Schedule:Plan, create, and manage all your social media content from a single space.
- Social Inbox: This feature enables users to aggregate all the incoming comments, messages, and brand mentions across multiple channels and respond to engage in relevant conversations.
- Analytics:The analytics dashboard shows in-depth data on engagement rates, impressions, follower growth, and clicks across different social profiles.
- Linkin.bio:Create a mini-lading page and link it to your bio on TikTok and Instagram to make your profiles more clickable and drive more conversions.
We’ve compiled numerous genuine user opinions of Later from G2 and Capterra, conducting a thorough examination focused on crucial features relevant to practical application. From this examination, we’ve extracted the following observations.
Pros
- The scheduling features in Later have received an overall positive verdict from its users, 67% of whom say it makes their everyday social media activities seamless.
- Bulk scheduling has been lauded as one of the best scheduling features by almost 83.3% of users, quoting the ability to schedule a month or more worth of posts as a reason for it.
- Almost 50% of the users agree that multiple-platform integration enables them to centralize their social media management.
- Three-quarters of all users have found the automation capabilities to have helped with their efficiency in the workflow in scheduling and rescheduling posts from their dashboards.
- The simplicity of post-arrangement content uploading with the drag-and-drop functionality prompted 66.5% of the current Later users to say that the platform scores high in ease of use.
Cons
- Around 50% of the reviews have raised concerns about the platform integration being limited, which has hindered their content scheduling activities.
- A major percentage of users, 81.4% to be exact, have raised concerns about the fact that they faced technical issues, not being able to post carousels and Instagram Stories.
- 75% of Later users have proclaimed the tool to be considerably expensive where the plans are designed so that high-level features are not available on basic plans.
- The connectivity of platforms is interrupted again and again due to regular disconnection of social media accounts. 66.7% of people in the reviews have raised this problem, saying they have to constantly keep reconnecting their accounts.
- A total of 81% of users have faced the inability to schedule advanced types of content with Later, like Reels and Stories.
One of the finest management tools is NapoleanCat. You can manage popular platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Google Business Profile, Twitter, and YouTube.
Its main features include managing several social media profiles, automating customer support, assessing marketing results, keeping track of competitors’ activities, and team collaboration.
You just pay for what you use with NapoleonCat. They provide customized add-ons like social tracking, campaign optimization, analytics, and reporting.
Pros
- Its social inbox feature lets you manage conversations on multiple platforms from a single dashboard.
- All plans are highly customizable.
Agnieszka K
Two absolute favorites: social inbox and automated moderation. The former saves us so much time, and we can stay in control of what’s happening in all our profiles without being all over the place – everything is in one app, finally. And the latter – it’s great for answering messages even when your team is offline and deleting all that spam.
Cons
- Connection with social media platforms, especially Facebook pages, is quite patchy.
- The tool is slow and takes a lot of time to load at times.
Kat B.
I believe the interface could have been made easier to navigate/user-friendly. I find that, at times, it was difficult to find a specific comment we wanted to get to.
Post Planner is one of the solutions for managing and scheduling content on social media. It supports the top 5 platforms, which include Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, and Pinterest.
Fill in your content calendar with branded posts and schedule them to the desired time slot. You can even filter popular posts from Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit if you dig in useful content for your audience to maintain an impactful social media presence.
This social media scheduler even lets you monitor your brand mentions, so you don’t miss out on any opportunity for meaningful interaction with your audience.
Pros
- The content discovery feature is its highlight.
- Multiple value-adding integrations are available.
- Provision to tailor content for specific platforms.
Bob S
I love the ease of use and the fact that I can post to all my social media sites with just a few clicks. They have a great search tool to find relevant content and even allow me to import my blog posts straight from my site. I also love the repeat post and recycle features.
Cons
- It supports just 5 platforms.
- Customer support isn’t prompt.
Michael H.
Frequent outages, constant need to refresh share tokens to enable publishing, its “randomizer” is not random at all.
Planable is a social media post planner designed around one simple principle: ridding marketers of tedious tasks and allowing them to create content.
