Leading Free Social Media Management Tools for 2024

Later has a highly visual focus. Although it allows you to post to Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest, its main emphasis is on Instagram. 

Later does offer a free plan, with one social account per platform, one user, 30 Instagram posts, 50 Twitter posts, 30 Facebook posts, and 30 Pinterest posts per month. You can schedule photos and upload unlimited images to their Media Library, see your basic Instagram analytics, can search and repost user-generated content. The three paid plans (starting at just $16.67 per month) add to these capabilities.

Unlike all the rest of these social media managers that start with a social message and then allow you to add an image, Later requires you to start a post by uploading a picture. You then add suitable text to the image.

The heart of Later is its Media Library. You begin every post by either uploading new media to the library or reusing media you’ve already uploaded. You can add notes and labels to your media items and add a Star to any image you wish to highlight. You can filter your images by Label or Star, by media usage, type of media, and by the time frame in which you uploaded your media. You can store unlimited media, even on the free plan.

The free plan limits you to scheduling static images, but the higher plans add videos, Instagram Stories, and multi-photo posts.

Monday.com doesn’t include a free plan, but it does offer you a free 14-day trial. Its Basic plan costs $8/seat/month. That plan is for teams just getting started with managing all their work in one place.

Monday.com doesn’t specifically target social media marketing. Instead, its focus is on improving the efficiency and workflow of your team. It is ideal for marketers and those wanting to create a logical workflow to manage their social media accounts.

Boards are at the heart of Monday.com. A board is a fully customizable table for managing
 your projects, workflows, and everyday work. You build boards that represent your workflow. Monday.com includes numerous templates to give you a starting point, one of which targets social media management. That template creates two boards:

1. Campaign ideas and requests
2. Campaign progress and status

Team members can make suggestions for upcoming social media posts on the Campaign Ideas and Requests board. If you decide these ideas are viable for a post, you can use the board to create an efficient and standardized workflow for a social media campaign.

The Campaign Progress and Status keeps track of your campaigns, split into Upcoming Campaigns, Live Campaigns, Completed, and Stuck.

Socialoomph has provided scheduled social posting services since 2008. It offers three paid plans, as well as a free plan. The Free Plan allows a single user to schedule unlimited posts to one social profile (limited to a maximum of three posts per hour). Even the most expensive Business Suite is reasonably priced compared to competing apps.

Socialoomph has a much more spartan interface than its competitors. It does, however, provide numerous benefits, and techies will love it. Most other people will need to make use of the help files as setting up your social accounts is the most challenging part of the entire process.

A central concept in Socialoomph is that of teams. With a free account, you automatically have one team – called “My Account.”

Socialoomph offers a variety of ways to create posts. You can both schedule and queue posts. You can begin posts from scratch; you can bulk import them, you can set up various queues, and collect content from RSS feeds.

You can also use Socialoomph to post to your blog. You can create content for your blog and publish it at set times using Socialoomph’s queue. You can then use another queue to publicize your blog posts across your social channels.

ContentCal offers a 14-day free trial. Feature-wise, it is a CoSchedule-like tool. It offers a powerful collection of features to help you manage our entire content marketing plan. It’s segmented into 3 tools. Here’s a look at what they do:

• Publish: This is where you’ll go to collaborate with team members on content ideas, create workflows, and publish articles, emails, and press releases. ContentCal also comes with Web Clipper, a tool that captureS content you come across on the web and saves it to your content library for use later. 
• Analyze: Dig into audience engagement with content and campaigns. Track hashtags, stories, top-performing content, and competitors to see what’s working and how to improve your content. Reporting is a major component of driving growth, and Analyze lets you visualize data for paid and organic analytics across platforms, and export your u findings in PDF or PPT format.
• Engage: Connect with customers through ContentCal’s team inbox. Depending on the size of your organization, you can assign queries to specific teams, handling messages from all platforms. Engage also offers a notes feature for messages from customers. These can be added by team members to formulate a complete and effective response to customers. 

ContentCal’s also working on a fourth feature called IQ. It’s an AI-powered intelligence solution to offer deeper insights. It will help identify channel performance, assign a content quality score, benchmark competitors, attribute revenue to campaign performance, and deliver industry benchmarking.

Meet Edgar offers a single $49 paid plan after a 14-day trial. That plan includes all their features, and you have the option of whether to pay monthly or annually (for a month’s discount). 

Meet Edgar is excellent for businesses that want to concentrate on queuing and delivering content. It doesn’t offer any social listening capabilities, nor does it have an in-app inbox.

At its core, Meet Edgar helps you schedule different categories of posts across your social networks. Categories are the heart of Meet Edgar. There are default categories; however, you can add to or adapt them to match your posting style.

