Planoly vs Preview (2026): One Sells You Accounts, the Other Sells You Devices

Two schedulers, two price tags, one very tempting mistake: putting $14 and $12.50 next to each other and concluding that Preview is cheaper. It might be. But you cannot know that from those two numbers, because they are not counting the same thing — and neither one of them is counting accounts.

I pulled both pricing pages on 8 September 2026 before writing this, because vendor pages in this category move faster than anyone's spreadsheet. Everything below is from those two pages on that day.

The two price tags are measuring different objects

Planoly sells you a unit it calls a social set. Preview sells you a unit it calls a device, plus a bundle of unlocked features.

Read the last row again, because it is the whole comparison. Preview's paywall is auto-post itself. Not the number of networks, not the number of posts, not the number of accounts — the act of publishing without you tapping the button. On the free and Pro tiers you can plan a year of content and you will still be pushing every single post out by hand.

Planoly asks "how many brands do you run?" Preview asks "do you want the phone to do it, and on how many phones?" Those are not two answers to one question. They are two different questions.

The number that breaks the ranking: Planoly's sixth set is cheaper than its seventh

There is a rule of thumb in this category that holds almost everywhere: the price of an extra seat or account bought as an add-on is lower than the average price of the ones already inside your tier. It is how vendors keep you from tier-hopping.

Planoly Pro breaks it. Do the division:

• Pro is $47 for 6 social sets → $7.83 per set on average.
• An extra set on Pro costs $8.

The add-on is more expensive than the average of what you already bought. That is small in absolute terms — seventeen cents — but it tells you something structural: Planoly's Pro tier is priced as a destination, not as a base to extend from. If your real number is 8 or 10 brands, Planoly is quietly telling you it would rather you not do that here.

Preview has no equivalent lever at all, because it has no quantity to extend. You are either on the tier that auto-posts or you are not.

So which one is actually cheaper? It depends on where your scarcity lives

The useful question is not "which is cheaper" but "what is the thing I keep running out of?" In this category scarcity is put in one of three places, and vendors rarely say which one they picked:

• Scarcity in people — seat-based pricing. You pay per human who touches the calendar.
• Scarcity in content — post caps per account or per workspace. You pay per unit of output.
• Scarcity in capability — the feature itself is the paywall. You pay to turn a switch on.

Planoly is a hybrid of the first two with a bundle wrapper. Preview is the cleanest example of the third I have found: neither posts nor people are limited on the paid tier, and the thing being sold is the ability to publish unattended.

Which gives you a decision rule you can apply in about a minute:

1. One brand, three networks, you personally press publish anyway. Preview free is genuinely free and genuinely unlimited. Planoly has nothing to offer you here.
2. One brand, you want unattended publishing, you work from a laptop and a phone. Preview Premium at $12.50 with unlimited devices beats Planoly Starter at $14 with one social set — and it is not close, because Planoly's single set is also a single user.
3. Two to six brands, each with its own set of networks. This is Planoly's shape. $47 for six sets and six users is a real bundle. Preview's pricing page does not publish an account cap at all, which is a gap you should resolve at signup rather than assume in either direction.
4. More than ten accounts, differentiated content per account. Neither of these is priced or built for it. Both are visual planners with a publish button attached; at that scale the cost that eats you is not the subscription, it is the hour a day of copying a caption into six different apps.

Three things that are easy to get wrong when you compare these two

1. "Social set" is not "account." A set is a cross-platform bundle. If you file "1 set" into an account column in a spreadsheet you will understate Planoly's value by roughly the number of networks in a set. This is the single most common error in published comparison tables — including some that rank fifteen tools at once.

2. Preview's "unlimited posts" is real, and also less impressive than it sounds on the free tier. Unlimited planning with manual publishing is a content calendar with a really good preview grid. That is a legitimate product. It is not a scheduler.

3. Annual and monthly are not the same table. Planoly's annual-billed numbers ($14 / $24 / $47) are the ones everybody quotes; the month-to-month numbers ($16 / $28 / $55) are 14–17% higher. Preview quotes $6.67 and $12.50 as annual-billed monthly equivalents too. If you compare one vendor's annual price to another's monthly price you will be wrong by about the size of the difference you are trying to measure.

Where a matrix operator actually lands

Both of these tools assume a shape: one brand, one voice, a human curating a grid. That assumption is baked into the pricing — Planoly bundles networks per brand, Preview bundles devices per person.

If your shape is different — say eight or thirty accounts, each with its own niche and its own persona, each needing content that is not the same caption reposted — the pricing question stops being interesting, because neither tier structure has a row for it. What you run into instead is the thing that no scheduler prices: the content itself has to be different per account, or the platforms treat the set as one operation.

That is the gap NoobClaw was built into: it runs on your own machine, logs into your own accounts in isolated browser profiles, and generates content per account rather than fanning one post out to many. It is a different category from a visual planner, and for a single-brand creator a visual planner is very often the better answer. Know which shape you are before you compare price tags.

FAQ

Is Preview really free forever?

The free tier is a permanent tier, not a trial: 1 user, 1 device, and posts described on the pricing page as "As many as you want. There's no limit." What it does not include is auto-post. You plan in the app and publish manually. That is a genuine free product for a solo creator who is on their phone anyway.

Does Planoly have a free plan?

As of 8 September 2026 the pricing page advertises Starter, Growth and Pro, with no permanent free tier alongside them. If you see a "free Planoly" claim, check whether it is describing a trial. Trials and free tiers behave very differently once you have six weeks of content scheduled inside one.

Which one handles more social accounts?

Planoly publishes the number — 1, 2 or 6 social sets, extendable at $10 or $8 per set. Preview's pricing page does not publish an account cap at all; it publishes device and team-member limits instead. Do not read "no number published" as "unlimited." Read it as "ask before you commit," and confirm it inside the app for the networks you actually use.

Pricing verified from planoly.com/pricing and thepreviewapp.com/pricing on 8 September 2026. Both vendors change tiers without notice — re-check before you buy.

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