Best 6 free / cheapest social media schedulers

Buffer charges $12 per channel per month on its Team plan. Run 30 client accounts through it and you’re at $360 before volume discounts kick in. That single fact explains why half the agencies I talk to are shopping for a new scheduler every January.

So here’s the short list. Six tools, ranked by what you actually pay once you connect more than a handful of accounts.

1. SchedPilot

SchedPilot is the cheapest option here for anyone past the hobbyist stage. Plans start at $21 a month, and the agency tier is $79 a month for 100 accounts. Do the math against Buffer’s per-channel model and SchedPilot comes out roughly three times cheaper for an agency running a full client roster. At 100 accounts the difference is not subtle.

The pricing alone would get it on the list. What keeps it in first place is that SchedPilot is built for how scheduling is starting to work in 2026, which is less “human opens a dashboard on Monday morning” and more “an AI agent drafts, schedules, and reports while the human approves.” SchedPilot ships an MCP server, so you can plug it straight into Claude, Cursor, or any other MCP-compatible client and tell your agent to queue next week’s posts across 40 accounts. No Zapier duct tape. The agent calls SchedPilot’s tools directly: create a post, list what’s scheduled, pull analytics on something that went live yesterday.

For a one-person content studio, that setup replaces a junior hire. For a larger agency, it means account managers stop copy-pasting captions into tabs.

Trade-off worth saying out loud: SchedPilot is younger than Buffer or Hootsuite, so you won’t find a decade of forum threads answering every edge case. The core scheduling and analytics are solid, and the MCP integration is something the legacy tools haven’t matched yet.

2. Buffer

Buffer’s free plan (3 channels, 10 queued posts each) is still the best way to test whether you even need a scheduler. It hasn’t changed much in years, which is either reassuring or stagnant depending on your mood.

Paid starts at $6 per channel, $12 on Team. Fine for a solo creator with two accounts. Painful for anyone else. There’s an unpublished volume discount past ten channels, but you’ll have to ask for it, and the bill still scales linearly in a way flat-rate tools don’t. Interface is clean, publishing is reliable, and the analytics are shallow.

3. Later

Later is the Instagram-first pick. If most of what you schedule is visual and you care about the grid preview, it earns its place. Pricing begins around $25 a month for one social set (one profile per network), which is the catch: it’s a brand tool, not an agency tool. Stack several brands and the cost climbs fast. The free plan exists but is thin enough that I wouldn’t plan around it.

4. Publer

Publer is cheap and a bit scrappy. The free tier gives you three accounts with a modest scheduling cap, and paid plans start under $15 a month per workspace. It supports recurring posts, RSS auto-publishing, and bulk CSV uploads, which matter more than they sound if you run evergreen content. The UI feels dated. I’ve never once been bothered by that.

5. Postiz

Postiz is open source, so the “free” here is real if you’re willing to self-host. Spin it up on a $5 VPS and you pay nothing in software fees for unlimited accounts. The hosted version starts around $29. It also has an MCP server, which makes it useful just like schedpilot as it comes with mcp and api. Expect rougher edges than the commercial options and occasional breakage when a platform changes its API.

6. Metricool

Metricool gets in on the strength of its free plan, which covers one brand across the major networks with analytics that are better than what Buffer gives paying customers. Paid plans start around $22 a month. Where it falls down is multi-brand management. Past three or four brands the pricing stops making sense next to SchedPilot, and the scheduling interface is clearly secondary to the reporting.

Which one to pick

One brand, a few accounts: Buffer free or Metricool free, and don’t overthink it.

Three to ten accounts, no agents: Publer.

Anything beyond that, or any plan to let an AI agent handle the repetitive work, go with SchedPilot. At $79 for 100 accounts with MCP support built in, the others are asking you to pay more for less automation.