Metricool vs Publer
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
Editorial assessmentMetricool compared with Publer
Both are strong value plays. Publer's base-plus-incremental account pricing with every tenth account free, plus spintax, watermarking, and recycling, suits high-volume publishing across many individual accounts. Metricool's brand-based pricing and far deeper analytics, including paid ads reporting and branded client exports, suit anyone whose deliverable is a report. Publish-heavy operators take Publer; report-heavy operators take Metricool.
Choose Metricool if
Freelancers, small agencies, and small in-house teams managing several brands across many networks who need dependable scheduling, genuinely good cross-network analytics including paid, and client-ready reports, without paying per seat for a suite they will not use.
Choose Publer if
Freelancers, small agencies, and multi-brand operators who manage many social accounts on a tight budget and need bulk scheduling, recycling, watermarks, and workspace separation more than they need a beautiful editor.
Side by side
13 attributes| Attribute | Metricool | Publer |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Social | Social |
| Starting price | €0 free for one brand, then from about €20 or $25 per month for five brands (Starter) (free plan available) | $5/mo (Professional, one social account) (free plan available) |
| Pricing model | Tiered subscription priced by the number of connected brands, with unlimited profiles inside each brand, a free plan for one brand, and team features, approvals, API, and Looker Studio gated to the Advanced tier. | Base subscription plus incremental pricing: each paid plan includes one social account, with additional social accounts and team members billed individually. Every tenth social account or member is free. Annual billing gives two months free. |
| Free plan | One brand, up to 20 scheduled posts per month, 5 competitor profiles, 30 days of analytics history, and the AI assistant. | 3 social accounts (X excluded), 1 workspace, 10 pending scheduled posts per account, 25 saved drafts, 24-hour post history. |
| Free trial | Available on paid plans; the free tier also functions as an indefinite evaluation path | No time-limited trial; a permanent free plan serves that purpose |
| Best for | Freelancers, small agencies, and small in-house teams managing several brands across many networks who need dependable scheduling, genuinely good cross-network analytics including paid, and client-ready reports, without paying per seat for a suite they will not use. | Freelancers, small agencies, and multi-brand operators who manage many social accounts on a tight budget and need bulk scheduling, recycling, watermarks, and workspace separation more than they need a beautiful editor. |
| Setup time | Under an hour per brand. Connect the profiles, connect the ad accounts if you have them, and the analytics start populating immediately with whatever historical window each network API will backfill. | An hour or two for a multi-account setup: connecting accounts is quick, but configuring workspaces, watermarks, signatures, and auto-schedule slots per account is where the time goes. |
| Learning curve | Low. The interface is dense but logically organized, and the brand-based structure is easy to reason about once you understand that profiles inside a brand are free. Reports and autolists reward a couple of hours of deliberate setup. | Moderate. The product is broad and the UI is dense; bulk upload, recycling, and spintax all reward a read of the documentation rather than clicking around. |
| Platforms | Web app, iOS, Android, Looker Studio connector, Smartlinks hosted pages | Web app, iOS app, Android app, Browser extensions for Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Opera, and Safari |
| Compliance | GDPR, EU-based operations under a European corporate parent | GDPR-aligned processes (self-reported) |
| Founded | 2015 | 2015 |
| Headquarters | Madrid, Spain | Tirana, Albania |
| Ownership | Acquired by team.blue, a European digital services and hosting group, in July 2024 | Bootstrapped, founder-owned |
Strengths and limitations
Metricool
Strengths
- Pricing by brand rather than by seat or channel is the single best-designed meter in this category for small businesses and agencies.
- Unified organic and paid reporting across Meta, Google, and TikTok Ads in one dashboard is genuinely rare and removes the most tedious recurring task in client reporting.
- Twelve supported surfaces including Bluesky, Threads, Twitch, and Google Business Profile, which is broader coverage than most tools charging five times as much.
- A real free plan for one brand, not a countdown trial, so you can evaluate properly and small operators can start at zero.
Limitations
- The inbox is a comment and message reader without assignment rules, routing, collision detection, or response-time reporting, which rules Metricool out for support-heavy brands.
- There is no query-based social listening at all, so brand monitoring beyond your own mentions and named competitors is not something the product does.
- Team management and approval workflows are Advanced-only, so a two-person team on Starter has no sign-off mechanism.
