Metricool charges per brand and measures considerably more than the other two. Later charges per set of profiles and is built around the image. Buffer charges per channel and does less on purpose. With one account all three work; with five brands the invoices diverge so far that the choice stops being about the product.
What separates the three, before the price
The three homepages say almost the same thing: plan, schedule, publish, measure. The difference starts at the unit each one sells, because that unit sets the price, the way permissions are handed out, and even how you end up organising the work inside the tool.
| Metricool | Later | Buffer | |
|---|---|---|---|
| The unit you pay for | Brand | Set of profiles | Connected channel |
| Free plan anyone can join | 1 brand, 20 posts a month | No, a 14 day trial | 3 channels, 10 posts per channel |
| Content approval | On the Advanced plan | From the Growth plan | On the Team plan |
| Message inbox | Included | From the Growth plan | A comments inbox |
| Exportable reports | PDF and PPT from Starter | Custom analytics on Scale | Advanced analytics from Essentials |
| Looker Studio connector | On the Advanced plan | No | No |
| Billing currency | Euros | Dollars | Dollars |
That last row looks minor and is not. Metricool bills in euros and warns on its own page that the figures exclude VAT, the value added tax charged in Spain. Later prints that prices are billed in dollars and that applicable taxes are extra. Buffer publishes in dollars too. If you are comparing three annual budgets, two of them move with the exchange rate and the third does not.
What each one costs today
The three models are not comparable as printed, so here are the published rates first and the translation into one concrete case second.
| Tool and plan | What it includes | Per month, billed annually | Per month, billed monthly |
|---|---|---|---|
| Metricool Free | 1 brand | 0 € | 0 € |
| Metricool Starter | 5 brands | 16 € | 20 € |
| Metricool Starter | 10 brands | 29 € | 37 € |
| Metricool Advanced | 15 brands | 43 € | 54 € |
| Metricool Advanced | 50 brands | 130 € | 172 € |
| Later Starter | 1 set, 8 profiles, 1 user | 18.75 $ | 25 $ |
| Later Growth | 2 sets, 16 profiles, 2 users | 37.50 $ | 50 $ |
| Later Scale | 6 sets, 48 profiles, 4 users | 82.50 $ | 110 $ |
| Buffer Free | Up to 3 channels | 0 $ | 0 $ |
| Buffer Essentials | Per channel, 1 user | 5 $ | 5 $ |
| Buffer Team | Per channel, unlimited users | 10 $ | 10 $ |
Prices checked on 6 September 2026: Metricool, Later, Buffer.
Buffer prints the same figure in both columns because its year works out at twelve months minus two: 60 dollars per channel a year on Essentials and 120 on Team. Later advertises 25 % off for paying annually and Metricool lands around 24 %.
Now the translation. Five brands with three networks each, fifteen connected accounts, a team of two. Metricool Starter at five brands: 16 € a month paid annually. Later needs five sets, which is Growth plus three extra sets at 11.25 dollars each, 71.25 dollars a month, or Scale outright at 82.50. Buffer is fifteen channels at 5 dollars, 75 dollars a month on Essentials, and 150 if you want the approval flow that lives on Team.
Buffer's asterisk deserves saying out loud: its own page states that channels one to ten are priced at the standard rate and that channels above ten cost less per channel, without printing how much less. So 75 dollars is a ceiling rather than the exact figure, and the only way to get the real one is to put fifteen channels into the calculator on their page.
Metricool: the most measurement per euro
It is the only one of the three that charges per brand in published tiers all the way to fifty, and that is what explains its price advantage the moment you pass one account. Five brands cost the same whether you are two people or seven, because people are not in the formula.
What you buy with that is mostly measurement. The Starter plan already carries exportable PDF and PPT reports, analytics history with no cut off, and several link in bio pages. The step up to Advanced adds three things an agency cares about: the post approval system, customisable report templates, and the Looker Studio connector, which is the door through which its analytics enter a dashboard you have already built.
The free plan is real rather than a trial: one brand, twenty posts a month and thirty days of analytics history. It is too little to work in and enough to decide whether you like the tool, which is exactly what a free plan is for.
Later: planning by looking at the grid
Later sells sets of profiles, and a set is one profile on each network it supports: Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Threads, YouTube, Pinterest, LinkedIn and Snapchat. Eight profiles to a set. If your brand only posts on two of them you still pay for the whole set, and that is the pricing trap for small accounts.
In exchange, it is the one that understands visual content best. Grid planning, user generated content collection and best times per profile are its ground, and it shows in accounts where the decision to publish is taken by somebody looking at how the whole profile reads.
Two limits are worth knowing before you sign. The first is volume: Starter allows 30 posts per profile per month, Growth raises it to 180, and only Scale is unlimited, so an account posting daily across several networks hits the ceiling sooner than it expects. The second is that the social inbox and approvals, both internal and with an outside stakeholder who has no Later account, begin at Growth. On Starter they do not exist.
Buffer: per channel, and deliberately smaller
Buffer is the most honest of the three about what it does not do. It schedules, publishes, stores ideas and measures, with a comments inbox and little else. That restraint is its argument and also its limit.
Per channel pricing is the fairest model in the world when you have few channels and the most expensive when you have many. Three channels free forever is hard to beat for somebody starting out. Fifteen channels at full rate put Buffer above a Metricool that also measures more. And if you need somebody to approve before publishing, the approval flow lives on the Team plan, which doubles the price per channel although it throws in unlimited team members.
The free plan has one detail that reads badly: the ten scheduled posts per channel are not ten a month, they are ten in the queue at once, refilling as they go out. For an account planning two weeks ahead that can be enough; for one loading a whole month on a Sunday, it is not.
Everything in this article happens in one place in GoFeed.
Try it freeWhich team picks which
A creator running their own account across two or three networks does well to start on Buffer. Three channels free, and when those run out, five dollars a channel is the gentlest progression of the three. If they also want serious analytics without moving up a tier, Metricool Free and then Starter gives more for less, at the cost of an interface that asks for a longer sitting before it makes sense.
A brand with a shop and heavily visual content is the Later case, especially when publishing volume is moderate and the person deciding works by looking at the profile. Moving to Growth becomes close to compulsory the moment a second person joins, because that is where comments on the piece and approval appear.
An agency with clients is where all three fall short in the same place. None of them has somewhere a client signs into with their own account to see what is about to be published, approve it, and leave that on the record. Metricool comes closest on coverage, reporting and price per brand, and its Advanced plan carries post approval inside the team. When what you need is the client's door, and behind it the quote and the invoice, the conversation moves to a different category of tool, and GoFeed is one of the products that live there. The head to head with the closest of these three is in GoFeed compared with Metricool.
How to check this yourself six months from now
All three move their rates several times a year, so what is worth keeping from this article is the method rather than the figures. Translate the three into a single unit, which is what you would pay a month at today's number of brands, people and connected accounts. Then run it again at double the brands, because the point where the per channel model crosses the per brand model is the real decision.
After that, add what the table does not carry: the VAT none of the three includes in the printed price, and the exchange rate on the two that bill in dollars. If you are reading this because the scheduling subscription is not the only one you pay, the full reckoning is in what a social media stack costs, which adds four tools rather than one.
And if the exercise leaves you feeling that none of the three fits, the problem is the category rather than the rate. The longer lists, sorted by case, are in the Metricool alternatives and the Buffer alternatives.