Jared JamesMost articles about free social media schedulers list tools, this one lists limits, because the caps are the entire difference between a free plan you can actually run a small account on and a trial that calls itself a free plan.
The list of real free tiers is shorter than the listicles suggest, and it shrinks most years. Hootsuite dropped its free plan back in 2023, Later never brought one back, Agorapulse quietly killed its free plan in 2026, and Crowdfire, a fixture of old free-tools roundups, shut its product down entirely in 2025. What's left splits into three groups: a handful of third-party tools with genuinely usable free tiers, the platforms' own free schedulers, and free-looking offers that are really trials.
The main comparison was checked against each tool's live pricing page or help docs in July 2026, and Fedica's plan was checked and added in August, because these numbers drift constantly and a comparison that was right last year will happily lie to you today. If you're reading this long after that date, trust the shape of the advice and re-check the exact numbers.
One disclosure up front: Maeve Social, whose site you're reading, has no free plan, it's a paid tool with a 3-day trial. This page isn't here to argue free tools are bad, it's here to tell you exactly what each free plan holds so you can pick one and get on with posting.
Every Free Scheduler Plan and Its Exact Limits
Here's the whole field in one table: the six third-party free tiers that exist, the two platform-native schedulers, and the self-hosted route. The original list was checked in July 2026 and Fedica's plan was added after a second pass in August.
| Tool | Accounts | Post limits | The big catch |
|---|---|---|---|
| Buffer Free | 3 channels, 1 user | 10 scheduled posts per channel at a time, refills as they publish | The 10-post queue per channel means weekly refilling; analytics history stops at 30 days |
| Fedica Free | 10 accounts, 1 per platform | 10 scheduled posts at a time across the account, refills as they publish | A strong X-and-Bluesky answer, but the shared 10-post queue needs refilling more often than Buffer's per-channel queues |
| Metricool Free | 1 brand, 1 user | 20 scheduled posts a month | No LinkedIn and no X on the free plan |
| Planable Free | 1 workspace, 4 social pages | 50 posts total, ever | It's a lifetime cap, not a monthly one, so it's really an extended trial with unlimited users |
| Planoly Free | 1 social set, 1 user | 10 uploads a month | Mobile app only, no desktop scheduling |
| Publer Free | 3 accounts, 1 user | 10 scheduled posts per account at a time, 25 drafts | No X accounts on free, and published posts vanish from your history after 24 hours |
| Meta Business Suite | Your Facebook Pages + Instagram | About 25 scheduled posts a day per account, 75 days ahead | Meta networks only, and the interface fights you when juggling multiple brands |
| TikTok Studio scheduler | 1 TikTok account | One video at a time, up to 10 days ahead | Desktop web only, no calendar view, Business and Creator accounts only |
| Postiz (self-hosted) | Unlimited | Unlimited | You run the server and you obtain your own platform API keys, which is real work |
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The Catches, Tool by Tool
The table gives you the caps; here's what they feel like in practice.
Free Tools for Scheduling Instagram Posts, With the Limitations
If Instagram is the account you care about, the honest ranking changes. Meta Business Suite is the strongest free Instagram scheduler because Meta runs it: posts, Reels, Stories, and carousels, scheduled up to 75 days out, with auto-publish that doesn't depend on a third party's API allowance. Its real limitation is workflow, one brand is fine, several gets clumsy, and there's no approval step, no notes, and nothing beyond Meta's networks.
Among the third-party free tiers, Buffer and Metricool both auto-publish to Instagram and both handle Reels; Buffer gives you more monthly volume (the queue refills) while Metricool's 20-a-month cap arrives faster than you'd think once Stories count against it. Planoly's free tier plans a grid nicely but only from the phone. The deeper Instagram-specific settings, like scheduling with product tags or collaborators, mostly sit behind paid plans or aren't supported by the APIs at all, which is covered in what settings are unavailable for scheduled Instagram posts.
