← Blog

Metricool vs Buffer: brands or channels, and which bill fits you

September 21, 2026

Metricool vs Buffer is decided by one number you already know: how many social accounts you manage, and whether they cluster into brands. Metricool bills per brand (one set of connected profiles), so ten accounts belonging to two clients cost the same as two accounts belonging to two clients. Buffer bills per channel (one connected account), so the same ten accounts cost ten times the per-channel price. Below a handful of accounts Buffer is usually cheaper; past that, Metricool’s brand bundling wins, and it stops being close. And if what actually sent you here was working out which hashtags to post under, that is a third job neither product does, which is worth knowing before you pay either.

Everything below about Metricool and Buffer was read from their own pricing and product pages in September 2026. Plans, prices and limits change; check their pages before you decide anything.

The short verdict

• Pick Buffer if you manage a small number of accounts and the calendar is the screen you live in. As of September 2026 its free plan covers up to 3 channels, and Essentials is $5/month per channel.
• Pick Metricool if you manage several brands or clients, or you want reporting and competitor analysis inside the same tool. Its free plan covers 1 brand at €0/month, and Starter is from €16/month for up to 5 brands.
• Do the arithmetic before the feature lists. Five clients with two accounts each is 10 Buffer channels ($50/month at the Essentials rate) against Metricool Starter at €29/month for up to 10 brands. The same portfolio, a very different bill.
• Both are free at the bottom, and the free plans are genuinely different shapes. Buffer’s free tier is three channels with a posting cap; Metricool’s is one brand with an analytics window.
• Neither one tells you which hashtags to use. Buffer saves and reuses tag groups; Metricool tracks tags after they are posted. Choosing them beforehand is a separate job.

What each product actually is, as of September 2026

Buffer is a publishing tool first. It bills by the channel (its pricing FAQ: “You’re billed per channel, so you only pay for the accounts you actually manage.”), and the whole product is organised around a queue: you connect channels, add posts, and they go out. Around that it has an AI assistant, a community inbox for replies, Insights for performance, a Start Page link-in-bio, and an API. Its FAQ is explicit about the unit: “A channel is one social account you connect to Buffer — a single Instagram profile, Facebook page, LinkedIn page, TikTok account, and so on.”

Metricool is a planner-and-analytics tool organised around a brand: one set of connected social profiles. Its own pricing page describes the free plan as managing 1 brand with all your brands’ social networks (except LinkedIn and Twitter), and its paid ladder is written in brand counts rather than account counts. Alongside the planner it sells Analytics, competitor analysis, PDF and PPT reports, a Looker Studio connector, Flows, an AI assistant and a Hashtag Tracker.

The practical difference: Buffer is a scheduler that scales by account. Metricool is a reporting suite that scales by portfolio. If your week is “publish twelve posts across three accounts”, the first is shaped like your week. If it is “publish for nine clients and send nine reports on Friday”, the second is.

Metricool vs Buffer on price, as of September 2026

The billing units are different, so read the unit row before the price row.

Metricool’s ladder is explicit about the brand counts inside each tier: Starter is €16/month for up to 5 brands and €29/month for up to 10; Advanced is €43/month for up to 15 brands, €69/month for up to 25, and €130 for up to 50, above which it is a Custom quote.

Buffer’s ladder has one rung and a multiplier: Essentials at $5/month per channel and Team at $10/month per channel, billed yearly at $60 and $120 per channel. Its FAQ adds a volume discount past ten: “channels 1–10 are priced at the standard rate, and any channels above 10 cost less per channel.” The same page notes its pricing was last updated in November 2025, and that nonprofits get 50% off.

Where the two curves cross is the whole decision. One Instagram account on Buffer Essentials is $5/month and on Metricool Starter is €16/month. Buffer wins easily. Five clients with two accounts each is 10 Buffer channels at the standard rate, against Metricool Starter’s €29/month for up to 10 brands, and Metricool wins by a distance. Work out your own crossing point with today’s numbers rather than trusting either side’s comparison page, including this one.