You create a weekly recurring schedule for each of your social accounts, deciding on the post category for each slot. There are multiple ways you can source content to fill these slots. You can create original posts, or you can import content by connecting an RSS feed for your favorite blog or importing a CSV spreadsheet containing multiple posts.

Once you approve enough content, Edgar creates a queue for the next two weeks. It matches your queue to your schedule and categories. By default, Meet Edgar selects the newest content in each category first; however, you can click the Shuffle button on a category to reorder the posts into a new random order.

Meet Edgar doesn’t have social listening, a centralized inbox, or much analytics, but it should do the job for people more interested in intelligently scheduling their posts.

Sprout Social is one of the more professional social media management platforms, and it lacks the free or cheap plan that most of the other platform reviewed have. It does offer a 30-day trial for its free paid plans, however. The paid plans range from $99/user/mo to $249/user/mo, varying by the number of social profiles you can manage, along with additional features on the higher plans.

Sprout Social has a clear and intuitive interface and is logically laid out. It features a Smart Inbox which collects all your social messages. You can combine your social inboxes in any way you wish.

It features a Listening module that works similarly. You track mentions of your brand, your competitors, or selected keywords.

Sprout Social makes connecting your social accounts effortless, even for the usually complicated Instagram. It includes tools enabling all your team to collaborate. You can efficiently allocate tasks to each member.

Every time you enter Sprout Social, it presents you with a Dashboard offering suggestions of what you should do next. 

It has one of the most comprehensive and intuitive systems to create posts. You can customize your posts to meet the best practices of the different social networks and set your posts for multiple time frames. You can access content from many sources, which you can import and then reschedule or add to your queue.

As its name suggests, the heart of Buffer is a queue of posts. You continually add posts to this buffer, and Buffer makes the posts at your designated posting times.

Buffer offers a simple Free plan, where you can schedule up to 10 posts across three social accounts. If you have higher needs, plans start at $5 per month.

Post scheduling is part of Buffer Publishing. Buffer offers two other apps (requiring separate subscriptions): 

• Buffer Reply – allows you to reply to social conversations and provide support from one shared team inbox
• Buffer Analyze – enables you to measure the performance of your social media content and create reports

You can now also get Buffer All-in-One, which includes all three Buffer products.

If you begin using Buffer Publishing by trialing the free plan, you will notice that the main dashboard has a decidedly spartan look, with only three menu items – Queue, Analytics, and Settings along the top, and the social accounts you have attached on the left-hand side. You can still create (and schedule) up to ten posts. Although you have an Analytics tab, all it does is list the posts you have made over the last week. The free plan does not give you a chance to see Buffer’s queue at work, but it does allow you to schedule some posts.

Buffer’s capabilities improve dramatically once you opt for a paid plan, however. They give you a great deal of flexibility when it comes to creating posting schedules (which are essential for the buffer to work). A combination of creating original posts, adding content with the Buffer browser add-on, and uploading posts from appropriate RSS feeds, should provide plenty of material for your social accounts.

Crowdfire offers a free plan alongside its premium plans. It’s also a smart blend of content discovery and social media management capabilities. To find new and engaging content for your audience, Crowdfire curates articles according to search terms you choose. Once terms are selected, you’ll receive a steady flow of new content to share. And sharing’s easy. Crowdfire presents a default post with copy and a link. You can publish posts in this format, but I recommend that you personalize it a little to look fresh and appealing. 

Something any busy influencer or marketer can attest to is the slog of grabbing links from websites and other, online shops, or other resources. It can be a painful process. Crowdfire will help give you back that time. By connecting your YouTube channel, WordPress site, Etsy or Shopify store, you can publish directly to your social accounts. Crowdfire pulls new content and you can easily publish content or tweak post copy before sharing. 

Crowdfire would be incomplete without post scheduling. It will help you identify the best times to share content, allowing you to prep content in advance. Need attention-grabbing images? Crowdfire’s image curation feature is another time-saver. It pulls images for posts and automatically credits creators. Crowdfire also comes with the option of adding your own RSS feed and a helpful Chrome extension to quickly share articles you come across.

You’ll love Crodfire’s team inbox. It’s where all direct messages are stored, making it easier to get to all messages without missing any. You also get a solid analytics reporting feature. Gather insights on post engagement, and customize reports with metrics that matter most. Analytics also covers competitors. You can spot which posts perform best, or get an overall view of their performance on social. 

CoSchedule offers a 14-day free trial, something you should consider trying if you’re shopping for a powerful tool. It’s more than a social media management platform. It’s a marketing solution that syncs with your website, email, and social media. At a glance, this sounds a little messy but it’s really smart. CoSchedule’s content calendar is where the magic happens. It’s an overview of all communications with your audience. From blog posts to be published to your next Facebook post, everything is easily viewed from your calendar. 

