18 Best Social Media Scheduling Tools (2024 Comparison)

Best Social Media Scheduling Tools

What are the best social media scheduling tools on the market?

We wanted to find out, so we tested out all of the leading social media schedulers to see what they had to offer, then picked out our favorites.

Below, you’ll find everything you need to know about each of our top picks, including their key features, pros and cons, pricing options, and more.

The best social media scheduling tools – comparison

TL;DR:

  1. SocialBee – Best social media scheduler overall.
  2. Sendible – Best all-in-one tool with scheduling.
  3. Pallyy – Best for content creators.
  4. Metricool – Affordable + great free plan.

#1 – SocialBee

SocialBee is our overall favorite social media scheduler. It’s way ahead of the curve when it comes to AI and comes with intelligent scheduling features that can save you dozens of hours every month.

SocialBee Scheduling Homepage

With SocialBee, you can schedule posts to all the leading social networks months in advance, from one place. That includes Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, TikTok, YouTube, and Google Business Profile.

The most efficient way to schedule content on SocialBee is to set up Content Categories. These are essentially lists of specific types of posts that are queued up to get auto-published at your chosen times/days.

For example, you could set up a ‘curated’ content category, where you save posts featuring relevant 3rd party content, and a ‘promotional’ content category to store all your posts that promote products/services. Then, schedule each category separately.

Once you’ve created your content categories, you start filling them up with posts. To make it easier to create your posts, you can use SocialBee’s built-in AI writer and media integrations.  As long as you keep each category filled up with fresh content, you’ll never run out of social media posts to share.

You can re-queue your evergreen content so that it gets shared again later with the post-recycling feature. Or for time-sensitive posts, turn on post expiration to have SocialBee automatically delete them after a set amount of time or shares.

My favorite thing about SocialBee, though, is its Social Media Copilot. It’s a game-changing AI-powered tool that handles the whole scheduling process for you from start to finish.

All you have to do is answer some questions about your brand, audience, and goals, and the AI will do the rest. It’ll tell you what social platforms to focus on, create a categorized content plan, set up the posting schedule (using best posting time recommendations), and generate all your posts from scratch. It’s completely hands-off.

Aside from social media scheduling, SocialBee also comes with tools for other tools including engagement, social listening, and analytics.

Key features

  • Cross-platform scheduling: Schedule social media posts to all your profiles and pages on different platforms.
  • Content Categories: Organize your posts into groups by category, then create a separate publishing schedule for each category.
  • Automations: Automatically re-queue evergreen content, expire posts, and more.
  • AI tools: Use AI to create posts and generate your entire social media posting schedule from scratch.

Pros and cons

  • Can schedule posts to most social media platforms
  • Best-in-class AI scheduling features (the Social Media Copilot is particularly good)
  • Very feature-rich
  • Easy to use and affordable
  • Supports most popular social platforms including Threads.
  • You can only view one social media profile at a time in the content calendar

Pricing

Plans start from $29/month, save 16% with yearly billing. Get started with a 14-day free trial.

Read our SocialBee review.

#2 – Sendible

Sendible is the best social media scheduling tool if you want an all-in-one solution. It doesn’t just help with scheduling but also helps with inbox management, social media analytics/reporting, and more.

Sendible Scheduling Homepage

With Sendible, you can schedule posts to all the main social media networks: TikTok, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube. Plus, you can also schedule blog posts to WordPress, Medium, and Tumblr.

The easiest way to schedule posts with Sendible is to open up the Content Calendar, choose a date, create your post, and set a posting time. 

But if you want to save time, you can also use the ‘Smart Queues’ feature to automate the process. 

You don’t have to schedule posts individually with Smart Queues—you just create a recurring posting schedule and ‘queue up’ posts. Every week, Sendible will pull a new post from the queue and share it at the correct time slot to your chosen social media accounts.

One of the things I like most about Sendible is how its content calendar is populated by holiday hashtags—it makes it much easier to come up with post ideas. 

Likewise, RSS feeds, and content and trends suggestions also help you fill out your content calendar with post ideas when you’re struggling with writer’s block.

Key features

  • Content calendar: Create, schedule, and manage posts in an easy-to-use content calendar (with holidays).
  • Smart Queues: Automate the scheduling process by queuing up posts for publishing.
  • RSS feeds: Schedule social media content automatically whenever you publish a new post/video to a feed URL.
  • Set optimal time: Sendible can automatically set your posts to be published at the best time for your audience based on your historical data
  • Other social media tools: Analytics, monitoring and replying, reporting, assignments and approvals, etc.

