There is no single best alternative, there are five that solve different problems. Later organises visual content, Buffer publishes fast and cheap, Hootsuite and Agorapulse are built for teams that answer to somebody, and GoFeed adds client approval. What decides is not the feature list, it is how each one charges.
The five options, and who each one fits
Before looking at prices it helps to lay the ground out, because these five tools look alike on their home pages and diverge a lot in real work. This table sums up who each one is built for and what you will miss first.
| Tool | Who it fits | What is missing first |
|---|---|---|
| Later | Visual content and teams of two or three | Commercial documents |
| Buffer | One person on three or four channels | A private message inbox |
| Hootsuite | Companies with a team and permission control | A cheap entry plan |
| Agorapulse | Teams that live inside the inbox | A price that does not grow with the team |
| GoFeed | Agencies whose clients have to approve | Social listening and a free plan |
Metricool is not in the table because it is the starting point rather than one of the exits. And it is worth saying why people leave, which is almost never a specific feature: they leave when the number of people touching the account stops fitting the pricing model they picked at the beginning.
That list is worth reading with the work in front of you rather than with each vendor's site. All five schedule to the big networks, all five have a calendar and all five show decent metrics; arguing about that is arguing about the 80 % everyone solves. What actually separates a happy agency from a fed up one six months later is three questions: who has to say yes before anything is published, how many people need to sign in, and what happens the month client number six arrives.
What each one costs today
There is a trap here that has to be shown before the figures: these five do not charge for the same thing. One charges per brand, one per set of profiles, one per connected channel, two per seat and one per workspace. Comparing the numbers without translating the unit is the fastest way to get this wrong.
| Tool | Entry plan | Published price | Charged per |
|---|---|---|---|
| Metricool | Free | 0 € | Brand |
| Metricool | Starter, 5 brands | 16 € a month, billed yearly | Brand |
| Later | Starter | $18.75 a month, billed yearly | Set of profiles |
| Buffer | Essentials | $5 a month per channel | Connected channel |
| Hootsuite | Standard | $99 per user a month, billed yearly | Seat |
| Agorapulse | Standard | $79 per user a month, billed yearly | Seat |
| GoFeed | See the pricing page | Whatever the live catalogue says | Workspace |
Prices checked on 6 September 2026: Metricool, Later, Buffer, Hootsuite, Agorapulse.
Two warnings about that table. Two of these publish in euros and three in dollars, and nothing has been converted here, so the exact comparison has to be made with the day's rate and your own VAT on top. And every price is the annual billing one, which is the column almost all of them show by default: paying month to month runs 20 % to 30 % higher depending on the tool. The full reckoning for a stack, with the subscriptions that usually sit alongside, is in the social media stack cost guide.
Later, if the content is mostly visual
Later charges per "social set", which is its own unit and the first thing to understand: one set is eight profiles, one of each network. That means two Instagram accounts consume two sets even if you never touch the other seven networks, and an agency with six clients needs six sets however small each one is.
The entry plan comes with one user, 30 posts per profile and three months of analytics. Approvals, the social inbox and custom roles appear on the next tier up, with two sets and two users. The extras are priced and reasonable: $11.25 a month per extra set and $3.75 per extra user.
It is the best option on this list if your planning means looking at the grid before publishing and your content lives on Instagram and TikTok. It is the worst if your problem is fitting fifteen brands into one account without the price multiplying.
Buffer, if you publish on few channels
Buffer has the most honest model in the group and the most dangerous at scale. You pay per connected channel: $5 a month each on Essentials and $10 on Team, with two months free if you pay for the year. The free plan connects three channels with ten scheduled posts on each, and it has been the most generous on the market for years.
The virtue is that you remove a channel the day a client leaves and the invoice drops that night. The flaw is arithmetic: five clients with four channels each is twenty channels, and on the Team plan that is a figure that no longer competes with anything on this list. Content approval workflows and access levels are on Team only.
One more thing worth knowing before choosing it: the inbox handles comments rather than private messages, so if answering DMs is part of the job, Buffer is not the whole answer and a second tool joins the bill.
Hootsuite, if the problem is governance
Hootsuite charges per seat, which puts it in a different price league: $99 per user a month on Standard with up to ten social accounts, $199 on Professional with unlimited accounts and $399 on Advanced. The trial runs fourteen days and asks for no card.
Nobody with three people should be looking at those numbers, and that is not a criticism. What that price buys is genuine social listening, granular permissions, configurable approval workflows, enterprise integrations with years behind them and support sized for large accounts. For a brand department with a legal team behind it, that is worth what it costs.
Agorapulse, if the team lives in the inbox
Agorapulse also charges per seat, but starts lower: $79 per user a month billed annually on Standard, $119 on Professional and $149 on Advanced, with ten social profiles included on all three and extra profiles at $10 a month. The trial runs 30 days with no card, the longest on this list.
Its product is the inbox, and it shows. Labels, assignments, saved replies, automated comment moderation and, on the top tier, ad reports and return on investment analysis. If your team spends half a day replying, it is the deepest tool in this comparison. What makes it expensive quickly is the same thing as Hootsuite: every new person is a new subscription.
Everything in this article happens in one place in GoFeed.
Try it freeGoFeed, if there is a client between you and publishing
GoFeed schedules to fourteen networks and measures on six, like most of these, and the difference is what happens before and after. Before: an approval that your team gives from the app or the client from their own portal, where one yes is enough, switched on for the clients who need to review. After: a monthly PDF report that sends itself, and the commercial documents, quotes and invoices with your own number series and your own VAT.
The price goes per workspace rather than per seat, so adding people to the team consumes member quota but does not open a new subscription. There are five workspace quotas and only one of them is soft. The list of what is not there matters just as much: no social listening, no Looker Studio connector, no content recycling queue and no free plan anyone can sign up for, but a fourteen day trial, card required and nothing charged until day 15, and a floor a lapsed workspace drops to without losing its data.
The current figures live on the pricing page, which reads the live catalogue, and that is the only place worth looking at them: the plans are database rows, and any number printed inside an article ages in weeks.
The portal, the monthly reports and the documents are agency workspace features. A solo creator gets the calendar, the analytics, the bio page and the DM automation, and none of the first three, because there is nobody to ask. How the whole chain fits together is on the calendar and publishing page, and the head to head is in GoFeed versus Metricool.
When moving is not worth it
There are three situations in which switching tools is wasted work, and they are worth recognising before opening a trial.
The first is having fewer than five brands and nobody external who approves. At that size Metricool covers scheduling, analytics, ads and competitors for a price none of the five alternatives beats, and what you would gain by moving is a feature you are not using yet.
The second is having your reporting built in Looker Studio. The connector is one of the things Metricool does better than almost the whole market, and if your dashboards already live there, rebuilding them costs more than any monthly saving.
The third is being halfway through a quarter. A queue of scheduled posts does not migrate between tools: it has to be reloaded by hand, so the only cheap moment to switch is the gap between two months of calendar. If the sums still work out, the tier by tier comparison of the three most similar is in Metricool, Later and Buffer compared.