Social media tools are the hardest category on this site to compare on price, because no two of them charge the same way. Buffer bills per connected channel. Hootsuite bills per user. Metricool bills per brand. Later bills per bundle of profiles. Predis.ai bills by AI credit consumed.
Compare the same account topology before comparing price: brands, networks per brand, users, publishing volume and required approvals. A brand is not a channel, and a Social Set is not an arbitrary bundle of interchangeable accounts. This guide separates those meters and explains how to price your own configuration.
Five billing models, and why the sticker price misleads
Per channel. Buffer charges for each connected social account. Predictable and cheap at three channels, linear and expensive at twenty.
Per user. Hootsuite charges per seat, with account limits attached to each tier. Cheap per channel if you run many accounts alone, punishing if you have a team.
Per brand. Metricool charges by brand rather than by channel, so connecting more networks to the same brand does not raise the bill.
Per profile bundle. Later sells Social Sets, each holding up to one profile from each supported platform. Costs step up in blocks rather than smoothly.
Per credit. Predis.ai meters AI generation. Cost scales with how much content you produce, not how many accounts you own.
Work out which axis your usage sits on before comparing anything. A solo operator with twelve channels and a five-person team with three channels should reach opposite conclusions.
What free actually means here
The word covers three very different things in this category, and the differences are larger than the marketing suggests.
Free forever, with a channel cap. Buffer lets you “Connect up to 3 channels” with “10 scheduled posts per channel”, refillable, and no time limit. Publer is free forever for “3 social accounts (except X)”, with 1 user, 10 scheduled posts per account and 25 saved drafts.
Free forever, with a posting cap. Metricool’s free plan works on a different axis: it covers one brand and lets you connect that brand’s networks, but excludes LinkedIn and X, limits you to “Schedule up to 20 posts per month”, 5 competitor profiles and 30 days of analytics. Channel count is not what constrains it — the 20-post monthly ceiling is.
No free plan at all. Hootsuite’s plans page lists no free tier; its cheapest option is Standard at $99 per user per month. Later’s pricing page likewise lists only paid plans. Any comparison still showing either with a free plan is out of date.
Free tiers in this category are for testing whether the output is good enough to pay for. Twenty posts a month or five AI credits will not run a business account.
Per-channel: Buffer
Buffer is the easiest tool here to start with and the clearest to price, up to a point. The free plan covers 3 channels with 10 scheduled posts each. Its pricing page lists Essentials at $5 a month per channel, or $60 per channel billed yearly, and Team at $10 a month per channel, or $120 billed yearly, with “unlimited team members” on Team against a single user on Free and Essentials.
One detail changes the maths at scale. Buffer states that “channels 1–10 are priced at the standard rate, and any channels above 10 cost less per channel”, but it does not publish the reduced rate anywhere on that page. The total for a large account is therefore lower than straight multiplication implies, by an amount you cannot calculate in advance. Confirm at checkout rather than budgeting from a spreadsheet.
What Buffer lacks is depth: no social listening, no unified inbox, and analytics that stay basic. For captions and consistent scheduling it is excellent value; for reporting it is not the tool.
Per brand: Metricool
Metricool is the strongest answer to per-channel pricing, because connecting more networks to one brand does not increase the bill. That advantage is real, but it lives on the paid tiers rather than the free one.
Its pricing page lists Free at $0 for one brand, Starter “From $20/month” for up to 10 brands, and Advanced “From $53/month” for up to 50 brands, with annual billing advertised as saving up to 24%. Starter itself is banded: the same page prices “Up to 5 brands for $20/month” and “Up to 10 brands for $36/month”. X and Advanced Analytics are sold as add-ons rather than included.
Metricool’s per-brand tiers can suit a brand active on several networks. Compare its total against a per-channel service only after listing the same actual accounts, required networks and add-ons. Ten brands and ten channels are not equivalent workloads.