Pros and cons

  • All-in-one solution that offers more than just social media scheduling
  • Schedule both social media and blog posts from the same place
  • Easy-to-use content calendar
  • Doesn’t include an AI writing assistant to help you create posts

Pricing

Plans start at $29/month, get 15% off with yearly billing. 14-day free trial available.

Read our Sendible review.

#3 – Pallyy

Pallyy is the best social media scheduling tool for content creators thanks to its ease of use and affordable pricing plans.

Pallyy Scheduling Homepage

With Pallyy, you can schedule posts to Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google Business, and TikTok from one place.

It’s particularly good for Instagram scheduling thanks to its visual planning grid feature, which lets you see how all your scheduled posts will look on your IG feed when they get published.

I also really like Pallyy’s content calendar. On the left, you have your media library, where you store all your images and videos.

You drag your media files from the library on the left onto dates in the calendar on the right to schedule them for posting, then add your captions and set your posting time. Or add them to a queue if you’ve created one.

To help make sure your posts get as many views and engagements as possible, Pallyy provides ‘best time to post’ recommendations. These are personalized to you based on your own audience and engagement data.

If you only need to schedule a few posts per week, Pallyy’s free plan might be enough. But if you want to schedule an unlimited number of posts, you’ll need to upgrade to Pallyy Premium. Fortunately, it’s very affordable.

Key features

  • Drag-and-drop scheduling calendar: Easily schedule social media posts by dragging and dropping media files onto dates in the calendar.
  • Planning grid: See how all your scheduled posts will look on your Instagram feed when they’re live, and rearrange them as needed.
  • Analytics: Track and analyze how your posts perform once they’re published with easy-to-understand insights and reports.
  • Social media inbox: View and manage all your comments, DMs, and mentions from multiple social media accounts in one place.

Pros and cons

  • Visual scheduling workflow
  • Incredibly easy to use
  • Very affordable for content creators
  • Plans only include one social set (you pay extra for each additional set), so it’s not as affordable if you manage lots of brands
  • No way to recycle old content

Pricing

Free plan available. Premium plans start from $25/month, and you can save 10% with yearly billing.

Read our Pallyy review.

#4 – ContentStudio

ContentStudio is the best social media scheduling tool for content marketers. It’s easy to use and has some outstanding content curation features.

ContentStudio Scheduling Homepage

The hardest part of social media scheduling is coming up with enough post ideas.

Fortunately, ContentStudio’s Discover tool makes this a lot easier. It’s a content curation tool that you can use to search for exciting, niche-relevant content from across the web.

I like how it’s seamlessly integrated in the post Composer. As you create your posts, you just click Assistant and can start searching the web for articles and videos. If you find something you want to share, drag and drop it onto the composer to add a link and CTA to your caption.

Another thing I like about ContentStudio is its pre-built automation recipes, which can help speed up the scheduling process. You can use them to do things like automatically schedule content from RSS feeds, recycle evergreen content, etc.

Aside from social media posts, you can also schedule and publish content to blog sites like WordPress, Tumblr, and Shopify. 

Key features

  • Cross-platform scheduling. Schedule and publish content to all your social media accounts, as well as to blog sites like WordPress, Tumblr, etc.
  • Hands-free smart scheduling. Use custom queue schedules and preset content categories to systematically publish content.
  • Discover: Search for and curate content that your social media audience will love from across the web.
  • Workspaces: Stay organized with separate workspaces for each of your social sets.
  • Other features: Best time to post suggestions, automation recipes, Canva integration, UTM tracking, saved hashtags, collaboration features, bulk scheduling (CSV uploads), AI writer, analytics, unified inbox, and more.

Pros and cons

  • Powerful automations to reduce the time you spend scheduling posts
  • Easy to use
  • Great UI
  • Higher learning curve for new users given the number of features

Pricing

Plans start at $25/month, get 20% off with yearly billing. Get started with a 14-day free trial.

#5 – Agorapulse

Agorapulse is a good option for social media managers. It comes with a powerful social media scheduling tool as well as a bunch of other useful features to help you better manage the social profiles of the brands you work with.

Agorapulse Scheduling

On Agorapulse, you can either schedule posts individually or automate the process with publishing queues. The latter is ideal for busy social media managers as it saves you a ton of time.

