Is Buffer or Postiz cheaper?

Buffer starts at $5 per channel per month (Essentials, billed yearly at $60 per channel per year) (free plan available). Postiz starts at $29/mo (Standard cloud), or $0 self-hosted (7 days trial).

Buffer vs Postiz

An independent, review-free comparison compiled by the SaaSTracker editorial team. Both products are profiled in full, and neither can pay for placement here.

The short answer

Both sides assessed

Buffer compared with Postiz

Postiz covers roughly three times as many networks, is open source, and can be self-hosted for free, but its cloud entry price is $29 a month with no free plan. Buffer wins for anyone who wants a free tier, a fifteen-year track record, and no infrastructure to run; Postiz wins for technical teams who want AI-agent and API control or refuse to be locked into a vendor.

Postiz compared with Buffer

Buffer has a free plan, fifteen years of reliability, and a simpler product; Postiz has 30-plus networks, an open-source licence, and flat pricing that beats Buffer badly past about ten channels. A non-technical team with a handful of channels should take Buffer without much thought. A technical team with a long channel list or an API requirement should take Postiz.

Choose Buffer if

Founders, solo marketers, and small in-house teams who post to a handful of channels across many different networks and want reliable scheduling with published, predictable pricing rather than a suite they will only use a tenth of.

Choose Postiz if

Technical teams, developer-adjacent startups, and agencies who want wide network coverage with API and AI-agent control, and who either value open-source ownership enough to self-host or want a flat cloud price that does not scale per channel.

Side by side

13 attributes

Attribute	Buffer	Postiz
Category	Social	Social
Starting price	$5 per channel per month (Essentials, billed yearly at $60 per channel per year) (free plan available)	$29/mo (Standard cloud), or $0 self-hosted (7 days trial)
Pricing model	Per-channel subscription: you pay a flat rate for every connected social profile, with unlimited team members on the top published tier. Billed monthly or yearly, with yearly effectively giving two months free.	Cloud subscription tiered on channel count with unlimited posts on every paid plan, or free self-hosting under AGPL-3.0 with the same features. No free cloud tier; a 7-day trial instead.
Free plan	3 channels, 10 scheduled posts per channel at a time, 100 ideas, 1 user, AI Assistant, 30-day Insights history, community inbox, 1 API key at 3,000 requests/month.	No
Free trial	Free plan with no time limit, plus a trial of paid features on signup	7 days on Postiz Cloud
Best for	Founders, solo marketers, and small in-house teams who post to a handful of channels across many different networks and want reliable scheduling with published, predictable pricing rather than a suite they will only use a tenth of.	Technical teams, developer-adjacent startups, and agencies who want wide network coverage with API and AI-agent control, and who either value open-source ownership enough to self-host or want a flat cloud price that does not scale per channel.
Setup time	Under 30 minutes to connect a few channels and fill a first week's queue; Instagram and Facebook require a connected business account and a page, which is usually the only fiddly step.	Fifteen minutes on the cloud version. Self-hosting is a half-day at minimum: Docker deployment plus Postgres, then registering a developer application with each network you intend to publish to, some of which require platform review.
Learning curve	Very low. Queue, calendar, composer, and Insights are the entire product, and the free plan lets a team learn on real posts before paying.	Low for calendar scheduling, moderate to high for the parts that make Postiz worth choosing (API, CLI, MCP, webhooks, self-hosted operations). It assumes a technical operator.
Platforms	Web app, iOS app, Android app, Browser extension, Public REST API	Web app, Self-hosted Docker deployment, Public REST API, CLI, MCP server
Compliance	GDPR-aligned processes (self-reported)	No formal certifications published
Founded	2010	2024
Headquarters	Fully distributed, no headquarters office; team members reported across 30 or more countries	Distributed; operated as Gitroom
Ownership	Independent, effectively founder and employee owned after buying out its main venture investors	Independent, founder-owned open-source project (Gitroom)

Strengths and limitations

Buffer

Strengths

Widest official-API network coverage among the accessible tools in this category, including TikTok, YouTube, Pinterest, Google Business Profile, Bluesky, and Mastodon.
A free plan that is actually operable (3 channels, AI Assistant, community inbox, 30-day insights) rather than a two-week disguise.
Per-channel pricing means unlimited teammates on the Team plan, so headcount growth does not raise the bill.
Fifteen years of operating history and a stable, well-documented API make it the low-risk choice when reliability matters more than novelty.

