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Planoly vs. Later: What is the Best Social Media Planner?
June 15, 2023
By
Irina Maltseva
The market is flooded with many social media scheduling tools in today's fast-paced digital era. Selecting the perfect one has become a daunting challenge in itself. But fear not! We've got you covered. Brace yourself for an in-depth showdown between two mighty contenders: Planoly vs. Later.
Planoly and Later rank pretty high among the best social media management tools. They offer similar features, including auto-post, Instagram scheduler, auto-publish, post templates, and more. Hence, it is no surprise that you may have difficulty deciding on which one to choose among them.
Luckily, we've taken it upon ourselves to test both tools to see which offers better value for money. This Planoly vs. Later comparison will cover their features, user experience, price, and who each tool is best for. So, let it inform your decision.
Planoly and Later are two popular social media management platforms offering various features designed to help individuals and businesses effectively plan, schedule, and analyze their social media content.
They simplify the work overload of managing multiple social media accounts, streamlining workflows, and maximizing engagement with followers. Although both tools were created to solve the same problem, they go about their solutions differently.
Planoly and its features are geared primarily toward Instagram, TikTok, and Pinterest. It provides a rather appealing interface where users can arrange and schedule posts in a grid format.
On the other hand, Later supports more channels, including Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, TikTok, and LinkedIn. And its equally appealing content calendar feature helps users schedule posts across all social profiles in advance.
The table below juxtaposes the significant differences between Planoly and Later.
Later offers a clean, organized, and user-friendly interface that greets you with the visual content calendar each time you log in. The calendar offers a clear overview of scheduled posts across your social profiles, allowing you to drag and drop posts for easy scheduling.
Right beside the content calendar is the file upload tab. You can easily drag and drop files from your computer into this tab, and you can drag from this tab into the calendar to schedule them right away.
Later also offers a library to access all your media on Later. You can see both old and new uploads and add them to the content calendar without any hassle.
Once your content is scheduled, Later automatically publishes it to the respective social profile without your action.
Planoly offers an equally clean interface. After login, The first page is the content calendar, with tabs for content templates, collection, and discovery. You also get a view of your most recent posts on Instagram, as seen in your feed.
You can easily drag and drop media files onto the dashboard to upload them to your account. You can then schedule them for the desired social profile.
Unlike Later, Planoly does not offer a media library where you can access all of your files. We also prefer the look and feel of Later's interface, which is cleaner than Planoly's.
Supporting 6 social media platforms, Later offers robust post-planning features.
It offers a visual planner for Instagram, letting you see what your feed will look like when your posts go live. So you can arrange each post according to get a particular pattern as you wish.
The versatile content creation tool lets you freely select stock photos from Unsplash. With it, you use them in posts or Instagram stories and schedule them right from your dashboard. It also lets you incorporate user-generated content into your marketing strategy.
With Later's post planner, you can optimize and schedule posts for each social media platform. All your media and texts can be tailored to each social profile so there are no awkwardities.
Planoly supports 3 social profiles, namely Instagram, TikTok, and Pinterest. Its primary social media platform is Instagram, so its features are mainly optimized for it.
However, it also offers a TikTok planner, which lets you organize and schedule videos for future posting. You can also save audio from trends.
The Instagram planning tool also offers a visual planner which lets you arrange and plan your feed with intentionality. It lets you drag and drop posts on the calendar for easy scheduling.
Later's auto-publish is one of the best in the industry. You can schedule and forget your posts. Once it's time, they get published without any input from you.
You can schedule and auto-publish Instagram images, carousels, Reels, and first comments with the Instagram scheduler. This feature is available for all 6 social platforms supported on Later, including LinkedIn, Twitter, and Pinterest.
Planoly equally offers auto-publish for Instagram and TikTok on its platform. Once you drag your content onto the content calendar, toggle on auto-post, and forget about it.
Users on the free version can only auto-post grid image posts, while paid users can auto-post images and video grid posts.
Later offers a wide range of content calendar management features that can help bolster your social media strategy. While some features are limited on the Starter and Growth plans, you get unrestricted access on the Advanced plan.
Later’s content calendar features include:
Planoly offers content calendar management features that are similar to those on Later. The only shortcoming on Planoly's end is that it only supports Instagram, TikTok, and Pinterest. On the other hand, Later supports 6 platforms and has dedicated content planners for each one.
Later's Instagram hashtag management is as advanced as its other features. It is a suite of tools that can extend your reach and potentially build your profile.
