Later

Later carved its niche as the visual planner for Instagram, and that heritage still shows. The drag-and-drop visual calendar is the best in the market for planning how your feed will look before you post. You can preview your Instagram grid layout, rearrange posts, and ensure visual consistency -- a feature that aesthetic-driven brands and creators genuinely need and that competitors like Hootsuite do not prioritize.

The Linkin.bio feature is another strong differentiator. It creates a clickable, shoppable version of your Instagram feed as a link-in-bio page, complete with analytics on clicks and conversions. For e-commerce brands and creators who drive traffic from Instagram, this alone can justify the subscription. The platform has expanded well beyond Instagram scheduling, now supporting TikTok, Pinterest, LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook, and X with auto-publishing.

Where Later falls short is in features needed by teams and agencies. The social listening capabilities are minimal, there is no unified social inbox for managing comments and messages, and the analytics are lighter than platforms like Sprout Social or Hootsuite. The pricing has also increased significantly since the Mavrck acquisition, with the Starter plan now at $25/month for just 1 social set (1 profile per platform). For solo creators managing a few profiles who care about visual planning, Later is excellent. As Later continues to expand its feature set, it is also becoming increasingly capable for teams managing multiple profiles who want visual planning at the core of their social media workflow.