Buffer Review Features, Pricing, Pros & Cons

What is Buffer?

Buffer is a social media management platform that helps small businesses schedule, publish, and analyze social media posts across various social networks. We mainly evaluated it for social media scheduling.

We were immediately impressed by the interface. We love using aesthetically pleasing software with a thoughtful user experience, and Buffer nailed it, especially compared to Metricool and Hootsuite. Buffer is modern while the others felt dated and old.

Upon connecting our social media accounts, Buffer even pulled in all of our past content and displayed it on a calendar, giving us an awesome birds-eye view of our past content schedule.

Aesthetics aside, functionality is what really matters so we put it to the test 💪

Social Media Platforms Tested

✅ Instagram Posts

When we tested Instagram, our post went through without any issues 🎉 When we tried to use Metricool for Instagram, we had major issues with the video file size, and the Metricool team said we'd need to re-size every video in order to post them through Metricool.

We had none of those issues with Buffer which was a HUGE win! Posting to Instagram was reliable and stable. You can format the captions, store hashtags, and choose a thumbnail.

Our content doesn't get a ton of views on Instagram (most of our audience is on YouTube, given we are a B2B channel), but we figure we might as well re-purpose the content for Instagram while we have it.

While we did see a slight decrease in views when posting via Buffer instead of Instagram directly, it wasn't anything major, and in general our content never gets a large number of views on Instagram. Because Instagram isn't a platform we care about much, we figured the time-saving from using Buffer to post outweighed any cons.

If you are thinking of using Buffer for posting to Instagram, I'd keep track of your video views and see if it's impacted at all from when you were posting manually.

✅ LinkedIn & X

We used Buffer to schedule our posts to LinkedIn and X, and it worked great 🚀

The only thing to note is that LinkedIn's API only allows for mentioning from LinkedIn Pages, and you can only mention businesses or individuals who follow that page, so that might be a bit limiting depending on the type of posts you're planning to schedule.

That said, by the sounds of it, Buffer is working on trying to make this possible:

❌ TikTok

We tested a TikTok post and quickly discovered that Buffer (like every single social media scheduling app) also couldn't handle caption formatting. It also didn't support the first comment feature for TikTok. If you don't care about caption formatting, then Buffer takes care of the scheduling part wonderfully, so you can still use it.

Our thought is more along the lines of, "if you're going to put work into formatting your caption, it's not worth using a social media scheduling app that will un-do your hard work. For TikTok, we ultimately decided to keep our posts as drafts and post manually on the day of for best results.

❌ YouTube Shorts

Buffer supports posting YouTube Shorts but you can't add related videos, or choose a thumbnail.

Spoiler: none of the social media scheduling apps allow for choosing a YouTube thumbnail, as YouTube's API doesn't allow for it.

For us, YouTube is our most important social platform, so we decided to use the native YouTube scheduling app instead.

Buffer Limitations

Best Time To Post Unclear

Another limitation we found with Buffer is that it doesn't suggest the best times to post. Instead, it offers seemingly random times or allows you to set your own posting schedule. However, the truth of the matter is that you can obtain a lot of this data directly from the social apps themselves—but it would have been nice to have in one social media management platform.

When we reached out to Buffer about this, we got an unclear answer that was something like "the more you use Buffer, the more Buffer can suggest the best times to post". We used Buffer for months (even on the paid tier) and didn't see any suggested post times.

Reporting & Analytics

Buffer also doesn't offer YouTube analytics, if that is something that is important to you. That said, we are heavy users of the YouTube Studio app, so this wasn't an issue for us.

Buffer Pricing

• Free Plan: Up to 3 social channels (10 posts per channel per monthj)
• Essentials: $6/month per channel for additional channels (beyond the 3 free tiers)
• Team: $12/month per channel (allows for team collaboration)
• Agency: $120/month for 10 channels + $6/channel for additional channels

Try Buffer Free Version.

Final Verdict

We love Buffer! If you're a small business, seriously, look no further than Buffer for scheduling content. Their free tier is extremely generous (although we did upgrade at a certain point because we were posting short form content almost daily).

The learning curve is small when it comes to using the app, they have a great mobile app, and the app is a clear winner when it comes to content scheduling.