Later does more than suggest Instagram hashtags. It can also categorize and insert your hashtags into your posts in one click.
You can search by hashtag to find new engagement opportunities. You can track your branded hashtags from your dashboard. Finally, you can see which hashtags bring the most engagement.
The hashtag manager on Planoly does two things:
Later offers a powerful Instagram analytics tool in its feature arsenal. Anyone in digital marketing knows the importance of data in a marketing strategy. So this feature makes Later very impressive.
Later’s Instagram analytics tool reports insights on KPIs such as
Planoly also offers a powerful Instagram analytics tool. In fact, it reports most of the data Later’s analytics tool reports. However, it falls short in the area of hashtags and linkin.bio analytics.
While Later reports useful data on its hashtags and linkin.bio, Planoly doesn’t. Even if you subscribe to Sellit at $29/Mo, there’s still no data reporting.
Later offers a visual planner for Instagram, which lets you see what your feed will look like when your posts go live. You can arrange each post in the desired order as you wish.
The visual planner is a dedicated Instagram scheduling tool that lets you plan all kinds of Instagram posts — videos, carousels, Reels, and stories.
You can bulk-schedule multiple posts at once and plan your content weeks or months into the future.
Planoly also offers a grid preview of your Instagram profile right on your dashboard. The visual planner previews your Instagram feed as you schedule posts, while the grid on your dashboard updates when your posts go live.
With the drag-and-drop functionality Later, you can schedule posts for any social profiles in your account. You can also use it to rearrange how your scheduled Instagram content appears on your feed.
Planoly offers the same drag-and-drop features as Later. You can move things around your content calendar and rearrange your feed.
Later offers an advanced linkin.bio tool that is far from what is offered on Planoly.
Linkin.bio provides a fully customizable web page built into your Instagram and TikTok profiles. With it, you can create a mini store of sorts, where your content is clickable and shoppable.
This feature is handy for sellers, influencers, and entrepreneurs. You can curate the posts and reels containing your product and drop the link in your bio.
Users who click the link see your curated content and can easily locate what they are looking for. Later also has full analytics reporting for Linkin.bio. You can see which posts and products receive the most clicks.
The external link feature lets you direct visitors to other web pages. And a fantastic feature is the Mailchimp integration which you can leverage to build your email list.
Planoly offers an essential link in bio feature called Linkit. Linkit only lets you create a slightly customizable page. However, you can only curate posts. You can't sell directly from the page.
If you’d like to sell, tag products, and run promos from Linkit, you must subscribe to Sellit at $29 per month. Sellit is a shoppable gallery for online courses, digital products, and more.
Later and Planoly offer flexible pricing tiers and subscription plans to current and intending users. They have 3 pricing tiers, and users can pay annually or monthly.
Later's pricing tiers are Starter, Growth, and Advanced. They cost $18/mo, $40/mo, and $80/mo respectively.
Starter offers a set of social profiles, Growth offers 3, and Advanced offers 6. It's also worth noting that an annual subscription plan will get you 2 months free with Later.
On the other hand, Planoly's pricing tiers include Starter, Growth, and Professional. Each plan costs $13/mo, $23/mo, and $43/mo respectively.
Starter offers a set of social profiles, Growth offers a set as well, while Professional offers 2. You can save up to 15% when you pay for an annual subscription.
Here's a comparison of Later and Planoly's pricing and features:
While we've used (and recommended) both Later and Planoly as excellent social media post planners, Later remains our favorite.
The primary reason for this is that it supports 6 separate social profiles. This means we can individually optimize and schedule posts for each profile without compromising on their final aesthetics. Then there are bonus features like the AI writer, media storage, and the amazing linkin.bio features.
Although Later is more expensive on the outside because its subscription fee is higher, it offers a whole lot of value for that money.
Not only does Later offer every feature found on Planoly, but it offers even more. That includes an AI that writes Instagram captions. However, this does not mean it is for everyone.
Later is perfect for businesses, agencies, and freelance social media managers who manage multiple social platforms simultaneously. Conversely, an Instagram influencer who only needs to post media and grow their Instagram account may be satisfied with Planoly.
Irina is a Founder at ONSAAS, Growth Lead at Aura, and a SaaS marketing consultant. She helps companies to grow their revenue with SEO and inbound marketing. In her spare time, Irina entertains her cat Persie and collects airline miles.
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