I really like the new Advocacy feature. It lets you share your scheduled posts directly with your advocates (i.e. your employees, team members, influencers, etc.) so they can help amplify your organic reach once they’re published.

If you’re working with a team, you’ll appreciate Agorapulse’s powerful, collaborative scheduling workflow. 

You can assign tasks to specific users, set up approval workflows, and use filters to keep track of where every post is in the process (e.g. draft, waiting to approve, scheduled, queued, published, etc.) However, you have to pay separately for each user, so it can get a little pricey for large teams.

Key features

  • Collaborative scheduling: Work with your team to plan, schedule, and publish posts. Set up approval workflows and track progress with status tags and filters.
  • Content queues: Save time on scheduling by creating automated weekly/daily publishing queues and filling them with posts.
  • Publishing calendar: Manage scheduled posts in an interactive, shared, drag-and-drop publishing calendar with four different view options.
  • Advocacy campaigns: Schedule advocacy campaigns alongside your social media posts to amplify reach and engagement.
  • Other tools: Take advantage of all of Agorapulse’s other social media tools, including social listening, reporting, inbox management, ROI analysis, and more.

Pros and cons

  • A great option for social media managers
  • Streamlined and efficient scheduling workflow
  • Rich collaboration features and approval workflows
  • Great user interface
  • Can’t schedule posts to niche platforms like Mastodon or Twitch
  • Expensive for teams

Pricing

Free plan available. Paid plans start from $69/month per user; save up to 30% with annual billing. Get started with a 30-day free trial.

Read our Agorapulse review.

#6 – Metricool

Metricool is an affordable social media scheduling tool with a great free plan. Use it to schedule posts to Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, TikTok, and more from one location.

Metricool Scheduling Homepage

You can sign up to Metricool for free without having to enter your credit card details, which is neat, and schedule up to 50 posts without spending anything. When you’re ready to upgrade, paid plans are very affordable and offer generous scheduling limits.

One thing I like about Metricool is its content calendar. It’s color-coded to show you the best times to post (i.e. when more of your audience is online), which is cool. Just keep in mind that the ‘best time to post’ feature requires a decent amount of data to be accurate.

Once you’ve chosen a date/time in the calendar, the next step is to select the platforms you want to post on at the top of the screen. You can schedule one post to multiple networks to save time.

One thing it’s not great at, though, is managing character limits. Twitter and TikTok have much smaller character limits than platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn, for example, and Metricool won’t automatically tailor your captions for each platform. 

As a workaround, you can create one post for Facebook/LinkedIn, duplicate it, then change the caption yourself and schedule the new version to Twitter/TikTok at the same time.

Metricool also provides some other useful time-saving scheduling features, including batch scheduling, autolists, and an AI caption generator.

Other tools you get with Metricool include competitor research, inbox management, analytics, ads management, and SmartLinks (a link in bio tool)

Key features

  • Color-coded content calendar: Schedule posts on an intuitive content calendar that shows you the best time to post.
  • Autolists: Organize your social media posts into autolists that can be scheduled periodically to save time.
  • Bulk scheduling: Schedule posts in bulk by uploading a CSV file, or generate up to 25 posts at once with AI.
  • Other tools: Analytics, competitor analysis, hashtag tracking, link in bio, unified inbox, ads management, and more.

Pros and cons

  • The ‘best times to post’ are visually represented in the content calendar
  • Integrates with most social media platforms
  • Generous free plan 
  • Time-saving tools like batch scheduling and autolists
  • Crossposting UX could be better
  • No unlimited scheduling on any plan (but generous limits)

Pricing

Get started with a free plan. Paid plans start from $22/month, and discounts are available with yearly billing.

Read our Metricool review.

#7 – Publer

Publer is another solid scheduler with all the features you need to manage your social media publishing effectively.

Publer Scheduling Homepage

There are four ways to schedule posts on Publer. There’s the regular scheduling option, where you just create a post and set the date/time you want to share it manually.

Then there’s auto-schedule, where you add new posts to a content queue, and posts in the queue are shared according to the posting schedule you set for each of your accounts.

There’s also the ‘recycle’ option, where you share one post multiple times on a schedule you choose, and the ‘recurring’ option, where you share one post periodically over time.

All scheduled posts can be managed in the content calendar. It’s drag-and-drop, so you can change post dates in seconds, which I found really useful.

Another thing I like about publer is that you can set it to auto-delete posts after a set amount of time, and auto-publish follow-up comments on your posts.

