Postiz vs Metricool (2026): "Free" Means Two Opposite Things Here
- Metricool free = 1 brand, 20 posts/month, and explicitly no LinkedIn and no Twitter/X. Postiz free = self-host it yourself, with the full feature set.
- Postiz cloud starts at $29/month for 5 channels and ships API + webhooks on every tier. Metricool gates API access behind its higher plans.
- The vendor-neutral rule: a free tier always cuts the networks the vendor pays the most for, not the ones users need least.
- Neither tool writes different content for different accounts — both take a post you already wrote and deliver it. That is a separate problem.
You are comparing these two because one of them has a free plan and the other one is open source, and both of those sound like "free." They are not the same kind of free, and picking the wrong one costs you a weekend.
Here is the short version before the details: Metricool's free plan is free to use but missing networks. Postiz is free to run but not free to operate. Everything below is downstream of that one sentence.
What each one actually is
Metricool is an analytics-first social media manager. Scheduling is there, but the reason people pick it is reporting depth, competitor tracking, and ad management in the same dashboard. It is a hosted SaaS product only.
Postiz is an open-source scheduler (AGPL-3.0, roughly 35.3k GitHub stars as of late August 2026) that also sells a cloud plan. Its unusual property is stated plainly in its own docs: "At the moment, there is no difference between the hosted version and the self-hosted version." That is genuinely rare — most open-core products ship a deliberately weaker community edition.
One of these tools sells you a dashboard. The other one sells you a shortcut around hosting it yourself. Know which purchase you are making.
Pricing, side by side
All figures checked against each vendor's own pricing page on 30 August 2026. Prices change — verify before you buy.
| Postiz | Metricool | |
|---|---|---|
| Free tier | None (7-day trial). Self-hosting is the free path. | Yes — 1 brand, 20 posts/month, 30 days of analytics history, 5 competitor trackers, AI assistant |
| Entry paid | $29/mo — 5 channels | €16–20/mo Starter — 5–10 brands |
| Mid | $39/mo — 10 channels · $49/mo — 30 channels | €43–67/mo Advanced — up to 50 brands |
| Top | $99/mo — 100 channels | Custom / white label |
| API + webhooks | Every tier | Higher tiers |
| Self-host | Yes, no licence fee | No |
The thing almost no comparison prints: what the free tier removes
Metricool's free plan is genuinely usable, and then you hit this: it does not include LinkedIn, and it does not include Twitter/X. X is an add-on even on Starter.
That is not an arbitrary cut. Look across the category and the same pattern holds — Mixpost's free Lite edition supports only Facebook Pages, X, and Mastodon, and puts Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, YouTube and Pinterest behind a $299 one-time Pro licence. The rule underneath is simple:
A free tier cuts the networks the vendor pays the most for, not the networks users want least.
So the correct way to evaluate any free plan is backwards from how everyone does it. Write your list of must-post networks first. Then go look at the free tier's supported list. Do it in the other order and you will spend a weekend setting up a tool that cannot post where you need to post.
Where the Postiz "free" gets expensive
Self-hosting Postiz costs no licence fee, and the server itself is cheap — it deploys to AWS, Azure, GCP, Railway, Hetzner, or Coolify. That part is real.
The bill arrives somewhere else: self-hosting means you personally have to obtain developer credentials for every platform you want to post to. In practice that means Meta app review plus business verification (and your target accounts must be Professional), TikTok's content posting API review, X API pricing that has moved repeatedly, and LinkedIn's posting scope approval.
"The software is free" and "the capability is free" are two different sentences, and only the first one gets said out loud. If self-hosting is what attracted you here, read our breakdown of what self-hosted Postiz actually costs before you provision anything — the server is the easy part.
Pick by your bottleneck, not by the feature grid
If you are also weighing Postiz against per-seat suites or flat bundles, we ran the same method in Postiz vs Hootsuite and Postiz vs Post Bridge — the billing units differ, the division habit is the same.
- You need reporting you can hand to a client. Metricool. Postiz has analytics, but reporting depth is the thing Metricool is actually built around.
- You need API access on a small budget. Postiz. It ships API and webhooks on every tier, including the $29 one. That is unusual and it is the strongest single argument for it.
- You must post to LinkedIn or X and you were counting on the free plan. Neither free path works. Metricool's free tier excludes both; Postiz self-hosted requires you to get through LinkedIn's and X's own approval processes.
- You run many accounts on one budget. Do the division: Postiz Pro is $49 for 30 channels, or about $1.63 per channel per month. Metricool prices per brand, which is a different unit — a "brand" bundles multiple networks, so the comparison is not apples to apples and anyone showing you a clean per-account table across both is glossing.
What neither of them does
This matters more than the pricing table if you run more than a couple of accounts. Both tools are distribution. You write a post; they deliver it on a schedule through platform APIs. Neither one produces different content for different accounts, and neither one behaves like a person on the platform.
If your actual problem is "I have twelve accounts and they all need their own content and their own posting rhythm," a scheduler does not solve it — you will just be scheduling the same post twelve times, which is the thing platforms are best at spotting. That is the gap NoobClaw was built for: accounts run locally in isolated browser profiles under your own logins, each generating its own content from its own niche and persona, on randomised human-like timing rather than a synchronised queue. It is one approach among several, and it does not replace an analytics dashboard — but it is a different category of problem, and worth separating in your head before you pick a scheduler. We also compared API-based versus browser-based automation if you want the trade-offs laid out.
FAQ
Is Postiz really free if I self-host it?
The licence is free (AGPL-3.0) and the docs state there is no feature difference from the hosted version. The cost moves to platform developer approvals, which you have to obtain yourself for each network. Budget time, not dollars.
Does Metricool's free plan include Instagram and TikTok?
The documented exclusions on the free plan are LinkedIn and Twitter/X. Because plan contents change, check the current supported-network list on Metricool's own pricing page against your must-post list before committing.
Which one is cheaper for 20+ accounts?
Postiz, on the published numbers — $49/month for 30 channels. But confirm the unit: Postiz counts channels, Metricool counts brands, and a brand contains several networks. Compare against your own account list, not against a per-unit average.
The one-line decision
Write down the networks you must post to. Then: if LinkedIn or X is on that list, no free path here works, and you are choosing between $29 and about €16–20. If they are not on the list, Metricool's free plan is a real option and costs you nothing to test this afternoon.
Do that before you read another feature grid. The grids all look the same; your network list is the thing that actually decides it.