- Pricing is denominated in euros with a sliding brand count, which makes budgeting slightly fiddlier than a flat published USD tier.
Publer
Strengths
- Best cost curve in the category at scale: cheap incremental accounts, $2 to $3 team members, and every tenth account or member free.
- Thirteen networks including Telegram, WordPress, and Google Business Profile, destinations most competitors skip.
- Genuine bulk operations (spreadsheet upload, recycling, recurring posts, spintax) that turn a month of client scheduling into minutes.
- Automatic watermarks and signatures remove per-post brand work that other tools leave manual.
Limitations
- Pricing is genuinely hard to compare: a base fee plus different per-account and per-member rates on each tier means two similar teams can land on very different bills.
- Feature gating between Professional and Business is arbitrary in places (photo versus video watermarks, unbranded versus tracked link-in-bio), which pushes most buyers to the higher tier regardless of need.
- The free plan excludes X, an unusual and rarely advertised restriction.
- Daily posting limits apply on all self-serve plans and are only removed on quoted Enterprise, which is a poor fit for genuinely high-volume publishing.
Pricing compared
Metricool
Tiered subscription priced by the number of connected brands, with unlimited profiles inside each brand, a free plan for one brand, and team features, approvals, API, and Looker Studio gated to the Advanced tier.
- Free€0
- StarterFrom €20 (about $25)
- AdvancedFrom €54 (about $67)
- CustomQuoted
Metricool is the best capability-per-dollar in this category and it is not close. Twelve networks with no per-channel meter, unlimited publishing, competitor tracking, unified organic and paid reporting, branded client exports, a link in bio, and an inbox for roughly $25 a month across five brands is a price structure the American competitors have simply not matched. Advanced at around $67 adds team roles, approvals, API access, and Looker Studio, features that cost $399 per seat at Hootsuite and $299 per seat at Sprout. What you give up is inbox depth, listening, and enterprise support, and those are real gaps rather than marketing distinctions. But for the overwhelming majority of small businesses and small agencies, Metricool covers the work and leaves several thousand dollars a year to spend on content instead of software.
Publer
Base subscription plus incremental pricing: each paid plan includes one social account, with additional social accounts and team members billed individually. Every tenth social account or member is free. Annual billing gives two months free.
- Free$0
- Professional$5
- Business$10
- EnterpriseCustom
Publer is the cost winner at scale and it is not particularly close. A twenty-account portfolio on Business lands well below the equivalent on per-channel pricing, and $2 to $3 team members make adding collaborators almost free. What you give up is polish and clarity: the tier boundaries are arbitrary enough (photo watermarks here, video watermarks there) that you will probably end up on Business regardless, and the interface asks more of a new user than Buffer's does. Price it out at your actual account and member count, including the every-tenth-free discount, before comparing headline numbers with anything else on this list.
Editorial verdict on each
Metricool
Best ValueMetricool is the default recommendation in this category for anyone whose business is smaller than a staffed social team. Pricing by brand rather than by seat or channel means a single business posting to ten networks pays the same as one posting to two, an agency with ten clients pays $45 a month, and the analytics you get for that money, including Meta, Google, and TikTok ad spend reported next to organic performance, are better than what most competitors sell at ten times the price. Approvals, team roles, API access, and Looker Studio arrive at around $67. The gaps are real and worth naming: no listening, an inbox that is a reader rather than a helpdesk, and a thin enterprise posture. If social is a customer support channel or a compliance surface, buy Sprout. For everyone else, start free, move to Starter, and spend the four thousand dollars a year you did not give to an incumbent on content.
Read the full Metricool profilePubler
Publer is the pragmatist's choice: the cheapest way to run a lot of social accounts properly, with the bulk-scheduling, recycling, watermarking, and workspace machinery that agency work actually requires and that creator-first tools never build. It is not the nicest product here. The interface is crowded, the Professional versus Business split is arbitrary enough that most people end up on Business anyway, and daily posting caps sit on every self-serve plan. But price a twenty-account portfolio against per-channel competitors and the argument mostly settles itself. Buy it for scale and for the unglamorous automation; buy something else if the writing experience is what you are paying for.
Read the full Publer profileMetricool profile last reviewed 2026-08-22; Publer last reviewed 2026-08-22. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.