How Much Does Buffer Cost? 2026 Pricing Explained

How much does Buffer cost?

Verified on buffer.com in July 2026, Buffer has a permanent free plan and then charges per channel. Free covers 3 channels, 10 scheduled posts per channel and 1 user. Essentials is $5 per channel per month, or $60 billed yearly per channel. Team is $10 per channel per month, or $120 billed yearly. The AI Assistant is included on every plan, including free. Buffer states that channels 1 to 10 are billed at the standard rate and channels above 10 cost less each, so your average per channel falls as you scale even though the total rises.

The word doing all the work in that answer is "channel." A channel is one connected social account: one Instagram profile, one Facebook page, one LinkedIn page, one TikTok account. Most pricing articles quote $5 and stop there, which understates the bill for anyone running a normal multi-platform presence.

Buffer pricing in plain terms

The free plan is unusually generous for this category and it refills: those 10 scheduled slots per channel free up again as posts publish, so a light poster on three networks can run on $0 indefinitely. That is a real free plan, not a demo, and it is the reason Buffer keeps showing up on lists of tools people never cancel.

What does Buffer actually cost for a real setup?

Run the arithmetic on a normal account list rather than the headline. A solo creator on LinkedIn, X and Instagram stays on free unless they want unlimited scheduling, in which case Essentials is $15 a month. A small brand on LinkedIn, X, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and a YouTube channel is six channels: $30 a month on Essentials, $60 on Team.

An agency running those six channels for two clients is twelve channels, so $60 a month on Essentials before the volume discount above ten channels applies, and $120 on Team if several people need logins and approval steps. None of those numbers are unfair for what Buffer does. They are simply not $5, and the gap between the marketing price and the real invoice is what most people are trying to work out when they search for the cost.

Is Buffer's free plan actually usable?

Yes, more than almost any competitor's. Three channels covers the majority of solo creators, 10 queued posts per channel is roughly two weeks of a sane posting cadence, and the slots recycle as posts go out. You also get the AI Assistant, basic Insights and API access on free, which are usually the first things a vendor strips out.

The ceiling shows up in two places. You cannot add a fourth channel without paying, and the 10-slot queue means you cannot batch a month of content in one sitting, which is exactly what people who repurpose tend to want to do. If your workflow is "one afternoon a month, load everything," the free tier will frustrate you long before the channel limit does.

Does Buffer's AI Assistant write your posts?

It edits and reshapes, which is not the same thing. The AI Assistant lives inside the composer and works on text that is already there: shorten this for X, expand this into a LinkedIn version, change the tone, split this into a few posts, suggest a reply. On the free plan you get 5 AI reply suggestions a week; Essentials and Team make those unlimited.

What it does not do is go and read the 2,500 word article you published on Monday, or the 40 minute podcast you recorded on Tuesday, and come back with the week of channel-native posts hiding inside them. It works on the post in front of it. That distinction matters when you are pricing your stack, because an empty queue is not a scheduling problem and no scheduler tier fixes it.

Buffer versus a repurposing tool: which cost is the real one?

Schedulers and repurposing tools get compared as if they were alternatives, and they are not. Buffer's job starts when a finished post exists. A repurposing tool's job ends there. The reason this shows up as a pricing question is that teams buy the scheduler first, keep paying for it, and still miss three weeks of posting because nobody wrote anything.

Put a number on the other half. If a source piece takes two to three hours to turn by hand into a thread, a LinkedIn post, captions and an email, and you publish four pieces a month, that is roughly ten hours. At any professional hourly rate, ten hours dwarfs both subscriptions. That is the comparison worth running: not $5 against $29, but the subscription against the posts that never got written. The full Buffer comparison lays out where each tool wins, with a plain cross on every row where we do not.

How does Buffer compare to Hootsuite on price?

They are not in the same bracket. Hootsuite starts at $99 per user per month billed annually, verified on hootsuite.com in July 2026, and rises to $199 and $399, with no free plan (the full Hootsuite pricing breakdown covers why the per-seat math surprises most teams). Buffer starts at $0 and charges by channel. The difference in price buys governance and intelligence: a unified inbox, social listening, approval workflows, competitor benchmarking and executive reporting.

For a team of one or two, almost none of that gets opened, and the honest recommendation is Buffer plus something that writes. For a marketing department where four people touch social and legal wants an approval trail, Hootsuite's price is doing real work. If you are weighing schedulers against writers, the content repurposing tools rundown sorts every category by what it is actually for, with verified pricing. If LinkedIn is the one channel you actually care about scheduling well, the LinkedIn post scheduler page covers what the LinkedIn API will and will not let a scheduler do. If X is the channel you care about, the per-post rates behind X API pricing decide more about your real cost than any subscription tier does.

How does Buffer compare to SocialBee on price?

This is the closer comparison, because both price by account rather than by seat. Buffer's Essentials is $5 per channel, so 5 channels is $25 and 10 channels is $50. SocialBee, verified on socialbee.com in August 2026, is $29 for 5 profiles and $49 for 10, or $24.17 and $40.83 on annual billing. Buffer is cheaper up to roughly 8 accounts and the two cross over around 10, after which SocialBee pulls away: 15 accounts is $75 on Buffer against $64 on SocialBee, and 50 accounts is $250 on Buffer against $179 on SocialBee's Pro50. Buffer does discount channels above 10, so narrow the top end of that gap a little rather than multiplying straight through.