Other features include ‘best time to post’ suggestions, RSS feed scheduling, an AI writing assistant, content curation tools, analytics, and more.

Key features

  • Drag-and-drop calendar: View and manage your scheduled posts in a beginner-friendly content calendar.
  • Auto-schedule: Add new posts that you create to a content queue and share them periodically.
  • Post recycling: Reshare scheduled posts again at set intervals to get more value out of them.
  • Other tools: Best time to post recommendations, RSS feeds, AI writer, content curation, social media analytics, etc.

Pros and cons

  • All paid plans include unlimited scheduling
  • Great for evergreen content
  • Easy to use
  • Flexible pricing plans
  • Post recycling is only available on the Business plan and above
  • ‘Best time to post’ recommendations are only available in the Business plan and above

Pricing

Get started with the free plan. Paid plans start at $12/month, and you can get 20% off with annual billing. 7-day free trial available.

Read our Publer review.

#8 – Iconosquare

Iconosquare is another all-in-one platform with excellent social media scheduling capabilities. It has a great UI and can schedule most post types, including Reels and Stories.

Iconosquare Scheduling Homepage

Iconosquare’s schedule works for Instagram, Facebook, X, and LinkedIn. It’s super easy to use: Just head to the Publishing toolkit, then choose the platform you want to post to and hit Scheduler > New post.

Once you’ve created your post, choose the time/date you want to share it on. And if you want to share the same post on multiple platforms, click ‘crosspost’ and add more accounts.

You can view all the scheduled posts that are coming up in the calendar view, and preview what they’ll look like with the feed view. If you want to change the schedule, you can simply drag and drop scheduled posts to reorganize them, and the publishing times/days will be adjusted accordingly.

The content calendar can be shared with your team members and clients, and you can set up approval workflows for easy collaboration.

Aside from scheduling, Iconosquare also has lots of other useful tools for social media management, including some of the best analytics we’ve seen, plus social listening, inbox management, and more.

Key features

  • Shared content calendar: Collaborate with your team to create and schedule posts in an easy-to-use calendar.
  • Crosspost: Schedule your posts to multiple channels at the same time with the crossposting feature.
  • Other social media tools: Analytics, social listening, inbox management, etc.

Pros and cons

  • Great user interface
  • Easy-to-use scheduling tool
  • Feature-rich
  • Can’t schedule to Pinterest or YouTube
  • No free plan

Pricing

Plans start at $59/month and get up to 22% off with annual billing. 14-day free trial available.

Read our Iconosquare review.

#9 – Later

Later is a social media scheduling tool that offers deep integration with TikTok, Meta, and Pinterest. You can use it to auto-publish posts to all the most popular social platforms.

Later Homepage

One of my favorite things about Later is its visual planner tool. It lets you preview how your scheduled posts will look in your feed. You can rearrange them as needed in the live preview, then sync up your changes to your schedule.

I also like that it includes built-in design tools, so you can optimize the media you use in your posts for each platform you schedule them on. For example, if you need to change the dimensions of an image before you crosspost it, you can quickly crop and trim it.

The hashtag suggestion tool comes in super useful too. It suggests relevant hashtags for Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter posts while you’re creating them to help maximize reach.

Later also offers ‘best time to post’ recommendations but unfortunately, only for Instagram and TikTok. It doesn’t suggest posting times for other platforms like Facebook and X.

The other issue is that you can only schedule unlimited posts on the most expensive ‘Advanced’ plan. On other plans, you’re limited to either 30 or 150 posts per profile.

Key features

  • Social media scheduling: Auto-publish posts to all the leading social networks including Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Pinterest
  • Visual planner: See how your feed will look once your scheduled posts are published
  • Media library: Upload images and videos to your library ahead of time for easier scheduling
  • Mobile app: Schedule posts on the go from your mobile device, or stick with desktop.
  • Other tools: Hashtag suggestions, first comment scheduling (for Instagram), link in bio page builder, creator database, analytics.

Pros and cons

  • Easy to use
  • Supports most social media platforms
  • Great design and planning tools
  • ‘Best time to post’ suggestions are only for Instagram and TikTok
  • Unlimited scheduling is only included in the top-tier subscription plan

Pricing

Plans start at $25/month, get 2 months free with annual billing. Get started with a 14-day free trial.

#10 – Vista Social

Vista Social is an all-in-one platform with its own social media scheduling tool. It’s one of the few tools that can schedule posts to Reddit.

