Buffer vs Later Comparison

I am actually a paid user of Later. However, when setting up a social media management service for a client, I needed to schedule posts for LinkedIn, which is not possible with Later. Therefore I recommended to my client to use Buffer and that's why I used it. I was pleasantly surprised by the ease of use. The biggest plus was having LinkedIn function and also the scheduler for Instagram was instant.

There wasn't anything not to like. What was missing for me is the feature Later has which is the Linkin.bio, otherwise Buffer would have had the upper hand because it also had LinkedIn scheduling. But the Linkin.bio that Later offers, was a winner for me.

That you can easily share directly or schedule interesting articles to get published later, while you are browsing in the Internet, with just a few clicks.

Their analytics / dashboards within the tool are quite basic.

The user interface is easy to navigate, everything is clear about what it does, and I feel confident scheduling my social media posts across multiple platforms.

I wish it had the ability to mark content as evergreen and have it "recycle" that content at a later date.

- Spaces out Twitter reposts so it doesn't bombard the timeline and allows you to stay consistent even if you miss a few days - Good reporting tools

- Not a great 'all platform' scheduler Don't really have any cons because haven't used it enough, because using Later for direct IG posting

I like the fact that it is easy to schedule social media posts using this platform. It saves you time by offering the functionality of scheduling previously scheduled posts for a later time.

It should focus more on adding more integrations and collaboration features.

It was great that I could schedule posts to go out later on instead of immediately, that way I could do a month's worth of work in a few hours depending on what it was.

I didn't like that it makes the twitter posts look strange and doesn't give good options for adding multiple photos to posts either.

Someday i was doing routine social media marketing of a client, I was using some other tool before where that was not possible for me to schedule the posts to LinkedIn with that old software named Later, That's why suggested my client to use buffer, And it was quite helpful for that scheduling task on LinkedIn along with the Instagram after that i am using this regularly.

If we talk about disliking there was not anything like that to be dislike, but i found something missing that was later have that is linkin.bio, otherwise that its great.

Easily post the same content (or slight variation of it) on multiple social media platforms. Queue posts for later posting according to a custom schedule. Chrome extension to easily add links to your queue. It does one thing, and does it well.

Can't manage other social media aspects such as messaging nor comments.

Thanks so much for the kind review, Rodrigo! For managing messages and comments, may I recommend Buffer Reply, our social media engagement tool? Here's a bit more information about it: https://buffer.com/reply/. -Alfred

Buffer is a company that does one thing, and they do it very well. You can create and schedule social media posts on Twitter, Facebook and more. The best part is that they don't make you schedule every single post -- you can simply create content and add it to your queue or "buffer," and it'll be posted at the best time, or on the schedule that you set for the week.

It's not good for social media monitoring, just for posting. You can add posts to your Buffer to be posted later, but you'll need another tool in order to do community management and engagement.

Easily post across platforms Synchronize posts or plan different timing Works in conjunction with other apps Schedule posts so content creation can occur in the middle of the night, but launch 2 days later without having to remember to get to your system to post

Free version had some restrictions on amount of platforms, but not a hindrance to me since I only used 3 at the time I found myself getting confused about the posting process more than once, but that may have just been me. UI and process could have been more simplistic though

I love the capability of being able to load up my social media posts, allow others to review and approve and then I can post immediately to my social media platforms (or schedule it to post later). The overall user experience is very good and clean. I really enjoy navigating it.

We had a hard time posting on Instagram at times. I think it was an issue with the type of Instagram account that we had linked up. Really not a big deal in our realm of operation so not a huge issue (or one that we wasted time in troubleshooting) . I'm sure the support team would resolve it if we reached out.

a. Add team member and can give limited to full accessb. Can easily check performance of same post on multiple platformsc. Effortlessly connect multiple social media handles to start posting content

Need to have a feature wherein social media chats can be handles using Buffer

I like that buffer is very easy to integrate in my blog. It makes sharing my contents on my social media platforms very possible and simple, it does it automatically. I love the feature that makes it possible for me to schedule my post to be published at a later date. I used it so much for content marketing.

Buffers is a pretty software but it would be really nicer if more social media platforms are available to automatically share from buffer to them.

I love the slick user interface. It is very easy to use and really found the biggest pin points: Being able to share anywhere, plan my posts for later, and the queue. They also have a great API which means that several services have been able to connect to Buffer and make sharing to Buffer a lot easier.

Would love to see a lot more analytics and be able to share on chatting apps. They haven't built out the functionality yet. But if you don't have that need, it's a great tool.

Thanks for the review and feedback, Diego! It'll be great to hear what other data you wish to see in the analytics. Thanks.

The simplicity that it offers is unparalleled against it's competitors. I like being able to set the schedule and then just throwing posts into the system to get scheduled for later. Saves a lot of time and yet I can still schedule for specific times. Even offers posting to Instagram directly now which is a game changer for me.

Would have liked a few more scheduled posts available on the free version - but I guess that's the point in getting me to pay. It's not exactly cheap software.

Thanks for the review and feedback about the post limit and price. Thanks for upgrading to the pro plan, too. Happy buffer-ing!