The Free TikTok Scheduler Options
TikTok has a native answer: TikTok Studio on the web schedules videos free, up to 10 days ahead, one at a time, from a desktop browser, on Business and Creator accounts. Whether that's enough depends on how you batch; the 10-day horizon is the wall people hit, and the full detail is in is the TikTok native scheduler free.
For scheduling TikTok alongside other platforms, Buffer, Metricool, and Publer all include TikTok in their free tiers within the caps above, which makes a workable free stack: TikTok plus Instagram plus Facebook on Buffer's three free channels, topped up weekly. If TikTok is the main event and you want a calendar, drafts, and a longer horizon in one place, that's the job of a paid TikTok scheduler.
Looking for a Free Alternative to Later?
A steady stream of people search for exactly this, usually after discovering Later's free plan is long gone: Later starts at $25 a month (or $18.75 on annual) with a 30-posts-per-profile cap, and the trial lasts 14 days. The full plan-by-plan detail is on our Later pricing breakdown.
The free plans that cover Later's core ground: Planoly Free is the closest match for phone-based visual grid planning, Buffer Free is the better all-round scheduler across three channels, and Metricool Free adds the analytics Later charges for. And if what pushed you off Later was the pricing structure rather than the price, the Later alternative comparison walks through the paid options side by side.
No Free Plan, Whatever the Listicle Said
These tools show up in free-scheduler roundups and do not belong there, as of July 2026. Full plan-by-plan breakdowns for the two biggest names are on our Hootsuite pricing and Later pricing pages.
Self-Hosted: Free If Your Time Is
The other route to $0 a month is running an open source scheduler like Postiz or Mixpost Lite on your own server: unlimited accounts, unlimited posts, no tier games. The cost moves from money to effort, a VPS, a Docker Compose file, and crucially your own developer API keys for every platform, with the approval queues that entails. It's genuinely the best deal available for a technical person and a poor fit for everyone else, and the full honest breakdown is in our self-hosted schedulers guide.
When a Free Plan Stops Being Enough
Free tiers fail on predictable breakpoints rather than gradually: a fourth account when the cap is three, a teammate who needs a login, a client who wants to approve posts before they publish, a month where 20 posts wasn't enough, or the morning you needed analytics from six weeks ago and the history stopped at 30 days. Until one of those lands, use the free plans with a clear conscience, that's what they're for, and the arithmetic for deciding whether a subscription is worth it once one does, hours saved times your rate against the price, is worked through in how to justify the cost of social media tools.
When one does land, compare what the jump costs: Buffer and Publer scale per channel or account, and Buffer pricing, worked out shows where that lands; Metricool and Planoly go by plan tier; and the fuller workflow tools price in the workflow itself, like Sprout Social's per-seat pricing. Maeve Social sits in that last group, scheduling plus calendar, approvals, inbox, and reports, paid with a 3-day trial, and it's worth paying for only when those team and client breakpoints are the ones you've hit. If that breakpoint lands near November, the Black Friday deal tracker separates public offers from support quotes and compares the sale with the ordinary annual price. The broader field of free helpers beyond schedulers, templates, generators, and calculators, is covered in free social media management tools.
The honest summary: Buffer Free for general use, Fedica Free for X and Bluesky together, Metricool Free when analytics matter, Meta Business Suite for a Facebook-and-Instagram-only world, TikTok Studio for TikTok alone, Planable's 50 posts for trialing approvals, Planoly Free for phone-based grids, Publer Free for three non-X accounts, and self-hosting when the server is part of the fun. That's the entire real list as of August 2026; everything else in the roundups is a trial or a tool that no longer exists.
Free plans reward small, focused setups and punish growth, which is fair, that's the deal. Pick the one whose caps fit the account you actually run, note which breakpoint would force your hand, and don't pay for software until you've hit it.
Related tools
Outgrown the Free Tiers?
When the caps start costing you time, teammates, or a client's patience, Maeve Social covers scheduling, approvals, inbox, and reporting in one paid plan with a 3-day trial. Until then, the free plans above are the right answer, and we've told you exactly where their edges are.
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