Is Buffer Free? Buffer's Free Plan vs 5 Free Alternatives (2026)

Yes, Buffer is free — genuinely free, not a trial. For one account and a light posting habit, it's a complete product at $0.

The trouble starts when you batch content, add a fourth platform, or want the tool to help you write. What Buffer's free tier really locks, and which free alternative to Buffer is worth the switch, is everything below.

Is Buffer Free, and What Does the Free Plan Actually Include?

Buffer's free plan is free forever with no card, and it is more generous than most "free" tiers in this category. You can connect 3 channels at once, keep 10 scheduled posts per channel in the queue, save 100 ideas, use the AI Assistant, and see 30 days of Insights on a single user account (Buffer pricing). The 10-post cap is a queue limit, not a monthly one — when a post publishes, its slot frees up, so you can publish far more than 10 posts a month per channel as long as you never queue more than 10 ahead. The limit most people never read about is the lifetime one: Buffer's help centre states the free plan "allows you to have up to three channels connected at any one time, and it also includes a lifetime limit of eight unique channel connections" (Buffer Help Center). Disconnecting an account doesn't give the slot back.

Buffer Free	What you get
Price	$0, forever, no card
Channels	3 at once (8 unique connections, lifetime)
Queued posts	10 per channel at a time
Users	1
Ideas	100
AI Assistant	Included
Insights	30 days of history
Next tier	Essentials, $5/month per channel billed yearly ($60/year)

Buffer's own explainer shows how the queue cap behaves in practice:

When Does Buffer's Free Plan Stop Being Enough?

Three things push people off Buffer's free plan, and none of them is "Buffer is bad." The first is batching: if you sit down once a week and write ten posts for X, the queue is full before you start on Threads. The second is per-channel pricing. Buffer's paid tiers charge per channel — Essentials is $5/month per channel billed yearly ($60/year each), Team $10 (Buffer pricing) — so a creator on four platforms is committing $240 a year to scheduling alone, which is a strange bill when Threads and Bluesky have free APIs and X's free tier covers a modest monthly post allowance. The third is writing. Buffer's AI Assistant is on the free plan, but it works on text you've already written; it isn't a drafting tool that turns a rough idea into a platform-shaped post. If the slow part of your week is producing the words rather than spacing them out, no amount of queue is going to fix it.

What Should a Free Alternative to Buffer Actually Give You?

The trap in this category is that "free plan" and "free plan that includes the platform you post on" are different things. Publer's free tier explicitly cannot connect X/Twitter — its help centre says "due to the Twitter Enterprise API cost, you can only connect Twitter/X accounts on the other tiers" (Publer Help Center). Metricool's free plan covers "all your brands' social networks (except LinkedIn and Twitter)" (Metricool pricing). Zoho Social's free edition doesn't schedule at all — it's same-day publishing only. So before you compare post counts, check three things in this order: does the free tier connect your actual platforms, is the cap a queue cap or a monthly cap, and does the free tier expire. A 14-day trial with everything unlocked is not a free plan, however it is labelled on the pricing page.

Which Free Buffer Alternatives Are Worth Trying in 2026?

Five of these seven tools have a real free plan, and which one suits you comes down to the platform you post on rather than the post count. If X/Twitter is where you publish, the shortlist is short: Postory's free account and self-hosted Postiz are the only two here that connect X without a paid tier, because Publer and Metricool both exclude it from their free plans over X's API pricing. If you post to Facebook and Instagram, Publer's free tier is the closest replica of Buffer's. If reporting matters more than publishing, Metricool gives away 30 days of analytics and five competitor profiles. And two of the best-known names in the category — Later and Hootsuite — appear here only because people keep expecting free plans that no longer exist. Every figure below was checked against each tool's own pricing page in August 2026.

Tool	Genuinely free?	Free-plan limits	Connects X?	Paid from
Postory	Yes, no card — but metered	100 credits (~33 posts), 1 account, no post caps	Yes	Credit packs from $10 (no subscription); one-off X scans, no account: Instant Shadowban Recovery $4.99, Instant X Profile Audit $4.99, Following Cleaner from $4.99
Publer	Yes	3 accounts, 10 pending posts each, 25 drafts	No (paid only)	Professional tier — extra accounts $4/mo each
Metricool	Yes	1 brand, 20 posts/month, 30 days analytics	No (paid only)	Starter, from $20/month (annual)
Postiz	Only if self-hosted	Open-source, unlimited — you run the server	Yes	Cloud from $29/month
Zoho Social	Yes, but no scheduling	1 brand, 1 user, same-day posting only	Not verified	Paid tiers unlock scheduling
Later	No — 14-day trial	—	Yes	$18.75/month (annual)
Hootsuite	No — 14-day trial	—	Yes	$99/user/month (annual)

