Social media: guides & tutorials

The best overall Buffer alternative is Publer. It is the closest like-for-like tool, it has a permanent free plan, and it adds bulk CSV import and recycling that Buffer lacks. Pallyy is the one that changes the billing unit, charging per brand rather than per connected account. SocialPilot is the best value above five accounts. Metricool is the best free option if you run a single brand. SocialBee is the only serious choice for evergreen recycling.

Hootsuite and Sprout Social are here too, but they are enterprise tools now, at $99 and $99+ per seat per month, with no free tier. They are not alternatives to Buffer for most people reading this.

Before you migrate: Buffer's pricing changed in November 2025 →

Buffer is the best social media scheduler for one to eight channels run by one or two people. The interface is the clearest in the category, the free plan is genuinely usable, and Essentials at $6 per channel per month is cheap. There is no bulk import, no evergreen recycling and no social listening, and it is not the cheapest option past roughly five accounts.

Rated 4.3 / 5 for creators and small teams. Lower if you are an agency running high-volume calendars.

Buffer costs $0 for 3 channels, $6 per channel per month on Essentials, or $12 per channel per month on Team. Annual billing drops those to $5 and $10 by giving you two months free. Above 10 channels the per-channel rate falls to $4, then $3, then $1-$2.

There is no Agency plan any more. Buffer retired it in the November 2025 pricing change and folded its features into Team.

Open Buffer's free plan: 3 channels, no credit card →

Buffer bills per channel from $6 a month. Hootsuite bills per seat from $99 a month. For a single operator running 10 or fewer accounts, Buffer is always cheaper: $60 a month at its worst against Hootsuite's $99 floor. Hootsuite only becomes the cheaper option past roughly 50 channels on one seat.

Buffer has a permanent free plan. Hootsuite has none. Hootsuite has social listening, paid-plus-organic reporting and multi-stage approvals. Buffer has none of those.

Buffer's free plan gives you 3 channels, 10 scheduled posts per channel at a time, unlimited AI Assistant, the community inbox, 30 days of analytics history, 100 saved ideas and one API key. It is permanent, needs no credit card, and never expires.

That is a materially better free tier than it was a year ago. Buffer used to gate AI and the inbox behind Essentials. It no longer does.

Create a free Buffer account, no card required →

This is a hands-on, per-platform scraping walkthrough for Instagram, Twitter/X, TikTok, and Reddit. For each network you get exactly what fields you can pull from public data, the platform-specific block risks and rate limits, and how Apify scrapers compare to the official APIs. For the full evergreen overview of social media analytics with Apify (use cases, the brand monitoring stack, and a normalized schema), see the social media analytics use case.

Quick answer: Apify can scrape public data from all major social platforms: Instagram, TikTok, Twitter/X, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Reddit. Each platform has dedicated Store Actors that export JSON/CSV (and often Excel) from the run console—no custom scraper required for most workflows.

Social networks are among the hardest sites on the web: aggressive rate limits, bot detection, and frequent UI/API changes. For most teams, the practical path is not to maintain bespoke headless farms, but to run maintained Actors from the Apify Store, optionally paired with rotating residential proxies when targets demand ISP-like traffic.

This guide maps what public data you can realistically collect, where to find Actors, a comparison table of platform scrapers, infrastructure notes (proxies, fingerprints), and legal/compliance guardrails.

Instagram maintains one of the most heavily fortified frontend architectures in the industry. Meta's anti-bot systems analyze IP reputation, browser session fingerprints, request velocity, and account behavioral patterns to detect and block scraping tools. Using standard datacenter proxies on Instagram typically results in immediate IP bans.

This guide details the appropriate proxy infrastructure required for Instagram data collection, examining the top providers for platform-specific proxies, and methodologies for extracting public Instagram data reliably.

Instagram is a heavily protected ecosystem. Teams still need public metrics like follower counts, reel velocity, and comment signals for influencer vetting, but automated collection is actively restricted.

Running an Instagram extraction workflow in 2026 means understanding SPA behavior, GraphQL/mobile endpoints, and IP reputation controls.

This guide outlines common failure modes in basic scripts and shows a more durable path using the Apify Platform.

Manual social listening breaks down as soon as you care about more than one platform or more than a handful of keywords. Automation means scheduled Apify Actor runs that pull fresh public data on a cadence you control, normalize it, and push it into sheets, a warehouse, a CRM, or an alert channel.

This guide focuses on what to monitor, which Store Actors fit, how to wire schedules and workflows, and how to set up alerts without building everything from scratch. For the full evergreen overview of social media analytics with Apify, see the social media analytics use case.