Aside from Reddit, Vista Social can also help you to create and schedule posts to all the usual social media platforms: Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, TikTok, YouTube, Pinterest, etc.

And it supports pretty much all types of content too, including Reels, video posts, image posts, carousels, and more.

Once you’ve connected your profiles, you can create posting schedules (publishing queues) for each of them, or just schedule posts manually one at a time. ‘Best time to post’ suggestions help ensure they go out at the optimal time for maximum engagement.

Speaking of engagement, Vista Social is one of the only tools I’ve tried that lets you schedule your first like. This actually comes in useful as liking a post gives it a quick engagement boost that can help get the ball rolling.

You can also schedule up to 10 post comments, which is particularly useful for creating Twitter/X threads.

I also like that Vista Social lets you search for trending user-generated content on social media, and schedule or repost it in one click. And if you’re reposting, Vista Social will automatically add credits in the caption box so you don’t have to worry about compliance.

Key features

  • Auto-publishing: Create and schedule posts to be auto-published to all your connected social media profiles
  • Best time to post: Ensure you schedule your posts at the perfect time with ‘best time to post’ suggestions.
  • Like and comment scheduling: Schedule your first like and up to 10 comments for a quick engagement boost
  • Other tools: Engagement, analytics, listening, review management, and more.

Pros and cons

  • Schedule most post types to all your favorite social media platforms
  • Includes some unique features like first like scheduling
  • Great mobile app
  • AI assistant allows you to create and schedule posts 10x quicker
  • Support could be better

Pricing

Free version available. Paid plans start from $15/month, and save up to 20% with yearly billing. Get started with a 14-day free trial.

#11 – Crowdfire

Crowdfire can schedule posts to Facebook Pages, Instagram, X, LinkedIn, and Pinterest, and automatically tailor them for each network.

Crowdfire Scheduling Homepage

Crowdfire shares a lot of the same scheduling features as the other tools we’ve looked at. It offers ‘best time to post’ suggestions to help you plan your schedule, a calendar view, post previews, etc.

My favorite feature, though, is its Queue Meter. This is a unique feature that I haven’t seen anywhere else. It tells you how many posts you still need to schedule each week in order to meet the optimal posting frequency on each of your connected accounts.

Another thing that makes Crowdfire stand out is its focus on content curation. You just enter the topics you’re interested in and Crowdfire will serve up suggestions from across the web, which you can then use in your posts to help fill out your schedule.

Key features

  • Social media scheduling: Schedule posts to Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
  • Queue Meter: See your progress toward your publishing goals and find out how many posts you still need to schedule each week.
  • Content curation: Quickly and easily discover trending content to share in your social media posts
  • Other tools: Analytics, mention monitoring, unified inbox, etc.

Pros and cons

  • Easy scheduling to most social media platforms
  • The Queue Meter helps make sure you’ve always scheduled enough posts
  • Unlimited content curation on all plans
  • You can only schedule 10, 100, or 800 posts per account depending on the plan you sign up for
  • Calendar view and bulk scheduling are only available to Premium and VIP users.
  • Can’t directly publish to TikTok (relies on push notifications)

Pricing

Get started with the free plan. Paid plans start at $9.99/month, save 25% with annual billing.

#12 – PromoRepublic

PromoRepublic is an all-in-one local marketing platform that comes with a built-in social media scheduler, as well as lots of other useful tools.

PromoRepublic Scheduling Homepage

It integrates with Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, X, and Google Business Profile. So you can schedule posts to multiple platforms from one place.

I like that PromoRepublic comes with a drag-and-drop Graphics Editor, as well as 6,000+ editable social media templates. This makes it a lot easier to create media for your posts.

Their ‘smart time slots’ feature is also useful; it shows you the best times to post for maximum engagement. Other useful scheduling features include post recycling, automatic link shortening, post idea generation, and automatic content screening. 

Aside from the scheduling features, PromoRepublic comes with other social media tools including a unified engagement inbox, post boosting (paid campaigns), social listening, etc.

On top of that, it also comes with tools to help local businesses with their wider digital marketing strategy, including review management, listing management, and local SEO tools.

Key features

  • Social media scheduler: Schedule posts to be published to all your connected social media accounts
  • Design tools: Create graphics for your social media posts with the help of the drag-and-drop editor and a huge template library.
  • Advanced scheduling features: Post recycling, content screening, link shortening, and more
  • Other marketing tools: Unified social inbox, post boosting, social listening, review management, listing management, and local SEO.