One of Planable’s most powerful features is the multi-level approval process built to ensure seamless collaboration for marketing teams. With real-time collaboration and four types of approval workflows (none, optional, required, and multi-level), Planable is suitable for teams of all sizes. Planable is the perfect place to make your social media workflow foolproof.
Planable is integrated with Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google Business Profile, YouTube, and TikTok.
Pros
- Planable has multiple views to visualize content as you create it: feed, calendar, list, and grid view.
- Leave comments (tag your teammates, attach files, and leave reactions) and replies next to the post that needs feedback.
- The ability to preview content exactly as it would appear on social media feeds before publishing.
Jay F
I have been using Planable for my Agency ever since. My Clients totally love it, and it is so easy for my team to schedule posts. Very convenient and makes life easier for all of us! I don’t think we can do Social Media Management without Planable, as it is one of the best social media management tools!
Cons
- As a free social media scheduling tool, it can only allow 50 posts.
- No social listening features are available.
- It doesn’t include analytics and reporting.
Verified User
Features are very limited; you can only schedule and approve or comment. I would like analytics, space to chat with my client, etc.
Conclusion
Though there are tons of paid and free social media scheduling tools in the market, only a handful are deemed fit for use. Some paid ones are either too expensive or don’t offer the platform you need, while others dispense a compromised performance.
That’s why we’re betting on SocialPilot. You can effortlessly post to any social media channel without spending time. Work together with your team and clients to make a lasting impact right away. Sign up for a free trial to level up your social media presence right away.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a social media scheduling tool?
A social media scheduling tool is an automation tool that helps you schedule social media posts for multiple social media accounts ahead of time. As you can’t be active on social media all the time, using a social media scheduler helps you be proactive and set up your content calendar in advance.
How to select the perfect social media scheduling and publishing tool?
Here’s how to select the perfect social media scheduler:
- Check if it helps you post on social media platforms you regularly use
- Check if the social media scheduling tool has advanced social media scheduling options and can customize posts for different social media sites
- The number of posts you can queue and publish in a day with the scheduler
- If it has a social media calendar for visualization
- If it allows team collaboration
- Provides deep analytics and reporting
Which tools can be used as paid and free social media schedulers?
You can use the following tools for social media scheduling:
- SocialPilot
- SocialBee
- Hootsuite
- Buffer
- Sendible
- AgoraPulse
- Sprout Social
- CoSchedule
- Zoho Social
- eClincher
- Mavsocial
- Sked Social
- MeetEdgar
- SmarterQueue
- StatusBrew
- Later
- NapoleanCat
- Post Planner
- Planable
How do I schedule all my social media?
You can schedule all your social media posts from a social media scheduler tool like SocialPilot. You can sign up for the free trial and connect the tool with all your accounts. After that, you just need to add your posts. You can schedule social media posts at different times for different platforms or share them on all networks at once.
Is there a free social media scheduling tool?
Yes, there are some free social media scheduling tools. However, the free plans of these tools come with very limited functionality and not enough to serve any marketing purpose. Hence, it is better to go for a tool like SocialPiot that is able to handle the requirements of a business and comes at an affordable price.
What is the best social media scheduler for small businesses?
SocialPilot is the best social media scheduler for small businesses as it is packed with advanced features like AI Assistant, content library, bulk scheduling, RSS feed automation, and more, but it comes at a surprisingly reasonable cost.
About the Author
1. SocialPilot
$30
For 10 Social Media Profiles
SocialPilot is a social media scheduling tool that lets you post on numerous social media platforms such as TikTok, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram (Direct Publishing), YouTube, Google Business Profile, Pinterest, and Tumblr.
Every feature of SocialPilot is designed to simplify creating social media schedules to optimize marketing efforts. This social media post scheduler also provides reliable support to its users via email, chat, phone, and social.
Features
What People Say About Us
Tal T.
What can you NOT DO with SocialPilot? In all honesty, I don’t have any clue. The ultimate friendly all-in-one social media scheduler, with great value. I highly recommend any marketer out there to check it out and give it a chance to prove its massive powers.