RecurPost vs Metricool (2026): You Are Comparing a Posting Allowance to a Reporting Suite
- RecurPost: $9 / $25 / $79 for 2 / 5 / 20 accounts, with a hidden cap of 10 / 20 / 80 posts per account per day.
- Metricool: free (1 brand, 20 posts/month), €16–20 Starter (5–10 brands), €43–67 Advanced (up to 50 brands). Cost per brand at the top tier is roughly €1.
- The per-unit prices are not comparable because the units are not comparable — Metricool's brand is a reporting object, RecurPost's account is a publishing slot.
- Metricool's free tier excludes LinkedIn and X. That is the third confirmed instance of a pattern: free tiers drop the networks that cost the vendor most in API access, not the ones users want least.
Put these two pricing pages side by side and Metricool looks roughly four times cheaper per account. Fifty brands for €43–67 against twenty accounts for $79 is not a close race.
It is also not a real comparison, and running it that way is how people end up paying for a reporting platform they never open.
The numbers first
RecurPost (recurpost.com/pricing, first-party, checked 2026-09-03). No permanent free tier; 14-day trial, no card.
| Plan | Monthly | Accounts | Users | Daily posts / account | $ per account |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | $9 | 2 | 1 | 10 | $4.50 |
| Personal | $25 | 5 | 1 | 20 | $5.00 |
| Agency | $79 | 20 | 3 | 80 | $3.95 |
Add-ons: extra account $4/month, extra user $20/month, shareable calendars $10 per block of 10, recurring time slots $20 per block of 10, AI posts and images $10 per 200 each.
Metricool (metricool.com/pricing, first-party, checked 2026-08-30).
| Plan | Price | Brands | Publishing | Notable |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | 1 | 20 posts / month | Excludes LinkedIn and X; 5 competitor trackers; 30 days of history |
| Starter | €16–20 | 5–10 (scales) | Unlimited | 100 competitor trackers; LinkedIn included; X is a paid add-on; PDF/PPT reports |
| Advanced | €43–67 | Up to 50 | Unlimited | Team + client management, approvals, full X analytics, Looker Studio, API |
| Custom | Quote | — | — | White label, dedicated manager |
Annual billing saves up to 24% on Metricool. Prices in euros; your local total will differ.
Why "cost per account" lies here
Metricool's unit is a brand. A brand is a reporting container — it holds a set of connected profiles and gives you dashboards, competitor tracking and exportable reports for them. Fifty brands at Advanced is roughly €1 each, and that is genuinely cheap, because what you are buying per unit is a row in a report.
RecurPost's unit is a social account with a posting allowance. Twenty accounts at $3.95 each buys you twenty publishing slots that can each push up to 80 posts a day, plus recurring content libraries and evergreen recycling — which is the thing RecurPost is actually built for and Metricool does not really do.
Dividing the price by the unit count only works when both vendors are selling the same unit. Here one is selling shelf space and the other is selling a filing cabinet.
The honest way to choose is to answer one question before you look at any price: when you open this tool on a Tuesday morning, are you going to look at a chart or type a post?
- Chart. You need competitor tracking, client-facing PDF reports, Looker Studio, historical analytics. Metricool. The publishing is a bonus.
- Post. You need a queue, recurring slots, evergreen libraries, and enough daily headroom. RecurPost. The analytics are a bonus.
People who answer "both" almost always mean "chart" — the reporting need is what drives tool selection, and then they discover the publishing side is thinner than they expected. That is the standard failure mode in this category.
The second ceiling in each
We keep a running list of the limit that is not on the headline of each vendor's pricing page. Seven tools in, no two of them meter the same unit — Hootsuite gates on seats, Buffer on 5,000 posts per channel under fair use, Blotato on AI credits, Later on posts per profile, Sprout on seats with profiles locked at five, upload-post on video minutes.
These two add two more:
- RecurPost: posts per account per day (10 / 20 / 80). On Starter that is 10. If evergreen recycling is why you are here, ten slots a day across two accounts is a real constraint, not a theoretical one.
- Metricool free: 20 posts per month, total. Not per profile. Twenty. The free tier is an analytics demo with a publishing sample attached.
The practical habit: on any pricing page, find the second number before you compare the first one. It has been there on all seven vendors we have checked, and it has never been the number in the plan name.
The free-tier tell
Metricool's free plan excludes LinkedIn and X. That looks arbitrary until you line it up with the others: upload-post's free tier excludes TikTok, and Publer's free tier excludes X.
Three for three, the networks cut from free tiers are the ones that are most expensive or most restrictive for the vendor to access — not the ones users care least about. Nobody removes LinkedIn because customers do not want LinkedIn. So when you evaluate a free tier, do not read the exclusions as a feature decision. Read them as a cost disclosure, and check that your priority network is on the included list before you build a workflow on it.
What both of them leave out
Neither tool covers Douyin, Xiaohongshu, Kuaishou, WeChat Channels, Bilibili or Toutiao. If any of those are on your list, this comparison does not apply to you at all.
And both are downstream tools: they assume the content already exists. Nothing here writes the post, cuts the video, or does the engagement work that gets a cold account seen. That is a different product category — NoobClaw runs in a local fingerprinted browser against your own logins, generates each account's content from that account's own niche, persona and keywords rather than duplicating one file, and paces every action in a randomised range. Whether you need that or a scheduler depends on whether the bottleneck is distribution or production.
If you want the whole field with cost per account computed the same way for every vendor, we did that across twelve tools here, and compared RecurPost against Buffer's per-channel model separately. For the analytics-heavy end of the market, Buffer vs Metricool covers the same channel-bill-versus-brand-bill split.
FAQ
Can I use Metricool free and RecurPost Starter together?
You can, and for some people it is genuinely the cheapest sensible setup: $9/month for two accounts with real publishing headroom, plus a free analytics dashboard for one brand. The friction is that you are now maintaining two connections per network and reconciling two sets of numbers. It works when you have one brand you report on and two accounts you post from. It falls apart the moment the counts diverge.
Which one is better for agencies?
Metricool Advanced for client reporting — approvals, team and client management, custom report templates, Looker Studio and API all live there, covering up to 50 brands for €43–67. RecurPost Agency for client publishing — workspaces, approval flow, white-label reports and three seats at $79 for 20 accounts. If your deliverable to clients is a monthly report, Metricool. If your deliverable is posts going out, RecurPost. We broke down the agency-shaped plans across the category here.
Is RecurPost's daily post cap a real problem?
For a single brand posting a few times a day, no — you will never see it. It becomes real in exactly the scenario RecurPost is designed for: evergreen libraries recycling old content on recurring time slots. Ten slots per account per day on Starter fills up faster than it sounds once you have several time slots per network. Count the recurring slots you intend to run, multiply by networks, and compare that number to your plan's cap before you subscribe rather than after.