Metricool also combines scheduling with analytics, competitor tracking and paid-ads reporting in one dashboard, which is the main reason teams running both organic and paid work choose it over Buffer.
Per account, budget: Publer
Publer occupies the low-cost end. Its pricing page lists Professional at $5.00 a month per social account, or $4.00 billed annually, and Business at $10.00 a month, or $8.00 billed annually, with unlimited AI prompts, analytics reports and competitor analysis on Business. Enterprise is quoted on request.
Against Buffer’s $5 and $10 monthly rates that is a modest saving rather than a dramatic one — roughly 20% on annual billing at the equivalent tier. What Publer adds is tooling Buffer charges separately for or omits: bulk scheduling, post recycling, watermarks and a link-in-bio page.
Its free plan keeps scheduling available but caps pending posts at 10 per account across 3 accounts, and excludes X entirely.
Per user, enterprise: Hootsuite
Hootsuite is the enterprise option and prices accordingly. Its plans page lists Standard at $99 per user per month billed annually with up to 10 social accounts, Professional at $199 with unlimited accounts, Advanced at $399, and Enterprise on request.
What the money buys is social listening, a unified inbox, approval workflows, competitor benchmarking and enterprise controls that none of the cheaper tools match. What it costs is a floor of $99 per person before anyone has posted anything.
A common mistake worth avoiding: comparison pages frequently label the $99 tier “Pro”. It is Standard, and it is the one with the 10-account cap.
Per profile bundle: Later
Later is built around visual planning and remains the common choice for Instagram-led accounts. Its pricing works differently again: plans are sold around Social Sets, each holding up to one profile from each supported platform.
Its pricing page lists Starter at “$18.75USD/month” billed yearly, with 1 Social Set of 8 profiles, 30 posts per profile per month, 5 AI credits, 1 user and up to 3 months of analytics. Growth is $37.50 billed yearly, with 2 Social Sets, 180 posts per profile per month, 50 AI credits, 2 users and a year of analytics. Scale is $82.50 billed yearly, with 6 Social Sets, unlimited posts, 100 AI credits, 4 users and two years of analytics. Annual billing is advertised as “3 months free | 25% off”.
The AI allowance is the thing to watch. Five credits a month on Starter will not survive a week of daily captioning, and the step from Starter to Growth is as much about the jump from 30 to 180 posts per profile as it is about the extra Social Set.
Per credit: Predis.ai
Predis.ai is the only tool here where content generation, not account count, drives the bill. It turns a prompt, product link or image into finished carousels, short videos and ad creatives, which is a genuinely different proposition from a scheduler with a caption writer attached.
Its pricing page lists Core at $24 a month, reduced from a $32 list price and billed as $288 yearly, with 1,300 credits a month; Rise at $55 a month, from $79, billed as $664 yearly, with 3,200 credits; and Enterprise+ at $212 a month, from $249, billed as $2,540 yearly, with 10,000 credits.
Predis publishes what each output costs, which is unusual in this category and makes the plan genuinely forecastable: 15 credits per image for ad creatives, social posts and photoshoots, 15 credits per slide on multi-slide posts, 5 credits per 10 seconds of faceless video, and 200 credits per 8 seconds of standard or UGC video. That last figure is the one that decides the tier: Core’s 1,300 monthly credits is about 52 seconds of standard video, or roughly 86 images.
Add-ons are priced separately — an extra brand at $5 a month, extra credits at $29 a month, and additional social channels at $5, $25 or $99 depending on plan. One limitation worth knowing before you buy the entry tier: Core is listed as “No Auto Posting”, so an AI-first tool may still require you to schedule manually until you reach Rise.
