Metricool vs Later (2026): One Gives You Ten Brands for Less Than the Other Gives You One Set
- Metricool Starter (€16–20/month) covers 5–10 brands with unlimited publishing. Later Starter ($25/month) covers one social set — 8 profiles — capped at 30 posts each.
- Metricool's free tier is real: 1 brand, 20 posts a month, competitor tracking included. Later has no free tier at all.
- The catch on Metricool: its free plan excludes LinkedIn and X, and full X analytics sits on the top tier. Free plans cut whichever APIs cost the vendor most.
- Later is buying you visual planning, link-in-bio and creator collaboration. If you do not use those, you are paying a large premium for a scheduler.
These two get compared as peers, and on the pricing pages they are not close. That is the honest headline, and the rest of this article is about the two places where it stops being true.
Both pricing pages read on 1 September 2026.
The gap, stated plainly
Later (later.com/pricing) sells "social sets," where one set is 8 profiles:
- Starter $25/mo — 1 set (8 profiles), 1 user, 30 posts per profile per month
- Growth $50/mo — 2 sets (16 profiles), 2 users, 180 posts per profile per month
- Scale $110/mo — 6 sets (48 profiles), 4 users, unlimited posts
No free tier. 14-day trial.
Metricool (metricool.com/pricing) sells "brands":
- Free €0 — 1 brand, 20 posts/month, 5 competitor trackers, 30 days of analytics history, AI assistant included — but no LinkedIn and no X
- Starter €16–20/mo — 5–10 brands depending on quantity, unlimited publishing, 100 competitors, LinkedIn unlocked, X as an add-on, PDF/PPT reports, link-in-bio
- Advanced €43–67/mo — up to 50 brands, teams and client management, approval workflows, full X analytics, Looker Studio, API
Line the entry tiers up: Metricool Starter gives you five to ten brands with unlimited publishing for roughly what Later charges for one set with a 30-post-per-profile cap. There is no reading of those two pages where Later is the value play on volume.
The post cap is the buried line
Later's per-profile cap deserves its own paragraph because it is easy to skim past and it changes the arithmetic completely.
| $ / profile / month | Posts per profile | $ / post | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Later Starter | $3.13 | 30 | $0.104 |
| Later Growth | $3.13 | 180 | $0.017 |
Two Later tiers priced identically per profile differ six-fold per post. Any tool comparison that ranks by price-per-account is using a ruler the vendor chose.
Thirty posts per profile per month is about one a day. Metricool's Starter says "unlimited publishing" with no equivalent asterisk. If your operation posts more than daily on any account, Later Starter is not actually an option — it is a $50/month product wearing a $25 price tag.
The reason this line is easy to miss is that it is not where you look for a limit. Everyone reads the profile count, because that is the number the tier is named after. The post cap sits in the feature list, phrased as an allowance rather than a restriction, and it only becomes visible when you hit it — typically mid-month, on your busiest account, at the worst possible moment. The general habit worth forming: on any pricing page, find the second number before you compare the first one. Every vendor in this category has one, and it is never the one in the headline.
Where Metricool's cheapness stops
Two honest caveats, because a one-sided comparison is not worth reading.
The free tier's exclusions are not random. Metricool's free plan drops LinkedIn and X, and full X analytics only appears on Advanced. This is a pattern worth internalising across the whole market: free tiers cut the networks whose API access costs the vendor most, not the networks users want least. If LinkedIn or X is central to you, Metricool's free tier is not a trial of Metricool — it is a trial of a different product.
"Brand" and "profile" are not the same unit. A Metricool brand bundles that brand's connected networks, closer to a Later social set than to a single profile. So the fairest comparison is set-to-brand: Later Starter gives you one set; Metricool Starter gives you five to ten brands. The gap narrows from absurd to merely large — and it still points the same way.
And Metricool is an analytics product first. Competitor tracking, reporting, Looker Studio — that is what it sells, with scheduling attached. If you never open a report, you are paying for a reporting suite to press "publish." That is a smaller waste than paying a visual-planning premium you do not use, but it is the same category of mistake: buying a product for the one feature it treats as secondary.
There is also a range in Metricool's pricing that deserves a flag. Starter is listed as €16–20 and Advanced as €43–67, because the price moves with how many brands you take. That is unusual — most vendors give you a fixed price per tier and a fixed allowance — and it means you cannot compare Metricool to anything without deciding your brand count first. Quoted against Later's flat $25, "€16" is the best case and not necessarily yours.
Worth knowing on the other side too: both vendors bill annually at a discount (Later advertises 25% off with three months free; Metricool up to 24%), and both discounts are calculated on tiers you may not need for twelve months. An annual commitment on a tool you are still testing is the most common way people overpay in this category, and it has nothing to do with which tool they picked.
So when is Later the right call?
There is a real answer here, and it is not about price.
Later is a visual planning tool. Grid preview, so you can see what an Instagram feed will look like as a composition. A content calendar built for people who think in weeks of imagery. Link-in-bio. Creator and UGC collaboration workflows. If your job involves showing a client a planned feed before it goes live, that is a specific capability and Metricool is not a substitute for it.
If your job is "publish reliably across several accounts and understand what happened," Metricool does that for meaningfully less money and better analysis.
And if your bottleneck is neither — if it is producing enough genuinely different content to justify the accounts you already pay for — then both of these are the wrong shelf entirely. Schedulers assume you arrive with finished posts. NoobClaw works on the other half: local logins in isolated fingerprinted browser profiles, with each account generating from its own niche, persona and keyword set instead of receiving copies of one plan. Complementary problem, different bill.
FAQ
Is Metricool cheaper than Later?
Substantially, at every comparable point. Metricool Starter is €16–20 for 5–10 brands with unlimited publishing; Later Starter is $25 for one 8-profile set capped at 30 posts each. Metricool also has a permanent free tier and Later has none.
What does Later do that Metricool does not?
Visual feed planning (grid preview), a calendar designed around imagery, and creator/UGC collaboration workflows. These are genuine capabilities, not marketing — they are just narrow, and they only justify the premium if you actually use them.
Why does Metricool's free plan exclude LinkedIn and X?
Because those are among the most expensive APIs for a vendor to support. The general rule across this market: a free tier cuts whatever costs the vendor most, which is rarely what users need least. Check which networks a free plan excludes before you judge it generous.
Related: Buffer vs Metricool, Metricool vs Blotato, Buffer vs Later, Metricool free alternatives. Prices verified 1 September 2026 from vendor pricing pages and change frequently.