Ease of use, ability to schedule social media posts

N/A

I like how it makes it easy to share links from my personal profiles and space them out. The browser extension is the only way I use it and I rarely have to go to their website/product. The best part is - it's free to use. (There are paid plans but I'll come to that later). Also, they have a great team their support staff is pretty good.

While it's easy to use for individual/personal profiles, I find it limiting for what it offers to businesses. One thing it does really well is "scheduling" and that's what I use it for. It does seem pricey if you compare it with some of the other tools in the market. There's a lot more that you can get for that.

Very easy to use. Powerful. Is maintained and updated very often. Provides useful data for analytics. Connects to the most popular social networks.

Free tier may not be enough for several users, and premium plans are expensive. Sometimes it can be unreliable to schedule posts.

I like that it's easy to use, navigate and I liked using it for a couple of my clients as I work as a Social Media Manager and I've used it for many clients because it was cheap and it worked pretty good.

After using this software for over a year or so, I noticed that a few times, my post didn't get published and the software didn't even send notification to my email or phone and I didn't post anything to social media when I needed to. This started happening more often later on, and that is the reason I went looking for services that will not let me down in these situations.

Hi, Stanisa, thank you for the honest review and feedback. I'm sorry that there have been a few errors with publishing your posts. We're keen to improve the reliability there. For the notifications, would you be up for going to My Account > Email Settings to turn on the Update Failures email notifications? Thanks. -Alfred

Buffer is very easy to use. Adjusting your posting schedule is simple and intuitive. After that, it's as simple as using any social media platform. Buffer is great for spacing out non-time-sensitive content. You can put the polish on your posts sitting at your desk, and then drop it in the queue for later. Buffer keeps doling out your posts one at a time following your predetermined schedule. It lets you get content to your followers when you know it will matter most without having to interrupt your own schedule to do so.

You can't choose a specific day or time for posts to be sent. When you add them to the queue, it just takes the next one on the pile when it's time to send something. That's typically not a problem, but occasionally, I've got something that I want to make sure hits first thing on a Friday. I've either got to shuffle my queue to get it to line up right or more likely, I've got to use another tool to schedule that post for a specific time.

Buffer allows me to quickly and easily create and schedule posts for LinkedIn. It even has a handy place to store ideas to post later. I'm on the free version and can set up a large number of posts in advance. While I believe there's a limit, I haven't hit it. I usually have 5 or 6 pre-planned at any time. It's easy to post, find the day on the calendar you wish to post and begin typing. You can narrow down the time to the exact minute you want to post. That's a very handy feature!

There are other features that would be helpful but you can only use them if you're on the paid plan. The system will ask if you want to do xyz then when you click yes you find out you have to pay for that feature. It would be nice if they would say up front, do you want to try xyz feature on the paid plan or something like that.

I've continually looked for a solution to make me better at posting to all my business's accounts across multiple platforms. When I found Buffer, it all clicked. I went from posting sparsely across a few platforms to being able to manager 3 companies Social media feeds with multiple posts a day. Buffer opened up the door for me to handle this.

The main Con is that it's too fast. What I mean by this is the initial settings wore me out trying to fill it. It delivers your posts so efficiently that I needed to step my game up quickly. I later learned that I could dial back the amount of posts in my Queue to make it possible to keep up. Since then I've been able to achieve the daily suggested posts as they were at the initial install.

- User friendly - Reliable auto publishing - Works with Facebook Groups as well as Pages - You can create campaigns to track all posts with some specific topic - Drafts - Includes analytics for published posts - Regular updates, improvements and new functions

- It is not possible to set campaign in drafts so you have to remember to add it after adding in queue - Does not reccomend best time to post based on the data from published content - Can't trasnfer drafts between profiles - Missing build-in tool for cropping picture - Tagging other Facebook Sites could use some improvements, sometimes it is hard to find the right page since there are not profile pictures

Later offers a wide variety of post scheduling features for most popular platforms but at a more modest price point. Later also offers some features not commonly implemented in competing products, such as a calendar view that makes it easy to see at a glance what posts are scheduled, and at what date/time.

Unfortunately Later's complexity does get the best of it sometimes, meaning the learning curve, while not bad, is certainly steeper than some competing tools like Buffer.

Later has some great features, especially with Instagram. I love how you can map out your posts within the app.

While I love the expertise it shows with Instagram, we've just found that other systems that do the same thing such as Buffer, would work better for our business.

I liked the price of the software the most. You get a lot of value from a small fee,

I dislike the user interface of Later. I have found that platforms like Buffer and Planoly have far better and easier to use designs. They need to work on this.

No pros were added to this review

No cons were added to this review

How easy it is to use, that it's an industry standard, and the extra features in the subscription are actually worth the price. The free version is accessible to people new to social media marketing, which makes it easy for anyone to get social media marketing/communications experience. The interface makes it easy to visualize when posts are scheduled, which photos have or haven't been used yet, and which social networks the posts are scheduled for. On top of that, I love that each post can be customized based on a platform's post guidelines and, if you have different demographics for each network, you can tailor your first caption to whatever audience you're trying to appeal to.

The only issue I ran into with Later is trying to authorize Later to log into Facebook mostly because we have multiple admins on the organization's page. We ended up resolving it by finding out the only person allowed to authorize the two apps to combine info is the person with the email address tied to the Later account. It's a hassle to keep in mind, but a small one that can be relieved easily.