Count brands and networks before calculating cost
Consider five brands, each with an Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn account. That is five brands, fifteen channels and five potential Social Sets if each required network is supported. It is not equivalent to one brand with fifteen accounts on the same network.
| Billing model | Input for this example | What to confirm |
|---|---|---|
| Per channel/account | 15 connected accounts | Volume discounts, excluded networks and feature tier |
| Per brand | 5 brands with 3 networks each | Network eligibility, add-ons and collaboration limits |
| Per Social Set | 5 sets, assuming one supported profile per network per brand | Included sets and additional-set cost |
| Per user with profile cap | Your real user count plus 15 profiles | A plan supporting both staffing and account volume |
| Per AI credit | Actual captions, images and videos produced | Credits per operation; posting limits are separate |
Arithmetic illustration: at a hypothetical flat $5/channel, fifteen channels cost $75/month before other charges. That is not a quote for Buffer or any other vendor. Use the live calculator to account for discounts. A plan quoted per brand must be evaluated using five brands, not fifteen. Compare the resulting prices only after the required features also match.
We have not measured caption quality or scheduling reliability across these tools. Use an approved test post on the networks you actually manage before relying on a scheduler for client publishing.
How to choose
Three channels or fewer: Buffer or Publer free. Both are permanent, not trials. Note that Publer free excludes X.
Many networks under a few brands: Metricool, where paid tiers count brands rather than channels. Its free plan is a trial in practice, capped at 20 posts a month.
Instagram-led visual planning: Later, checking the 30-posts-per-profile ceiling on Starter against your actual cadence, and budgeting for AI credits separately if captions matter.
A team that needs listening and approvals: Hootsuite, accepting the $99-per-seat floor.
Content production is the bottleneck, not scheduling: Predis.ai, watching video credit consumption and noting that auto-posting starts at Rise.
Agencies with many brands: compare an identical set of brands, networks, users and approval requirements. Include client access and reporting. A low price for a plan missing a required approval workflow is not a workable saving.
For the captions themselves, our guide to AI writing tools covers dedicated options, and AI image generators covers the visuals.
Related guides
- Best AI Writing Tools in 2026
- Best AI Image Generators in 2026
- Best AI Video Generators in 2026
- Best AI Marketing Automation Tools in 2026
- Best AI Chatbots in 2026
Frequently asked questions
Which of these are free forever?
Buffer (3 channels, 10 posts each), Publer (3 accounts excluding X, 10 pending posts each) and Metricool (1 brand, 20 posts a month, no LinkedIn or X). Hootsuite and Later list no free plan on their pricing pages.
Why is Hootsuite so much more expensive?
It charges per user rather than per channel, starting at $99 per seat per month billed annually with a 10-account cap on Standard. The higher cost buys social listening, a unified inbox and approval workflows that the cheaper tools do not offer.
Which is cheapest for many social accounts?
Metricool, provided your accounts group into a small number of brands, because its paid tiers bill per brand rather than per channel: up to 10 brands for $36 a month with each brand’s networks connected. Per-channel tools scale linearly, so the gap widens as you add accounts.
Do AI features have separate limits?
Often yes. Later includes 5 AI credits monthly on Starter, 50 on Growth and 100 on Scale. Predis.ai meters everything by credit and publishes the rates: 15 credits an image, 15 a slide, 5 per 10 seconds of faceless video and 200 per 8 seconds of standard video, so video consumes an allowance far faster than static posts.
Is an AI-first tool better than a scheduler with a caption writer?
They solve different problems. AI-first tools generate finished creatives from a prompt; schedulers with caption assistants help you publish content you already have. Choose based on whether your bottleneck is producing content or distributing it.
Conclusion
Start by identifying which axis your usage sits on. If you have few channels, per-channel pricing is the cheapest entry. If you have many networks grouped under a few brands, per-brand pricing wins outright. If you need listening and approvals, per-seat pricing is what that costs. If your bottleneck is producing content rather than scheduling it, a credit-metered tool is a different purchase entirely.
Whatever you shortlist, count your channels and your brands separately, then check what the free tier actually caps — channels on Buffer and Publer, posts per month on Metricool. Those facts decide this category far more than any feature list does.