As for features you’d expect from a social media management tool, CoSchedule packs a lot of value. You can schedule content across social media accounts, track the success of your posts and campaigns using a range of reports, and access conversations through a team inbox. Like evergreen posts? CoSchedule offers ReQueue as a way to reshare your best stuff. 

CoSchedule’s true power is that it’s a powerful collaboration tool. Social can be a complex beast, and more so with a team. In CoSchedule, you get project management and collaboration features that cover workflow (think drafts, edits, approvals, etc.). It also makes creating content easier with templates. Once created, producing posts and publishing content becomes streamlined. And this optimized approach carries through to campaigns. 

Tracking how well your email and website content performs alongside social posts for a campaign means pulling data from various platforms. In CoSchedule, it’s all in one place. And, if you have content like images and copy stored in different places, CoSchedule integrates with tools like Google Drive and Dropbox, and comes with an asset library.

As social media platforms go, it’s not uncommon to find a tool with tons of features. And while most features can sometimes feel underdeveloped, there are tools that deliver the goods. E-Clincher falls into the latter category and comes with a 14-day trial to boot. In addition to common features like post scheduling and a visual content calendar, you get powerful analytics and reporting, a media library, can publish content using Smart Queues (an auto-posting feature), and have the option to publish content from your RSS feed. 

E-Clincher also comes with a URL shortener (with tracking) and a content curation feature. These prove how versatile the platform is, but there’s more that social media marketers and influencers will love about this tool. Take its reputation management and listening tool. It helps you keep tabs on conversations around your brand and content. And there’s the social inbox that stores all interactions in one place. You can also track mentions through listening feeds. Work with a team? E-Clincher handles workflows, too. Create and manage all stages of your content creation and publishing processes and get stuff done like clockwork.

Social Champ’s a well-rounded social media management platform. While you only get a 7-day fee trial window, it’s enough to test the platform out. It helps teams improve their hold on social through a set of integral features. As with most platforms, you get a visual social media calendar. It’s where you can view all content or use filters to see bulk, queue, scheduled, recycled, and Forever posts. It also shows sent, future and failed posts, helping you keep track of any content that somehow didn’t get published so you can adjust your calendar accordingly.

Analytics will show top-performing content, and you get to see how audiences respond to content on each channel through platform-specific graphs. If you’re as busy as most social media marketers, you’ll appreciate Social Champ’s collaboration feature. With it, you can build workflows, assign team member rights, and easily turn social content creation and publishing into a predictable and fun process that’s perfected for optimal results. And for users always on the lookout for inspiration, Social Champ’s Chrome extension makes it easy to share images, blog posts, and videos with a click.

Kontentino comes with a 14-day free trial. And if you’re after a team tool, it may be what you’re looking for. Like others on our list, it offers a strong collaborative feature set. From creating post creation checklists and workflows to tagging team members and assigning tasks, you have all you need to ensure that content ideas never fall through the cracks. And if you’re worried about how content ideas have evolved over time, you’ll love Kontentino’s change tracker. It tracks version control during the social media planning and approval processes. 

Kontentino also comes with a drag-and-drop social media calendar, making updates and planning easier, especially for larger teams with multiple social accounts to manage. Speaking of management, you can get better at tracking and finding posts by labeling them. You can create any label of your choice and add them to posts as a way of tracking content produced for different purposes like entertainment, education, or selling. 

Core features aside, Kontentino adds a few nice-to-haves that you’ll find yourself enjoying. One is the UTM tag builder. If you’ve been at social for a while, you know how painful switching between tabs can be as you build UTM-rich URLs. To simplify this process, Kontentino has a UTM tag builder that easily fits into your workflow. Another is logo and branded frames. With this feature, you can easily add logos and branded frames to images without going the long route of creating a request for your designer to make the update.

ContentStudio gives users a 14-day free trial. It also does a little more than most social media platforms. For example, influencer marketing is big business, but it often means resorting to manual web research or investing in a separate tool to find the best influencers to partner with. ContentStudio has identified this challenge and solved it with an influencer discovery feature. 

It works for Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube. Results show how many posts an influencer has published, how many followers they have, how many accounts they follow, provide an interaction value for every thousand followers, and score each influencer out of a 100%. 

Content discovery is a feature more platforms offer today, and you’ll appreciate how ContentStudio’s works. You can search by keyword, topic, or identify sources. And if you want to get granular, you can build queries that include identifiers like “MUST ALSO”, “NOT”, “EXCLUDE”, and “LIMIT”.

ContentStudio has also taken a stab at automating content publishing social and blogs. This feature lets you identify sources or keywords and set auto-posting to push content to channels of your choice. Content can be reviewed if you’d like to personalize or approve it before publishing. 

Unique features aside, you get all the must-haves. ContentStudio has a beautiful planner, offers post scheduling, analytics on every channel, and an RSS feed reader. A team inbox is available to handle direct messages, along with collaboration tools to create workflows, tasks, and checklists.