Pros and cons

  • Lots of design tools to help you create posts
  • Easy post scheduling
  • Supports most networks
  • Great for local businesses
  • Bloated with additional features you might not need
  • It’s focused more on local businesses than social media managers and creators

Pricing

Plans start from $59/month, and save up to 25% with yearly billing. Get started with a 14-day free trial.

Read our PromoRepublic review.

#13 – Missinglettr

Missinglettr is the best tool for scheduling branded social media content. It’s a great choice for bloggers and content creators who want to promote their posts on social media automatically.

Missinglettr Scheduling Homepage

There are a couple of ways to schedule social media posts with Missinglettr. 

The first way is to schedule one-off posts like you would in any other tool: Create your post, choose the date and time you want it to go out, and hit schedule. Easy.

But a much better way is to use the Drip Campaigns tool to automatically create and schedule a whole year’s worth of social media posts in minutes, saving you hundreds of hours of work.

All you have to do is connect an RSS feed to your blog or YouTube channel so that Missinglettr can pull in your branded content. Then, whenever you publish a new post or video, Missinglettr will create a bunch of unique posts to promote it and schedule them over the next 12 months to constantly drive traffic.

It’s powered by AI, so it can analyze the context of the branded content to understand what it’s all about and write a relevant caption. It can even extract meaningful quotes and phrases and include them in the caption. Plus, it will pull images from the content to use in the social post, and add relevant hashtags to maximize reach.

Pretty cool, huh? But what if you don’t have your own blog or YouTube channel to create social posts from?

In that case, you can use the Curate feature to discover popular content in your niche and use it to create and schedule social posts automatically. 

Given how good of a tool Missinglettr is, I’m surprised at how affordable it is. You can schedule up to 50 posts for free, and up to 500 posts for under ten bucks a month.

Key features

  • Drip Campaigns: Automatically create and schedule a year’s worth of social media posts to promote your branded content
  • Curate: Discover and share popular content that’s guaranteed to resonate with your audience automatically
  • Interactive social media calendar: Schedule posts directly from the interactive social media calendar and add comments to your upcoming posts with the note-taking feature.

Pros and cons

  • Cutting-edge automated scheduling features
  • Can save you hundreds of hours of work every year
  • Perfect for bloggers and YouTubers who want an easy way to promote their content on social
  • Support could be better

Pricing

Free forever plan available. Paid plans start from $9/month and get your first 2 months free when you pay yearly.

Read our Missinglettr review.

#14 – Sprout Social

Sprout Social is a powerful all-in-one social media scheduling tool built for larger businesses. Its high price tag means it’s probably not the best choice for content creators and SMBs.

Sprout social Scheduling Homepage

The reason Sprout Social is so expensive is that it’s an all-in-one solution, so you’re paying for a lot of stuff you might not need, like a social CRM, advanced analytics and reporting, social listening tools, employee advocacy features, etc. 

Its social media scheduling and publishing tools are very good, but probably not good enough to justify the cost unless you want all the other bells and whistles too.

It supports most networks, so you can schedule posts to Facebook pages and groups, Instagram, Twitter/X, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, and TikTok from either desktop or the mobile app, up to 180 days in advance.

I like Sprout Social’s best time to post recommendations. As you schedule posts, you just click ‘Use Optimal Times’ and you’ll be shown a list of all the best time slots, ranked using a star-rating system based on how good they are. Suggestions are based on your past 16 weeks of posts, so it can take a while to gather enough data for it to be accurate. 

I also really like how scheduling in Sprout Social is seamlessly linked to some of the other features.

For example, you can use Sprout Social to create your own link-in-bio page too. Then, when you schedule a post to Instagram, add a link to it and it’ll be automatically added to your link-in-bio page too.

Key features

  • Advanced scheduling: Schedule social media posts to all your profiles, pages, and groups from desktop or mobile.
  • Collaboration features: Simplify team collaboration with an interactive content calendar, shared assets, user-level permissions, internal conversations, and publishing workflows. 
  • Optimal times: Get suggestions for the best times to post to help you plan your publishing schedule
  • Other tools: Link-in-bio page builder, customer relationship management (CRM), analytics and reporting, social media listening, and more.

Pros and cons

  • Schedule unlimited posts on all plans
  • Best-in-class scheduling and publishing tools
  • A true all-in-one solution with lots of features
  • Great for large businesses and agencies
  • Very expensive
  • Higher learning curve than some other scheduling tools

Pricing

Plans start at $249/month, save up to 25% with annual billing. Get started with a 30-day free trial.

