Metricool

If you're managing social for multiple clients, you'll know that posting is only half the job. The other half is proving your strategy is working by pulling performance data, sending monthly reports, showing clients what their competitors are doing.

If you're a freelancer with 8-12 clients or small agency and you want to be able to put together white-labeled reports that look professional, Metricool is a decent option to consider.

Maybe you've looked at agency tools like Sprout Social or Hootsuite and balked at the price. But then you looked at more affordable tools like Buffer, and their analytics felt too thin to do strategic client work. Metricool is trying to fill the gap in between those two levels.

If you're running paid social alongside organic, Metricool lets you see both in one place, even on the free plan. That's super unusual.

Most social media schedulers don't touch paid at all.

During our initial research to see who the modern day social media scheduling contenders are, Metricool appeared multiple times piquing our interest. We watched a couple YouTube tutorials and Metricool looked promising and it sounded like we'd be able to use it to post on YouTube Shorts, TikTok, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, like we wanted.

We saw Metricool even had a nifty calendar displaying the best time to post and a first comment feature on certain social media platforms, which we frequently used to direct our audience to our full-length podcast episodes. This was initially impressive and felt like it would help us with optimizing our content plan.

Encouraged by these features, we created an account. However, we quickly began to notice the limitations once we started using it 😬

YouTube Shorts auto-posting isn't optimized through Metricool. Although it allows for auto-posting, you can't add related videos, or most importantly, select a thumbnail for your short (at the time of writing, YouTube doesn't allow you to change the short thumbnail after posting).

We later learned this is actually a limitation of YouTube's API and none of the social media platforms allowed for this.

Given that YouTube is our most important channel, we decided to continue posting to YouTube Shorts manually and use Metricool for all other channels—or so we thought.

Metricool also didn't provide the best times to post on YouTube like it did for Instagram and TikTok (although you can get this data directly from YouTube Analytics which is what we use now). Overall, we'd say skip using Metricool, or any social media scheduling tool for posting your YouTube shorts, unless you don't care about choosing a thumbnail (keeping in mind that thumbnails do matter for CTR).

When we scheduled our first TikTok to auto-post, the formatting of our captions was completely removed. Our post ended up looking like a mess 🤔.

Spoiler alert: none of the other apps allowed for proper TikTok caption formatting either, likely due to TikTok's API limitations.

When we tried to schedule an Instagram post, we encountered an error saying our video size was too large, which was particularly frustrating since we could easily post the same video directly to Instagram.

We kept getting an error with the file size when trying to schedule our Instagam post from Metricool.

After chatting with the Metricool customer support team, they said this was an API limitation, meaning we'd have to resize our videos in order to use Metricool.

Metricool's Customer Support Team was adamant that we needed to re-size our Instagram Reels. We tried posting the same videos with Buffer, a Metricool competitor, and it worked perfectly.

This was a deal-breaker for us. While we could resize videos, we already had dozens of shorts made which would have been time consuming for our team to re-size. With all the coordinating with our video editor, were we really going to be saving time or just adding more grunt work on our plate? With that in mind, we decided to evaluate other tools,

Spoiler: Turns out while Metricool had limitations when it came to the Instagram video size, when we tried the exact same files with Buffer, it worked perfectly 👌 With that, Buffer instantly overtook any desire to continue using Metricool. Read our full Buffer Review.

We didn't go down the path of trying to use Metricool for LinkedIn or X (Twitter) since we already determined it wasn't going to work with us with the limitations above. As a note, you can also view Facebook Ads and Google Ads performance within Metricool, although this is a feature we also didn't evaluate.

A friend who works in marketing tested Metricool when it was still relatively new. At the time they were managing around 10–15 client accounts and gave it a few weeks of real-world use before deciding it wasn't the right fit.

The biggest issue wasn't pricing or analytics. They needed more mature agency features like approval workflows, brand grouping, and client management controls that Metricool didn't have at the time.

Reliability was an issue too.

Reconnecting social accounts occasionally is normal because the platforms periodically revoke access for security reasons. But they found channels were disconnecting far more often than expected, which became frustrating when you're responsible for multiple client accounts.

They later worked with a personal-brand client using Metricool and ran into Instagram issues that ended up being dealbreakers: video size limitations (just like the ones I ran into), failed posts, and content that sometimes underperformed compared to publishing natively.

So that's really the problem with Metricool. It's trying to give smaller agencies and consultants access to reporting, analytics, competitor tracking, and paid social insights without forcing them into enterprise-level pricing.

But the people who need those features are usually the same people who need super reliable workflows and minimal interruptions.

This is Metricool's strongest feature. It shows historical performance data from all your platforms into one clean dashboard.

It also pulls up to 100 competitor profiles (on paid plans), so you can track what competitors are posting, how often, and what's working for them.

If you're running paid social alongside organic, Meta Ads, Google Ads, and TikTok Ads all pull into the same dashboard. Having paid and organic in one place is something most schedulers don't offer, and is definitely interesting.

Heads up though, the analytics graphics are watermarked on lower plans to push you toward upgrading.

Metricool will auto-generate PDF or PPT reports and send them directly to clients for you on a monthly basis, and on advanced plans, you customize them with your logo and colors.

There's also a Looker Studio connector and the ability to build custom client-facing dashboards, which makes you look more professional without needing extra tools. For agency work, this is one of the better reporting setups I've seen at this price.

The frustrating part: when I went into the Reporting section to check it out, the main feature showed me "Create a Report" and then almost everything else was greyed out with an "Upgrade your plan" prompt. I understand freemium. The free tier can feel more like a demo account than an actual account.

Saved Texts are useful and something tools like Buffer doesn't offer.

Metricool lets you save text snippets you reuse across posts (think: captions, hashtag sets, recurring links) and pull them in without retyping.

This is actually a feature I've been wishing I had in Ordinal when I'm posting podcast clips.

I could save a "Saved Text" called something like "Podcast: Claude Failed You" with the YouTube link to that episode and the hashtags I want on every single clip.

Then with one click, they're in my post. For anyone with a predictable content cadence, this is a small feature that will save you time.

This one caught my eye because the concept is interesting and not something I saw a lot when I was comparing tools: you can monitor and analyze how a hashtag is performing on X or Instagram, track reach, and see how it's being used.

This is useful for campaign work or just staying on top of what's resonating in your space.

But then I saw the price: $25 per day 😅 Not a monthly fee...per day. I'd skip this entirely. There are tons of free hashtag trackers out there, and even the paid options are way more affordable than Metricool.

We're in the age of AI, so like a lot of tools out there, Metricool has a built-in AI writing assistant for drafting post copy.

Credit limits are slim (5 per brand per month on Free, 20 on Starter) so think of it as more of a fallback when you're stuck than a daily workflow tool. On the advanced tier you get more credits and can set custom instructions, which is more useful.

I tested it out some of our copy and I wasn't impressed.

I dropped in a caption we used for a recent LinkedIn post and asked it to optimize the copy for Instagram. Here's what I got:

The suggested caption was not something I'd share on our channels and definitely not what I'd call "optimized." It feels spammy (sooo many emoji!) and it swapped our writing with generic, AI-sounding copy.

Metricool connects with most of the tools you're probably already using, like Canva, Adobe Express, and Google Drive.

More advanced plans also support integrations with Looker Studio, Zapier, and Make, so it would be easy to automate workflows and streamline reporting.