Buffer vs Later vs Metricool: three different billing units, not three prices

Quick verdict

Work out the shape of your accounts first, then look at the prices. Comparing $18.75 against $20 against $5 is meaningless when those figures buy a set of eight profiles, a bundle of five brands and a single connected account respectively.

Accounts, sets and brands are not the same unit

Most comparisons of these tools put the headline prices in a row and call it a cost comparison. That only works if the prices measure the same thing, and here they measure three different things.

Buffer charges per channel. Its help centre defines a channel as each social account you connect, and gives the example that a Facebook Page, a Facebook Group, an X profile, a LinkedIn Page and a LinkedIn Profile count as five channels. The price is per channel per month, so your bill is a straight multiplication of how many accounts you have connected.

Later charges per social set. Its pricing page describes a social set as including "one profile from each of Later's supported social platforms" — currently listed as Instagram, Facebook, Threads, Pinterest, TikTok, LinkedIn, YouTube and Snapchat, so eight profiles per set. The constraint that matters is stated in Later's own glossary: "A single Social Set can't contain more than one profile from the same social platform. For example, you can't have two Instagram profiles in one Social Set."

Metricool charges per brand. Its help documentation calls a brand "a magical folder where you group everything digital for a client, company, or project," and applies the identical restriction: "Each Brand can only have one profile per social network or platform." Two Instagram accounts means two brands.

So Later and Metricool sell the same unit under different names — a container holding one account per network — while Buffer sells the accounts themselves. That produces the single most useful fact on this page: Buffer is the only one of the three that charges you more for expanding to a platform you are not on yet. A creator posting only to Instagram who adds TikTok, YouTube and Pinterest watches Buffer's bill go from one channel to four; on Later and Metricool that expansion is free, because the new profiles drop into a container already paid for. The reverse is just as sharp — a second Instagram account costs Buffer only its per-channel rate, but forces an entire additional container on the other two.

What each one costs

Read off the vendors' own pricing pages and help documentation in September 2026.

Quotes read September 2026 from Buffer pricing and Buffer's pricing and features article, Later pricing and its social sets glossary, and Metricool pricing plus its brand documentation. Buffer discounts channels above the tenth; Later advertises 25% off plus three months free on annual billing; Metricool advertises up to 24% off annually.

The two numbers that decide it

You do not need to model plans to answer this. You need to count your accounts twice.

First, your total accounts — what Buffer charges for, one channel at a time. Second, the largest number of accounts you hold on any single platform — how many containers Later and Metricool will make you buy, since neither lets two profiles from the same network share one. Run four Instagram accounts and one TikTok, and your second number is four: four containers, with the TikTok account riding along free inside one of them.

Breadth is free on Later and Metricool and billed on Buffer. Depth is billed on all three, at wildly different rates. Here is what that does to four common setups, all on annual billing.

Our arithmetic on the vendors' published annual rates. Later's extra social sets are priced at $11.25/mo each on annual billing, shown on the Growth and Scale plans.

Two things stand out. The first is how badly Later handles depth: five accounts on one platform costs $71.25 a month there against $20 on Metricool, a 3.6x gap for a workload Metricool treats as ordinary. If you run the kind of operation described in our Instagram theme page blueprint, where the whole model is several accounts on one network, Later is close to the worst value available — and it is the tool most often recommended for Instagram.

The second is the comparison nobody makes. Later's entry plan and Metricool's entry plan sell the same unit at very different quantities. A social set and a brand both mean "one profile per network." Later gives you one for $18.75 a month; Metricool gives you five for $20 — five times the capacity for $1.25 more, invisible in any comparison that lines up plan prices or counts total profiles.

Buffer wins the small case outright: three accounts is a real free plan, not a trial, and at four or five accounts the per-channel rate stays competitive. It falls behind around eight or ten accounts, where paying individually stops making sense against a bundle.

Costs that are not in the plan price

Three things change the arithmetic above and none of them appear in a normal price comparison.

Metricool charges separately for X. Its help documentation states the X/Twitter add-on costs "€10/$10 per month per connected X/Twitter account," or $120 a year, effective July 13, 2026. Customers who already had add-ons active keep a grandfathered €5/$5 rate, but only "as long as you do not remove all of them" — remove every add-on and the old price is gone permanently. X is also excluded from the free plan entirely, along with LinkedIn. So if X is part of your posting mix, add $10 a month per X account to every Metricool figure in our table. Buffer treats X as an ordinary channel with no surcharge.