Limitations

Per-channel pricing punishes agencies and multi-brand operators; at thirty or forty channels Buffer is one of the most expensive options here.
No social listening, no sentiment analysis, and no paid-ads management, so it cannot serve as a full social suite for a brand team.
The community inbox lacks assignment, SLAs, and case history, making it unsuitable for support-driven social workflows.
Approvals and permissions sit behind the Team plan, which doubles the per-channel rate for what many teams consider a basic control.

Postiz

Strengths

Widest network coverage in the category by a distance, including Discord, Slack, Telegram, Reddit, and several web3 and niche platforms nobody else supports.
Genuinely open source under AGPL-3.0 with stated feature parity between the hosted and self-hosted builds, so there is a real exit from vendor lock-in.
Best flat pricing at scale: 30 channels for $49 a month and 100 for $99, with unlimited team members throughout.
First-class machine interfaces (public API, CLI, MCP server, webhooks, n8n, Make, Zapier) rather than an API bolted on as an afterthought.

Limitations

No free cloud tier and only a 7-day trial, making it the most expensive way into this category for a small team that will not self-host.
Self-hosting means registering your own developer apps with each network, which involves platform review processes and rate limits that a vendor would normally absorb.
AI generation allowances are metered and stingy at the entry tier (20 images and 3 videos a month on Standard).
A young project from a very small team: expect rougher edges, faster changes, and less operational history than a fifteen-year-old competitor.

Pricing compared

Buffer

Per-channel subscription: you pay a flat rate for every connected social profile, with unlimited team members on the top published tier. Billed monthly or yearly, with yearly effectively giving two months free.

Free$0
Essentials$5
Team$10

For one to five channels Buffer is close to unbeatable value: $5 to $25 a month buys reliable official-API publishing to eleven networks, a real free tier underneath it, and analytics good enough to steer cadence. The model inverts above roughly ten channels, where per-channel billing makes Buffer more expensive than Publer, Postiz, or almost any flat-rate tool while offering less depth than either. Buy it for breadth of networks at small channel counts, and re-price the moment your channel list starts growing faster than your team.

Postiz

Cloud subscription tiered on channel count with unlimited posts on every paid plan, or free self-hosting under AGPL-3.0 with the same features. No free cloud tier; a 7-day trial instead.

Self-hosted$0
Standard$29
Team$39
Pro$49
Ultimate$99

Postiz has the best cost curve at high channel counts of any cloud tool here: 30 channels for $49 a month, or 100 for $99, against per-channel competitors that would charge several times that. It is simultaneously the worst deal at the low end, since a founder with three channels pays $29 where Buffer charges nothing and Publer charges $13. The self-hosted option resolves this only for people who genuinely want to run infrastructure; for everyone else, treat Postiz as a tool that starts making financial sense somewhere north of ten channels or the moment API and agent control becomes a requirement rather than a nice-to-have.

Editorial verdict on each

Buffer

Buffer is the safe answer, and for one to five channels it is also the right one. Nothing else in this category combines eleven official-API networks, a free plan you can actually run on, and $5 per channel pricing with fifteen years of uptime behind it. The honest caveats are depth and scale: there is no listening, no ads, no serious inbox, and the per-channel meter turns hostile somewhere past ten profiles, at which point Publer or Postiz will do the same job for less. Buy Buffer if your channel list is short and your network list is long. Look elsewhere the moment either of those flips.

Read the full Buffer profile

Postiz

Innovation

Postiz is the right answer to two specific questions and the wrong answer to most others. If you need to publish to networks nobody else supports, want the software under your own control, or intend to drive social from code and AI agents rather than a UI, nothing else in this category comes close, and 30 channels for $49 a month makes the economics work at agency scale. If you are a founder with three channels who wants to schedule some posts, a $29 floor with no free plan and a self-hosting path that involves registering your own OAuth apps makes this the hardest tool here to justify. Judge it as infrastructure, not as a scheduler, and the price makes sense.

Read the full Postiz profile

Buffer profile last reviewed 2026-08-22; Postiz last reviewed 2026-08-22. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.