Postiz vs Mixpost (2026): The Free Tier Difference Nobody Mentions
- Both are self-hostable open-source schedulers, but they monetize in opposite directions: Postiz sells a cloud subscription, Mixpost sells a one-time self-hosted license.
- The decisive detail: Mixpost Lite (the free edition) supports Facebook Pages, X and Mastodon only. Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, YouTube and Threads sit behind the $299 Pro license.
- Postiz says there is currently no feature difference between its hosted and self-hosted versions, which makes "free" mean something quite different there.
- Neither one solves the part that actually eats your week: producing different content for each account. They move finished posts; they do not make them.
You have probably already read five comparison posts that list the same feature checkboxes. Here is the one line that decides this for most people, and it is usually buried in a footnote:
Mixpost's free edition cannot post to Instagram or TikTok. Mixpost Lite supports Facebook Pages, X and Mastodon. Everything else — Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, TikTok, Pinterest, Threads, Bluesky, Google Business — is in Pro, which is a $299 one-time license (verified on mixpost.app/pricing, 2026-08-30).
If your whole reason for looking at self-hosted tools was "I want to schedule Reels and TikToks without paying a subscription," that sentence just ended your evaluation. Read on for what to do about it.
They are open source in two completely different business shapes
| Postiz | Mixpost | |
|---|---|---|
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Lite is free/open source; Pro and Enterprise are paid licenses |
| Free self-host covers | Same features as hosted (per their docs) | Facebook Pages, X, Mastodon only |
| Paid model | Cloud subscription $29–$99/mo | One-time license: $299 Pro / $1,199 Enterprise |
| Channels on paid | 5 / 10 / 30 / 100 by tier | Unlimited accounts and team members |
| GitHub traction | ~35.3k stars | Smaller, Laravel-based |
(Pricing and tiers verified on the vendors' own pages, 2026-08-30. Both change these; check before you commit.)
Postiz gives away the software and sells the hosting. Mixpost gives away part of the software and sells the rest. Neither is wrong — but they hand you the bill at different moments.
The math flips depending on how long you plan to run this
Run the numbers on your own horizon instead of trusting either landing page:
- Postiz cloud, Standard tier: $29/mo = $348/year, for 5 channels.
- Mixpost Pro: $299 once, unlimited accounts — but you also pay for the server, and Pro includes one year of updates.
- Postiz self-hosted: $0 in license, you pay for the server.
If you are running 3 accounts for 6 months, the subscription wins on effort. If you are running 20 accounts indefinitely and you already have a VPS, the one-time license wins on money. The crossover is somewhere around a year — and most people underestimate how long they will keep doing this.
The cost neither page shows you: platform API approvals
This is the part that turns a weekend project into a month. When you self-host either tool, you are not using the vendor's platform integrations — you are using your own. That means registering your own developer app with each network and getting it approved for the permissions you need.
Practically:
- Instagram and Facebook publishing goes through Meta's Graph API with app review, business verification, and Professional-account requirements on the target accounts.
- TikTok's content posting API has its own developer application and audit.
- X's API access has been repriced repeatedly and the free tier is extremely thin.
None of this is the tool's fault. But it means "free and self-hosted" describes the software, not the capability. Budget days, not hours. We wrote about the same trap in open source social media automation tools and n8n social media automation limitations.
What both of them are, and what neither of them is
Postiz and Mixpost are distribution tools. You give them a finished post; they put it in a queue and fire it at the right time across accounts. That is genuinely useful and they both do it well.
What they do not do is make the posts different from each other. If you run 8 accounts and you paste the same caption into all 8, a scheduler will happily deliver identical content to 8 places, which is exactly the pattern platforms are best at spotting.
That gap is where a different category of tool lives. NoobClaw is a desktop app that runs on your own machine: you log into your own accounts in local fingerprint-isolated browser profiles (no passwords handed over), and each account generates its own content from its own niche, persona and keywords — rather than one caption fanned out N ways. It is not a cheaper Postiz; it solves the step before scheduling. Compare against Blotato vs Buffer if you want to see the same distinction in the SaaS lane.
FAQ
Is Mixpost really free?
Mixpost Lite is free and open source, but it supports Facebook Pages, X and Mastodon only. Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest and Threads require the $299 Pro license. That is the single most important fact in this comparison.
Does self-hosting Postiz lose any features?
Postiz's documentation states there is currently no difference between the hosted and self-hosted versions. What you do take on is the server, the upgrades, and your own platform API credentials.
Which one should a solo creator pick?
If you want to stop thinking about infrastructure, Postiz's cloud tier. If you enjoy running your own server and you need many accounts long-term, Mixpost Pro's one-time license usually costs less over years. If your bottleneck is writing enough different posts, neither one addresses it.
The one thing to do today
Before you install anything, write down every network you actually need to publish to. Then check that list against Mixpost Lite's three supported networks. If more than one of your networks is missing, the "free" option was never on the table — and you can skip straight to comparing paid prices.
Related: Buffer alternatives beyond scheduling, manage multiple social media accounts free.