Read our Sprout Social review.

#15 – Loomly

Loomly is another good social media scheduling tool for teams. It offers generous usage limits and great collaboration features.

Loomly Homepage

Loomly offers automated publishing for Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Google Business Profile, and TikTok. 

On top of that, it also offers manual publishing for Snapchat and other custom channels. Manual publishing means you can still schedule posts, but Loomly won’t actually share them for you—it’ll just send you a push notification reminding you to do so at the right time.

My favorite thing about Loomly is its structured calendar workflow, which works really well for teams. As you schedule posts, they can go through several stages: draft, pending approval, required edits, approved, scheduled, and published.

There’s also a commenting system to help you and your team communicate and offer feedback on posts, and an alerts system, which notifies you through email, Slack, or Microsoft Teams whenever someone in your team updates or comments on a piece of content.

You can create the posts that you schedule from scratch or generate them from RSS feeds. Loomly also provides information about holidays and date-related events to help you come up with post ideas and tips to help you optimize your posts for engagement

Key features

  • Automatic & manual publishing: Schedule posts to have Loomly publish them for you automatically or send you a push notification at the right time
  • Collaboration features: Easily collaborate with your team with well-organized approval workflows, notes and comments, alerts, and more.
  • Other tools: Post sponsoring (boosted posts), inbox management, analytics, media library, RSS feeds, etc.

Pros and cons

  • Great scheduling workflow for teams
  • Easy to use
  • The entry-level plan includes 2 users and 10 accounts
  • No free plan
  • Analytics could be better

Pricing

Plans start from $42/month, save 25% when you pay yearly. Get started with a 15-day free trial.

#16 – Buffer

Buffer is an easy-to-use social media scheduler that supports pretty much every social network and post type.

Buffer Homepage

It’s one of the only tools we’ve tried that lets you schedule content to Mastodon, as well as all the usual social networks (i.e. Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, TikTok, etc.) from one easy-to-use dashboard.

I also think Buffer has one of the best free plans out there. It’s one of the only ones that has no monthly or yearly scheduling limits. However, you can only schedule up to 10 posts per channel at one time, so if you need to post every day, you’ll probably need to upgrade to a paid plan.

The way you schedule content on Buffer is this: First, you open up the composer and create the post. Then, you select the platform you want to post it on by clicking the avatar at the top of the composer. You can select multiple platforms and customize the post for each network.

After that, you can either publish the post straight away, schedule it for later at a time/date you choose, save it as a draft, or add it to a queue. Posts in a queue are shared one by one each week/month according to your posting schedule.

Key features

  • Mobile scheduling: Schedule posts on the go from your smartphone with native iOS and Android apps, or just use the desktop version.
  • AI Assistant: Generate post ideas, rewrite social media copy, and more in a couple of clicks.
  • Content queues: Schedule posts one at a time or add them to a content queue to streamline your workflow.
  • Other tools: Social media analytics, engagement monitoring, and a link in bio page builder.

Pros and cons

  • Simple social media scheduling workflow
  • Clean UI for easy navigation
  • Very affordable plans
  • No curation tool to find trending content
  • Limited collaboration features make it harder to work as a team

Pricing

Get started with the free plan. Paid plans start at $6/month and get 2 months free with annual billing.

#17 – Hootsuite

Hootsuite is another powerful all-in-one platform with social media scheduling capabilities. It can schedule posts to Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok, YouTube, and Pinterest.

Hootsuite Scheduling Homepage

Hootsuite’s entry-level plan is pretty expensive, especially given that it only lets you add 10 social accounts and 1 user. That said, it does let you schedule unlimited posts.

Rather than scheduling posts for each social media platform one by one, you can schedule one post to multiple platforms at the same time and tailor the caption and posting time as needed, saving you a lot of time. 

If you want to speed up the scheduling process even more, you can use the bulk composer to create and schedule lots of posts at once. Then, you can view all your scheduled posts in Hootsuite’s social content calendar, and share it with your team for easy collaboration.

Hootsuite provides suggestions for the best time to post on each platform, as well as hashtag suggestions, to help make sure your posts reach as many people and generate as many engagements as possible.

Other useful features include Hootsuite’s content discovery streams (useful for finding content to share in your social posts), built-in editing software (great for quickly adjusting image dimensions for different platforms), stock photo library, and Canva integration.

