Nobody leaves Later over a missing feature. People leave when the second brand stops being one more profile and becomes a whole extra set, and when they find there is no free tier on the pricing page to fall back to. The reasonable exits are four, and they charge in different units.
The options, and who each one is for
Before looking at figures it helps to lay out the ground, because these tools look alike on the homepage and separate quite a lot in real work. This table says who each one is built for and what you will miss first if you move there.
| Tool | Who it is for | What is missing first |
|---|---|---|
| Planoly | Instagram and Pinterest, visual work | Breadth of networks |
| Metricool | Several brands of your own, fine measurement | Documents and a client portal |
| Buffer | Simple publishing on a few channels | Check their site, no figures quoted here |
| Publer | Simple publishing on a few channels | Check their site, no figures quoted here |
| GoFeed | Fourteen networks, an inbox with reviews, Bio | A visual planner and a free plan |
Two warnings about that table and about the whole piece. Buffer and Publer appear because they always make the short list, but no price and no feature is attributed to either here: their pages were not read for this article, and writing from memory is exactly what this site does not do. And the row order is not a ranking, because the five solve different problems.
What Later costs today
Later charges by "social set", which is its own unit and the origin of nearly every move away from it. A set is eight profiles, one per network, so two Instagram accounts consume two sets even if you never touch the other seven. Users are counted separately.
| Plan | Sets and profiles | Users | Per month, billed monthly | Per month, billed annually |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | 1 set, 8 profiles | 1 | $25 | $18.75 |
| Growth | 2 sets, 16 profiles | 2 | $50 | $37.50 |
| Scale | 6 sets, 48 profiles | 4 | $110 | $82.50 |
Prices checked on 8 September 2026: Later, Planoly, Metricool.
The entry tier carries 30 posts a month per profile and three months of analytics history. Approval flows and the social inbox arrive on Growth, along with a year of history. Scale moves to unlimited posts, two years of history, competitive benchmarking and brand health monitoring. Extras are priced: $11.25 a month per additional set and $3.75 per user. On the page consulted there is no permanent free plan, only a fourteen day trial.
On the Metricool source we should be explicit, because this article quotes its figures below: the usual Spanish address returned an error and a page on the same domain was read instead, also in Spanish and with amounts in euros. It is a secondary source and it is stated as such.
Planoly, if the work is the grid
Planoly counts the same way Later does, by "Social Set" and by user, so moving there because of the pricing unit gets you nowhere. Its entry plan is $14 a month with one set and one user; the next is $24 with two and two; the top one is $47 with six and six. Extras are priced at $10 and $5 on the middle tier and $8 and $3 on the top one.
There is a detail in that rate card worth reading twice: the same page publishes an annual cycle at $16, $28 and $55 a month, which does not come out under the monthly one, so both columns deserve a look before committing to a year. A free tier exists but lives only in the mobile app, at ten uploads a month.
What you buy by moving is not a pricing structure, it is a product. Planoly is Instagram and Pinterest first, with a visual grid for placing images before publishing that is still among the best around, and it includes a link in bio page and the selling of digital products on every paid plan, the $14 one included. It also publishes to X, which not everything here does.
It is the right choice if you were leaving Later on price rather than on model. It is the wrong one if you were leaving because the set as a unit had run out, because you will find exactly the same unit there.
Metricool, if the free plan was the reason
Metricool counts by brands rather than by sets, which is a change of axis rather than a discount. Its free tier holds one brand, up to 20 posts a month and 30 days of history, with no LinkedIn and no X. The paid ladder starts at 20 euros a month for five brands and rises to 37 for ten; the Advanced tier runs from 54 euros for 15 brands to 172 for 50, and that is where post approval, role management and the Looker Studio connector appear.
For a creator running three projects of their own, counting by brands works out far better than counting by sets, and that is the real reason behind most of these moves. For a small agency the jump sits at the Advanced tier and deserves a look before signing, because approval does not exist below it.
The tier by tier comparison, with more names on the table, is in the Metricool alternatives round up.
Buffer and Publer, with no figures
Both turn up on any short list of Later alternatives and both deserve a trial. What you will not find here is a price or a feature list, because their pages were not part of the verification behind this article, and this site does not print a number it has not read on a dated page.
That is not a mark against them, it is a rule against us. If they are on your list, open them on their own sites, look at the billing unit before the amount, and compare with the same number of brands and the same billing period, which is the only way two rate cards in this category resemble each other at all.
Everything in this article happens in one place in GoFeed.
Try it freeGoFeed, if the calendar is no longer the whole job
GoFeed publishes to fourteen networks: Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, TikTok, YouTube, Threads, Reddit, Pinterest, Bluesky, Google Business, Telegram, Snapchat, Discord and WhatsApp. There is no X, and if you post there that counts against it from the first line. Analytics cover six networks, with around thirty metrics documented alongside their aggregation rule: reach is never summed across days, and demographics exist on Instagram and YouTube and nowhere else.
For a creator, the part most noticeable on arriving from Later is the inbox, which treats private messages, comments and reviews as three kinds of the same object, with Google Business reviews in the same thread list as an Instagram message and a clock marking a message overdue at 24 hours. And the Bio page per brand, with sixteen templates and per day stats, where Bio Pro buys three things: removing the mark in the footer, the daily detail, and custom slugs. It is not a domain of your own.
The limit deserves the same clarity: client approval, the client portal and the monthly PDF report are agency workspace features, and a creator workspace does not have them. The kind of workspace is chosen at sign up and can be changed, so the road exists, but it is not included by default.
The price goes per workspace rather than per seat, it includes VAT, the Spanish value added tax, there is no minimum term and nothing is charged per post. The current figures live on the pricing page, which reads the live catalogue. The trial runs fourteen days, card required and nothing charged until day 15, and the head to head is in GoFeed against Later.
What Later does better, and when not to move
Later does two things better than almost everything on this list, and they deserve acknowledging before anybody cancels anything. The first is the visual planner: working by looking at the grid before publishing is still more comfortable there than nearly anywhere else, and if your content is mostly images, switching costs you comfort every day. The second is its link in bio page, polished over years rather than added late.
There is a third that shows only when the table is read carefully: approval flows and the social inbox arrive on the middle tier rather than the most expensive one, which is a generous and uncommon decision in this category. And the granular add-ons, sets and users bought singly at a published price, let you grow without jumping a plan.
There are also two moments when moving is wasted work. One is having a single brand and nobody outside who has to approve: at that size almost any of these tools covers the same ground and the switch only buys inconvenience. The other is being mid quarter, because the queue of scheduled posts does not migrate: it has to be loaded again by hand, so the only cheap window is the gap between two months of calendar. The head to head between the three most alike is in Metricool, Later and Buffer.