Postory — best if writing is the bottleneck

Postory has no subscription at all. You sign up with no card, get 100 credits, and everything is priced in credits at $1 = 100 credits — a published or scheduled post costs 3 credits per account, an AI assistant run 5. Credits never expire, and there is no cap on how many posts you queue, so a month of Threads content sits in the calendar without a paywall. One social account is included; extra account slots are a one-time 100 credits each. Platforms are X, Threads and Bluesky. The honest limitation: it's built for text-first platforms, so if Instagram carousels are your main output, this isn't your tool.

Publer — closest thing to a Buffer clone

Three accounts and 10 pending posts each mirrors Buffer's free tier almost exactly, with a workspace, a calendar and 25 saved drafts on top. Post history is kept 24 hours on the free tier (Publer Help Center). The X exclusion is the deal-breaker for most people reading this.

Metricool — free analytics, tight publishing

Twenty scheduled posts a month for one brand, with 30 days of analytics and five competitor profiles — the reporting is the reason to use it, not the scheduling. Again, no X or LinkedIn on free.

Postiz — free if you're willing to run a server

Postiz is open source and free to self-host; the hosted version starts at $29/month with a 7-day trial (Postiz pricing). It posts to 30+ networks including Bluesky, Threads and Mastodon. "Free" here costs you a VPS and an evening.

Later and Hootsuite — no free plan any more

Later's cheapest plan is $18.75/month billed annually, and Hootsuite starts at $99/user/month (Later pricing, Hootsuite plans). Both run 14-day trials. Treat any article still listing them as "free Buffer alternatives" as out of date.

If you want the full paid-tier comparison rather than the free one, our Buffer alternatives breakdown runs the per-channel maths across the whole category.

How Does Postory's Free Plan Compare to Buffer's?

These two free plans are shaped differently on purpose. Buffer gives you more channels and meters the queue: 3 accounts, 10 posts waiting on each, and you're never charged for publishing. Postory gives you one account and meters the actions: nothing caps how far ahead you schedule, but each delivery costs 3 credits and each AI assistant run costs 5, drawn from the 100 you start with. In practice Buffer is cheaper if you post lightly to several platforms and write everything yourself, and Postory is cheaper if you post a lot to one or two platforms and want drafting help — 100 credits is roughly thirty published posts, fewer if you lean on the AI assistant at 5 credits a run, and a top-up is $10 for 1,000 credits rather than a subscription you have to remember to cancel. The other difference is coverage: Buffer connects Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Mastodon as well, while Postory is deliberately narrow.

	Postory Free	Buffer Free
Price	$0, no card	$0, no card
Accounts	1 (extra slots 100 credits each, one-time)	3 at once, 8 lifetime
Scheduling cap	None	10 queued per channel
Cost to publish	3 credits per post per account	Free
AI writing	Included (5 credits per assistant run)	AI Assistant included
Platforms	X, Threads, Bluesky	X, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Mastodon, Bluesky and more
Extras	Profile Audit and shadowban checks (credit-priced)	30 days of Insights
Paying more	Credit packs from $10, never expire	$5/month per channel

How Do You Move From Buffer to Postory Without Losing a Week?

There's no import tool — Buffer doesn't export scheduled posts — but the overlap is at the channel level, not the content level, so you don't need one. Five steps. One: sign up for Postory with Google or email; no card, 100 credits. Two: connect one channel (X, Threads or Bluesky) via OAuth and leave the rest on Buffer for now. Three: let Buffer's existing queue drain rather than cancelling it, so nothing goes dark mid-week. Four: rebuild that one channel's schedule in the content calendar and run both tools in parallel for a week — just never schedule the same post from both, or it publishes twice. Five: move the remaining channels once you trust it, then downgrade or close Buffer. Give it two weeks, one platform at a time. The failure mode to watch for is double-posting.

Try Postory Free — No Card, No Subscription

If Buffer's free plan runs out because you're writing more, not scheduling more, that's the gap Postory is built for: AI post writing and scheduling in the same tool, for X, Threads and Bluesky, with no monthly bill attached to it.

Start with Postory free — 100 credits, no card, and credits that never expire.

Still shopping around? We also compare the best free social media schedulers across the whole category, and run a head-to-head on Postory vs Buffer vs Hootsuite vs Later.