Hootsuite also comes with other social media management tools including a centralized social media inbox, contact management, social listening, analytics & reporting tools, and more.

Bonus tip: Check out our roundup of Hootsuite alternatives to explore similar options.

Key features

  • Advanced scheduling: Schedule posts individually in the content calendar or in bulk through the bulk composer.
  • Post tailoring: Create variations of your posts and schedule them to different social media networks simultaneously.
  • Other tools: content curation, design tools, unified inbox, contact management, analytics and reporting, etc.

Pros and cons

  • Powerful social media scheduling capabilities
  • Very feature-rich
  • ‘Best time to post’ suggestions are accurate
  • Expensive starting price
  • Could be easier to use

Pricing

Plans start at $99/month, save 20% when you pay yearly. Get started with a 30-day free trial.

#18 – HubSpot Social

HubSpot Social is ideal for brands that need an entire solution to manage their business. From content to commerce, and everything in between. This includes a basic but effective social scheduling feature.

HubSpot Social

With Hubspot’s social media scheduling tool you can either schedule posts individually or automate the process with a calendar or by adding them to a campaign. The “add to campaign” option is a neat feature that you don’t see with many other tools.

With HubSpot you can schedule unlimited posts on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Twitter (now rebranded as X).

HubSpot has its own URL shortener so links you add to the scheduler will be shortened automatically.

You can’t add custom tracking parameters but they do add tracking parameters for you automatically. This is because the feature ties in with HubSpot’s other social analytics tools. Whilst some may view this as a limitation, I view it was being extremely convenient. It makes the reporting data a lot more useful.

Pinterest, YouTube, and some of the more niche social media platforms aren’t supported (as I write this). And the platform is missing some of the more advanced scheduling features included with specialist tools like SocialBee. So, definitely some limitations.

But the most important thing to note about HubSpot is that you really need to go all in on the entire platform to get the most of it. Although that’s the same for any other all-in-one tool. This makes it a better fit for larger businesses that need all of the tools on offer & justify the cost (it’s not cheap!)

Key features

  • Advanced scheduling: Schedule posts individually in the content calendar or in bulk through the bulk scheduling tool. Also save the posts as templates for later use.
  • Real-time analytics: View how your posts perform once they’re published with real-time analytics.
  • Collaboration features: simplify team collaboration with an interactive content calendar.
  • Optimal times: Get suggestions for the best times to post to help you plan your publishing schedule. These suggestions are based on how your previous posts perform.

Pros and cons

  • Schedule unlimited posts on most major social media platforms
  • Very easy to use once your social accounts are connected
  • You get access to a bunch of other HubSpot marketing tools
  • Excellent customer support
  • Overkill if you just need post scheduling
  • Crossposting UX could be better
  • Some scheduling functionality is quite basic
  • Can’t schedule to Pinterest or YouTube
  • Very expensive once the demo is over

Pricing

A free demo is available for HubSpot’s social media tools but plans vary greatly depending on your needs after that.

Frequently asked questions

Want to know more about the best social media scheduling tools and how they work? Here are the answers to some frequently asked questions on the topic.

Most social media scheduling tools are extremely easy to use and work just like a calendar app such as Google Calendar. However, Pallyy is particularly easy to use thanks to its visual calendar and it has a free option available.

Alternatively, you could opt for a tool like SocialBee or Sendible that uses content libraries and allows for easy post recycling.

Posting content to various social platforms using apps or websites can be time-consuming as you can only post one post at a time, and you’ll need to spend time logging in and out of social media accounts on different platforms.

With most social media scheduling tools, you can manage content and publishing for all your accounts from one dashboard, so you can save time and stay on track with your publishing schedule easily.

The short answer is no. According to CinchShare, whether you post directly from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. or you use a post scheduler, it won’t affect the number of views or how much engagement a post receives.

No. Although there are some myths circulating about this, Agorapulse ran tests and found that the engagement rates and number or likes were comparable whether they used a scheduler or posted directly through the Instagram app.

Final thoughts

That concludes our comparison of the best social media scheduling tools.

I’ve been using and testing these types of tools for more than a decade and the most important thing I’ve learned is that no single tool is best for everyone. Best for most, sure. But not everyone.

So, the right one for you will depend on your needs, budget, and the specific platforms you want to schedule posts on.

If you just plan on posting to Instagram, use one of these Instagram schedulers.

For help with other areas of social media, see our roundup of the best social media automation platforms. And to learn more about the state of social media marketing this year, take a look at these interesting statistics.


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