A comprehensive toolkit for social media scheduling, engagement, and analytics.
An entry-level scheduler for solo beginners, strictly capped by a low queue limit and supporting a maximum of three social accounts.
Forever free
The baseline tier for solo marketers, unlocking unlimited scheduling and full analytics, but billed dynamically per connected platform.
The collaborative tier designed for agile marketing teams, unlocking draft approvals, custom permissions, and unlimited users.
A volume-based tier for social media agencies, offering a bulk starting block of channels and custom client access levels.
Unlike competitors (like Later or SocialBu) that bundle networks into 'Social Sets' or tiered packages, Buffer charges an a-la-carte fee for every single connected account. This model heavily favors users who only need to manage 1 to 2 very specific channels (e.g., just LinkedIn and X). However, it punishes comprehensive omni-channel marketers; running a robust 8-channel footprint across multiple platforms will cost $48 to $96 per month, stripping away Buffer's primary selling point of affordability.
Buffer includes a 'Start Page' feature (a link-in-bio tool). However, Buffer actively counts this landing page as a 'channel' towards your billing plan. If you connect a Start Page on the Essentials plan, you are permanently paying $6/month just to host a basic link-in-bio, which you could easily get for free through Linktree or a dedicated builder.
In a market where many SaaS tools gate advanced integrations behind Enterprise tiers, Buffer includes full access to Canva, Google Drive, Dropbox, and the Buffer Browser Extension across all plans—even the Free tier. This makes content ingestion highly frictionless for solo operators who rely on decentralized asset management.
The Free plan does not limit monthly publishing, but it strictly limits your queue to 10 posts per channel at any given time [1.1.2]. If you batch-create content and want to schedule a full month of daily posts (30 posts) for a channel like LinkedIn, Buffer will block you. You are forced to log in constantly to 'refill' the queue, entirely defeating the purpose of a set-and-forget automation tool.
Buffer advertises '$6/month', but this is exclusively a per-channel cost [1.1.1]. A standard solo brand operating on Instagram, Facebook, X, LinkedIn, and TikTok (5 channels) will instantly see their bill multiply to $30/month. Because there is no bundled option for single brands, omni-channel creators end up paying significantly more than they would on flat-rate competitors.
If a solo founder on the Essentials plan hires a single virtual assistant to help schedule content, they violate the strict 1-user limit [1.2.2]. To add that single team member, they are forced to upgrade to the Team plan, which raises the per-channel cost from $6 to $12. Your entire software bill literally doubles instantly just to collaborate with one person.
Buffer heavily promotes that channel costs drop significantly as you scale (e.g., channels 11-25 drop to $4 to $6 each) [1.1.1]. However, a standard internal brand will rarely ever manage 11+ profiles. These discounts are mathematically engineered exclusively for large marketing agencies; standard in-house teams will always pay the maximum premium rate per channel.
No. The Essentials plan ($6/channel) is strictly locked to 1 user [1.1.3]. If you need a second person to access the account, even just to review drafts, you must upgrade your entire workspace to the Team plan ($12/channel), instantly doubling your total monthly cost.
Buffer's AI assistant is included across all plans (including Free), but the usage differs. Paid plans (Essentials and Team) offer unlimited AI credits for generation and repurposing, making it highly valuable for high-volume content creators compared to competitors that charge micro-transactions for AI.
Buffer's Free plan does not have a strict monthly publishing limit, but it limits your active queue to 10 posts per channel. You can publish 50 posts in a month, but you can only have 10 scheduled in the system at any given moment, forcing you to log in frequently to add more.