The post caps are on different denominators too. Buffer Free allows "10 scheduled posts per channel — refill anytime," which reads as a queue depth limit rather than a monthly quota; empty the queue and you can schedule ten more. Metricool Free is a genuine monthly ceiling at 20 posts. Later Starter allows 30 posts per profile per month, rising to 180 on Growth and unlimited on Scale. Listing "10 posts" against "20 posts" against "30 posts" as though they are comparable, as most roundups do, gets this backwards: Buffer's is the least restrictive of the three despite the smallest number.

Later has no free plan. Its pricing page offers a 14-day trial and nothing else, so the floor for trying Later properly is $18.75 a month annually or $25 monthly. Buffer and Metricool both still publish free tiers you can run indefinitely, and Buffer Free with three channels is the more usable of the two.

One thing that does not differ: all three publish approval workflows only on their upper plans — Buffer Team, Later Growth and above, Metricool Advanced. If a client needs to sign off on posts, no entry tier will do it.

What we could not confirm

Stated plainly rather than filled in with numbers we could not read at source.

• Metricool's monthly-billing prices. Its pricing page displayed one set of figures with matching annual totals ($20/mo and $240/yr, for instance), which indicates we were reading the annual rate. Third-party articles report a higher monthly rate of around $25 for the same 5-brand tier. We quote only the figures the page showed us; check the billing toggle for your own monthly price.
• Later's extra social set price on Starter. The $11.25/mo figure is shown against the Growth and Scale plans. Later's page does not state whether extra sets can be added to Starter at all, so our five-account and three-account rows build from Growth rather than assuming a cheaper Starter add-on. If Starter does accept add-ons, Later's cost in those rows would fall, though not far enough to change which tool wins.
• Buffer's volume discount above ten channels. Buffer's support article confirms channels above the tenth cost less, with figures given for the monthly rate. We could not reconcile the tiers cleanly across both plans and both billing periods, so every Buffer figure in our tables stays at ten channels or fewer, where the $60 per channel per year rate is unambiguous.
• Later's platform list. Its pricing page lists eight platforms per social set including Threads, YouTube and Snapchat, while its glossary still describes six and includes Twitter. The glossary appears out of date, so we use the pricing page's list. The load-bearing rule — one profile per platform per set — is identical on both.

Site-wide rule: a number we could not read at source does not get stated as a fact. The billing mechanics here are all quoted from vendor documentation and are the load-bearing part of this comparison.

Final recommendation

Do the counting before the shopping. Total accounts is what Buffer sells; containers is what Later and Metricool sell, and they price that same unit five times apart. Once you know both numbers the answer is usually immediate, and it will frequently disagree with the roundup that ranked these tools by feature list.

For most people building income from several accounts on one platform — theme pages, client work, multiple stores — Metricool's five-brand entry tier is the strongest value of the three, with the X add-on as the one line item that can quietly undo it. For a single brand spreading across many networks, Later's social set is the right shape and the cheapest way to buy it. For anyone with three accounts, Buffer Free costs nothing and there is no reason to pay yet.

A scheduler is only one line in the stack: what AI clipping costs covers the step before this one, and automating social media with Make covers what to do when a scheduler alone stops being enough.

A second caveat, September 2026: if the accounts you are bundling are Instagram theme pages, two of Meta's Spam clauses bear on the plan you buy. Meta prohibits "posting, sharing, engaging with content or creating accounts, Groups, Pages, Events or other assets, either manually or automatically, at very high frequencies" and publishes no figure for "very high" — so a queue sized to fill a five-brand tier is an undefined risk rather than a settled tactic. More decisively, Meta prohibits "selling, buying, or exchanging platform assets, such as accounts", which removes the resale exit that usually justifies running a portfolio of pages in the first place. See Instagram theme pages: what Meta actually allows.

One scheduling caveat, September 2026: if the Pins you are queuing carry affiliate links, volume is a policy question rather than a growth lever. Pinterest's commercial and branded content guidelines list "Creating affiliate Pins repetitively or in large volumes" among prohibited behaviours and tell marketers to use affiliate links "in moderation", and they also say affiliates should "operate only one Pinterest account" — which cuts against paying for extra brands or sets to run several Pinterest profiles. Scheduling ordinary Pins at volume is unaffected. See Pinterest affiliate rules: what is actually allowed.

Related reads: comparison hub, the Instagram theme page blueprint, the faceless TikTok product loop, and Zapier vs Make vs n8n task costs, which turns on the same kind of unit mismatch.