How Many Social Accounts Can You Connect To A Scheduler?

Account limits are the least advertised number in social media software. Feature pages talk about calendars and AI assistants; the account cap sits in a pricing-table footnote, phrased differently by every vendor, social accounts at Hootsuite, social profiles at Sprout, channels at Buffer, social sets at Later, connections elsewhere. They all mean roughly the same thing: one account on one platform counts as one.

That vocabulary fog is why the question keeps being asked in plain words. The real-world version usually looks like this: a company with six brands, one media manager, needing to post to six Instagram and six Facebook accounts. That is twelve connections, and whether it costs $25 or $300 a month depends entirely on which fine print you land in.

Run those twelve connections through the July 2026 pricing. On Buffer, twelve channels on Essentials cost about $68 a month ($58 on annual billing), one user only; approvals or a second user pushes it to the Team plan at roughly double. On Hootsuite, twelve accounts is past the Standard plan's cap of 10, so the honest price is Professional at $199 per seat per month, billed annually. On Sprout Social, twelve profiles is past the 5-profile tiers, so it is Professional at $299 per seat per month. On Later, six brands means six social sets, which is exactly the $110-a-month Scale plan.

On Maeve, twelve connections fit inside the Basic plan at $25 a month, which includes 20 connections across two workspaces, and if the manager wants each brand in its own workspace with approvals on top, the $99 Standard plan carries 50 connections across five workspaces and five team members. The spread on identical requirements runs from $25 to $299 a month, which is why counting connections before comparing tools is the single highest-leverage step in shopping for one.

Instagram adds two limits of its own that no scheduler can change. The app allows up to 5 accounts logged in at once, which is where phone-only multi-account management runs out. And scheduling tools can only connect Instagram professional accounts (business or creator), because Instagram's publishing API does not serve personal accounts, the same wall covered in can regular accounts schedule Instagram posts.

Past those, the practical constraint is workflow rather than count: six brands in one flat list gets chaotic, which is why tools built for multi-brand work separate accounts into workspaces or groups, keep each brand's media and tags in its own space, and let you filter the calendar to one brand at a time. The day-to-day of running several accounts without cross-posting accidents is its own topic, covered in how to manage multiple social media accounts.

Maeve's counting is deliberately boring: a connection is one account on one platform, the plan includes a number of them, and the price does not move when you use what is included. Basic at $25 a month includes 20 connections across two workspaces, which covers the six-Instagram-six-Facebook setup with room left over. Standard at $99 includes 50 connections, five workspaces, and five team members, plus internal approvals and client review. Premium removes the caps.

Workspaces are the part multi-brand managers end up caring about most: each brand or client gets its own calendar, media room, tags, and connected accounts, so brand six's Reel cannot be scheduled to brand two's account by a tired Thursday-afternoon click.

Maeve's Basic plan includes 20 connections for $25 a month, and Standard carries 50 across five workspaces with approvals included. The caps are on the pricing page, not in a footnote.