Flick alternative: free and cheaper ways to pick Instagram hashtags
If you are looking for a Flick alternative, the honest answer depends on which part of Flick you actually use. If you pay for Flick mainly to find a starting set of hashtags for a niche, you can do that for free: with a hand-picked niche list, a free hashtag generator, or a planner that turns a one-sentence question into the tags worth checking. If you use Flick to track which of your hashtags drove reach on your own posts, and to schedule those posts, a free tool will not replace it, and you should stay.
This guide covers what Flick’s hashtag tool is for, who should keep it, and the alternatives worth trying, with what each one is genuinely better at. Details about other products are taken from their own websites as of September 2026; plans change, so check their pages before you decide.
The short verdict
- Stay with Flick if you want hashtag search, saved hashtag collections, per-post hashtag tracking, analytics reports and a post scheduler in one subscription.
- Try a free alternative if what you need is the list itself: which tags a niche posts under, and which ones are worth testing before you commit a month of posts to them.
- Use more than one if you are unsure. A free list tells you where to start; tracking on your own account tells you what worked. They answer different questions.
What Flick’s hashtag tool does
As of September 2026, Flick’s Instagram hashtag tool page describes the product as a way to “find, manage and analyze hashtags for Instagram”. Its feature list names:
- Hashtag Search: finding hashtags related to a topic.
- Hashtag Collections: saving groups of tags to reuse.
- Hashtag Tracking: seeing how the hashtags you used performed on your posts.
- Instagram Analytics Reports and an Instagram Feed Planner.
- A post scheduler, an AI social assistant for strategy and captions, and iOS and Android apps.
It is sold as a subscription, and the hashtag tool page offers a 7-day free trial with cancel-anytime terms. For current plan prices, go to Flick’s own pricing page: they vary by plan and by monthly or yearly billing.
That bundle is the point. Flick is built for someone who plans, publishes and reviews Instagram content in one place. If that is you, most of what follows is a way to do part of that job, not all of it.
Who should stay with Flick
Be straightforward with yourself about this before switching:
- You schedule posts and review their performance weekly. Flick’s tracking is tied to your own account and your own posts. No free list can tell you which tag brought your audience.
- You manage several accounts or clients. Saved collections and reports across accounts are workflow features, and rebuilding them from spreadsheets costs more time than the subscription.
- You like having one app on your phone for all of it. The mobile apps are part of what you are paying for.
If two of those describe you, switching to save the subscription will probably cost you more in time than it saves.
Who a Flick alternative suits better
- You only open Flick to find tags when you start a new content theme, then paste them into Instagram yourself.
- You are testing a niche and do not yet know whether it is worth a paid tool.
- You want to understand a hashtag before posting under it (who posts there, how busy it is, whether it is flooded with reposts) rather than a relevance score.
- You are a small business posting a few times a week, where a monthly subscription for hashtags alone is hard to justify.
Flick alternatives compared
| Feature | Flick | Hashtag Ninja | Inflact | Best-Hashtags.com | Instagram search |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cost to start | 7-day free trial, then paid | Free, no account | Free tools; paid plans | Free | Free |
| Find tags for a topic | Yes | Yes, niche lists and a planner | Yes, hashtag generator | Yes, related tags | Yes, one tag at a time |
| Tracks tags on your own posts | Yes | No | Not part of its hashtag generator | Not part of its hashtag tools | No |
| Scheduling | Yes | No | Not part of its hashtag tools | Not part of its hashtag tools | Native posting only |
| Explains why a tag is suggested | Tracking shows what worked afterwards | Yes, every plan states its reasoning and assumptions | Generated from your keywords | Says it uses historical data | No |
Here is what each one is better for.
Hashtag Ninja: for deciding which tags are worth checking
Hashtag Ninja is built around a question rather than a keyword. You describe what you want to know in a sentence (“which photography tags still carry real work rather than reposts and stock?”) and the free planner turns it into a research plan: up to five hashtags to look at, how many posts to pull from each, over what time window, and what to focus on (how busy each tag is, how engagement is spread, who posts most, which tags appear alongside it, when posts go up, and the mix of media). It also lists the assumptions it made about your question, so an underspecified brief does not come back as a confident answer.
For common niches there is a ready list: the hashtags by niche pages carry hand-picked tag sets you can copy in one click (for example Instagram hashtags for photography), each with a starting question you can plan from.
What it does not do today: track a tag continuously. Running the plan (collecting the posts, the written report and the CSV behind it) is open, on the 500 free rows a signed-in account gets every 30 days, and the pricing page says what more rows will cost. So it is a free way to decide what to look at and read the posts behind it, not a replacement for Flick’s tracking. It is the better fit if you want to think through a niche before you post, and you can try the planner here without signing up.
Inflact: for a quick generated tag set
As of September 2026, Inflact offers an Instagram hashtag generator that it describes as AI-based: enter keywords and it returns hashtags to use, alongside a hashtag trends page. Inflact’s pricing page says most of its tools are free, lists hashtag searches among its plan features, and shows paid plans at $34 per month and $59 per month, with a 7-day trial for $3.
It is better for speed: type a keyword, copy a set, move on. Inflact also covers profile analysis and influencer search, so it suits someone who wants a wider Instagram toolkit than tags alone.
Best-Hashtags.com: for related tags at no cost
Best-Hashtags.com lets you enter a hashtag and returns the best related ones, and says its suggestions are calculated from historical data. It also has a TikTok hashtags section. It is free and quick, and it is good for widening a list you already have: start with the one tag you know, and find the neighbours.
Instagram’s own search: for checking a single tag by eye
The simplest alternative costs nothing: search a hashtag inside Instagram and look at what is posted under it. It is slow for more than a few tags and gives you no numbers, but it is the most direct way to see whether a tag is full of the kind of post you make, or full of spam and giveaways.
How to replace Flick’s hashtag search without losing your tags
If you have decided a free route covers what you use, switch in this order so nothing gets lost:
- Export your collections first. Before your subscription ends, open each saved hashtag collection in Flick and copy the tags into a document or spreadsheet, one collection per column. This is the part that is painful to rebuild.
- Note which tags worked. If you have used hashtag tracking, write down the handful of tags that performed best on your posts. That history is specific to your account and no other tool will have it.
- Pick one free tool for new niches. Use a niche list or the planner when you start a new theme, and a generator when you only need to widen a list.
- Check a tag before committing to it. Look at what is actually posted under it (how busy it is, and whether the posts look like yours) before building a month of content around it.
- Review monthly, by hand. Without automatic tracking, compare your Instagram Insights for posts under different tag sets once a month. It is less convenient than Flick, which is the trade you are making.
Choosing: a simple rule
Ask what you would miss in the first week after cancelling.
- If the answer is “the list of tags”, a free alternative covers it.
- If the answer is “knowing which tags worked on my posts” or “scheduling”, keep Flick, or accept a manual monthly review in its place.
- If you are not sure which tags a niche uses at all, start from a question: describe the niche and what you want to find out, and let the plan tell you which tags are worth looking at. You can plan a brief for free, or browse the tools for the job closest to yours, such as Instagram hashtag research.
Flick, Inflact, Best-Hashtags.com and Instagram are named here only to describe what each product is; each name belongs to its owner. Hashtag Ninja is not affiliated with or endorsed by Flick, Inflact, Best-Hashtags.com or Instagram.