What you get on each free plan

Both free plans are real, not trials, and they are limited along different axes.

If you are one person with three accounts, Buffer’s free plan may be the entire answer, provided ten queued posts per channel is enough (a published post frees its slot again). If you want to see how you compare to five rivals, Metricool’s free plan does that and Buffer’s does not.

Features where they genuinely differ

Two details are worth pulling out because they change the bill rather than the experience. On Buffer, the hashtag manager is not a free feature: its comparison table lists Tags as 3 tags on Free and 250 tags on Essentials and Team, and lists “Hashtag manager”, described as “Save and reuse hashtags”, as Not included on Free. On Metricool, team process lives at the top of the ladder: role management, client management and the post approval system are Advanced features, from €43/month.

When to pick Metricool

• You manage brands, not accounts. Several clients, each with a few profiles, is the exact shape its pricing is built around.
• Reporting is a deliverable. If Friday means sending somebody a PDF, a tool that generates one is worth more than a cheaper tool that does not.
• You want to watch competitors. Up to 100 competitor profiles on Starter is a feature Buffer does not sell at any price.
• You want unlimited analytics history early. It arrives at Starter, so a quarter-over-quarter view costs €16/month rather than a per-channel multiple.

When to pick Buffer

• You have a handful of channels. Under about five accounts, per-channel pricing is simply cheaper, and the free tier may cover you outright.
• The queue is the product you want. Buffer is smaller on purpose, and a smaller tool you open daily beats a suite you use a tenth of.
• Your team needs approvals but not analytics. Team at $10/month per channel includes unlimited team members, access levels and approval workflows.
• You want to plug it into other things. API access on every tier, including free, plus Zapier, Make, n8n and IFTTT.

When neither is what you actually need

Here is the case where everything above is beside the point. You opened one of these tools, went looking for the hashtag screen, and found either a box that saves tags you already knew or a tracker that reports on tags after you posted them. Neither product answers the question you arrived with: which hashtags should I be posting under in the first place?

That is the job Hashtag Ninja is built for. You describe what you want to know in a sentence (which tags a niche really posts under, who is creating under a campaign tag, when those posts go up), and the planner returns a collection plan: the tags to pull, how many posts, over what window, what to look for, and the assumptions it made getting there. It states those assumptions out loud, which is the part you can disagree with and change. It is free and needs no account.

Be straight about what is open, because it decides whether this is for you today. As of October 2026 the planner is free, and turning a plan into the posts themselves, the numbers computed from them and the CSV behind them is open, on the 500 free rows a signed-in account gets every 30 days. Nothing takes payment yet, and the pricing page publishes what the paid tier will cost ($9/month for 10,000 rows) before it goes on sale rather than after. If you need more than 500 rows of finished report this month, keep using what you have.

How to switch, either direction

1. Export first. Both free tiers keep 30 days of analytics history, and leaving does not hand you back what falls outside that window. Pull your reports before you downgrade or cancel.
2. Count the unit, then run one month in parallel. A month on both is cheaper than a year on the wrong one, and the free tiers make the trial genuinely free on one side and 14 days on the other.
3. Rebuild the queue, not the history. Scheduled posts do not migrate between tools. Export or screenshot the calendar, then re-enter the next two weeks by hand.
4. Check network coverage before you commit. Metricool’s free plan excludes LinkedIn and Twitter/X; if either is central, that comparison has to happen on a paid tier.

What to do next

Most people comparing Metricool vs Buffer are not choosing between two philosophies. They are choosing a billing unit, and one of the two units matches the shape of their accounts much better than the other. Count the brands, count the channels, and the answer usually names itself. If you want more of this comparison, the Buffer alternative and Metricool alternative guides go further on each side, and Metricool vs Hootsuite covers the case where seats, not brands, are what you are being billed for.

Try Hashtag Ninja free →