The sharper difference is what each one charges for a second person. Buffer moves you from Essentials to Team, which doubles the rate on every channel: 10 channels for a two-person team is $100 a month, though Team then allows unlimited users. SocialBee includes one user on both its cheapest tiers but sells extra seats flat at $10 a month, so the same setup is $59. SocialBee is far cheaper for small teams, and Buffer's unlimited-user Team plan wins back the advantage somewhere past five or six logins.

Buffer keeps one advantage outright: a genuine permanent free plan for 3 channels, where SocialBee has none at all, only a 14-day trial with no card and a 30-day refund window. A creator on three networks should stay on Buffer. The full SocialBee pricing breakdown works the add-on arithmetic through four real setups.

How does Buffer compare to Zoho Social on price?

This is the most interesting price comparison Buffer has, because the two tools meter opposite things and the winner flips depending on the shape of your accounts rather than how many you have.

Buffer charges $5 per channel per month on Essentials, with no notion of which network a channel belongs to. Zoho Social charges per brand, where a brand is one complete set of channels holding a maximum of one profile per network. Standard is $15 a month, or $10 billed annually, and covers twelve channels: Facebook, X, Instagram, both LinkedIn types, Google Business Profile, YouTube, Pinterest, TikTok, Mastodon, Threads and Bluesky.

Read the third row carefully, because it is the one that catches people. Zoho Social has no way to put two Instagram accounts in one brand. A second account on the same network means a second brand, and Standard accepts no add-ons at all, so you are moved to Professional at $30 a month before you buy the extra brands at $14.50 each. Buffer simply charges another $5. If your accounts cluster on a few networks, Buffer is dramatically cheaper and Zoho Social is close to unusable at the price.

Flip it around and Zoho wins just as decisively. A single business posting one account each to a dozen networks pays Buffer $60 a month and Zoho $10. That is the same $600 a year difference, pointed the other way.

Two more things belong in the comparison. Buffer has the better free plan for testing, with three channels and refilling scheduled slots, while Zoho Social’s free tier covers six channels but drops YouTube, Pinterest and TikTok entirely. And Buffer charges per channel for unlimited users on Team at $10 a channel, where Zoho meters seats separately at $10 each on top of the brand. The full breakdown, including the add-on ladder and the point at which the Agency tiers take over, is in our Zoho Social pricing article, and the Zoho Social alternative page covers what neither tool does.

How does Buffer compare to Planable on price?

These two meter completely different things, so the winner flips on how many people touch the account rather than on how many accounts you run. Buffer charges per channel and charges again for teamwork: Essentials is $5 a channel for one user, and Team is $10 a channel, which doubles the rate on every channel the moment a second person needs a login. Planable, verified on planable.io in August 2026, charges per workspace and never charges for seats: Basic is $39 a month for 4 social pages and Pro is $59 for 10, both with unlimited users.

Count channels alone and Buffer wins every time. Add a team and the ranking inverts.

The crossover sits at four channels. Below it Buffer is cheaper whatever your headcount, and from six channels upward any team of two or more pays less on Planable, with the gap widening as channels grow because Buffer's team surcharge multiplies across every one of them.

Two caveats keep this honest. Buffer discounts channels above ten, so narrow the top of that gap slightly. And Planable caps how many posts you can create, at 60 a month on Basic and 150 on Pro, which Buffer does not do at all: across the 4 and 10 pages those plans cover, both work out to 15 posts per page per month. If you publish daily on every channel, Buffer's higher bill buys a limit you will not hit, and that is worth more than the saving. The full breakdown is in the Planable pricing article.

Hidden costs to watch in Buffer

There are no surprise overage fees, which is a genuine strength: Buffer does not meter AI credits or charge you for going over a post count. The costs that creep in are structural. Every new platform you decide to try adds a channel and a line to the invoice, so experimenting is not free the way it is on a flat-priced tool. Adding a second person who needs their own login pushes you from Essentials to Team, doubling the per-channel rate.

The third is the one nobody budgets for: the content upstream. If the posts come out of articles you publish, those articles have to exist and be found, and pushing new URLs through the official Google indexing API is its own separate job from anything a social scheduler touches. Buffer sits at the very end of that chain.

Which Buffer plan should you buy?

Stay on free if you post to three channels or fewer and two weeks of queued posts is enough runway. Move to Essentials when you add a fourth channel or when the 10-slot queue starts blocking a batching habit, and expect roughly $5 times your channel count. Move to Team only when a second person genuinely needs their own seat or an approval step exists, because it doubles the per-channel rate for collaboration features rather than publishing ones.

If you get to the end of that and the queue is still running dry, the plan was never the problem. The fix sits upstream, in turning content you already published into the posts that fill it. The content repurposing tool shows what one article turns into across every channel, and the honest test for whether you need one covers the break-even point where it stops being cheaper to do by hand.