Later Pricing: Is It Worth the Cost?

Social media management is an overwhelming task on its own. Add another frustration from tools that either do not match your needs or are costly. If you are here to determine whether or not Later pricing plans are worth the investment, you’re in the right place.

Many users cite Later as expensive. Its plans make you pay more unnecessarily by imposing limitations on the number of social profiles, the number of posts per social profile, and AI credits.

We will guide you through Later pricing plans and features suitable for different business types ー from individuals to small businesses, growing businesses, agencies, and enterprises. So, stick around and examine which plan fits the bill for your business. We’ll also introduce you to a better alternative to Later.

A Quick Overview of Later Pricing

Later pricing plans are divided into five tiers to meet the needs of different business levels, from individuals to large enterprises. Each tier consists of features that align with the needs of their respective business types.

Below is a breakdown of the Later plan features, which you can use to compare and determine whether Later pricing options align with your budget and needs. They work on the model of catering to a complete social set (1 profile each on 7 different social channels).

The five Later plans and pricing options, from Starter to Enterprise plans, offer flexibility for different business types. However, as the plans advance, the cost may add up due to the extra price for additional social sets, users, and AI credits. This can stretch the budget for growing teams or multi-brand businesses.

The additional social sets and multiple users may make it a suitable plan for various business levels, ensure your preferred plan mirrors your budget and business needs.

Let us look at the detailed Later social media pricing plans across different business types.

Later Pricing Guide: A Business-Specific Breakdown

1. Individuals

Suitable Later plan for solopreneurs and content creators:

Starter plan (1 social set)

Essential features included:

Later’s starter plan is cost-effective and supports solopreneurs and content creators in managing their social media accounts. The plan has features that allow individuals to manage only one social set, including Instagram, Facebook, X, Pinterest, TikTok, LinkedIn, and YouTube profiles.

The plan also provides other important features, such as customizable links to help manage partnerships and collaborations. The basic analytics feature helps users track the success of their social media for actionable metrics.

Missing Features:

Although Later’s Starter plan suits small businesses looking to exploit their basic features, it needs more essential advanced features that are limiting scalability. The basic features are a great starting point for individuals or content creators experimenting with social media content strategies before upgrading to a superior plan.

However, the plan limits active users who want to go beyond the surface-level data and gain content trends. Also, it only supports 30 posts per social profile, a big drawback for users who want to post more frequently to grow their audience.

In addition, the limited social media analytics and access groups may hinder small businesses from optimizing strategies for higher engagement and tracking ROI. For individual users looking for a scalable, budget-friendly plan, Later’s Starter plan cannot support long-term scalability.

For the Starter plan, you must pay an extra $3.33/month to get an extra 100 AI credits. This adds to the overall plan’s cost and limits small businesses looking into scaling their content using AI.

2. Small Businesses

Suitable Later plan for small businesses:

Growth plan (3 social sets)

Essential Features Included:

This is superior to the Starter plan and is suitable for small businesses that want unlimited access to groups. The plan also offers 30 AI credits and supports team collaboration.

Small businesses have their work simplified as the plan supports performance reports, calendar notes, and sharing, with up to one year of analytics data. It is also budget-friendly and helps small businesses repurpose and manage their content on multiple social media platforms.

Missing Features:

While the Growth plan allows small businesses to enjoy important features with a comparatively friendly budget, it still lacks advanced features like content approval workflows. This may limit accountability across teams.

The plan also supports only 3 social sets, which can be limiting for small businesses that deal with multiple brands or product pages. Now, let’s say a small business wants to run multiple Facebook and Instagram pages only, and not build a presence on other channels, paying for 3 full social sets would be a waste of money for them.

With the $45/month Growth plan, you still have to pay an extra $10/month for an additional social set, $3.33/month for extra AI credits, and $3.33/month for additional team users. This turns out costly for small businesses aspiring to scale their social media growth or oversee diverse social media platforms.

So, the Growth plan is not ideal for scalability, and small businesses will have to overstretch their budget to add more users and social sets.

3. Growing Teams and Mid-Sized Businesses

Suitable Later plan for growing teams and mid-sized businesses:

Advanced plan (6 social sets)

Essential Features Included:

This is one of the best Later pricing plans suitable for growing businesses with multiple teams.  It supports 6 social users, boosting collaboration among team members. You also get access to comprehensive social media analytics to evaluate and refine your strategies and maximize user engagement. The plan’s unlimited posting offers growing teams the business flexibility to scale their content.

With the brand management tool, you can have consistent messaging across multiple platforms. You can also use the brand collaborative feature to enable real-time feedback and post approvals.

Missing Features:

Although Later’s Advanced plan has several important features for growing teams, it still falls short of valuable capabilities. For example, it lacks a content approval workflow that helps maintain content quality, accountability, and brand consistency. This means teams may turn to manual approvals, which slackens workflows.

The lack of prioritized support means teams cannot get dedicated assistance, especially when troubleshooting or resolving technical issues.

While this plan offers full analytics data of up to one year, 6 social sets, and 6 users, you must pay $10/month for extra social sets, $3.33/month for additional users, and $3.33/month for extra AI credits. This cost is prohibitive for a team’s growth.

The Advanced plan does not support future scalability, so you might want to switch plans.

4. Agencies

Suitable Later plan for social media agencies:

Agency plan (15 social sets)

Essential Features Included:

The plan suits marketing agencies working with a larger team as it supports 10 users. It is AI-integrated to improve efficiency in content recommendations, automated captions, and optimized predictions. The feature saves you time and ensures your content is tailored to engage your audience.

With this Later Agency pricing plan, you also get an unlimited posting feature to manage extensive content schedules across various social profiles. This is a plus for agencies to meet high-demand posting for several clients or campaigns.

Missing Features:

Automated region-specific content and analyzed audience sentiment are essential for an agency supporting regionally diverse and localized brands. However, Later’s Agency plan lacks these features.

As an agency, you may miss critical conversations pertinent to your client’s brand and may not exploit emerging trends. Its limited localized reports make it difficult to derive granular performance outcomes for clients with local marketing strategies.

Later’s Agency plan allows 15 social sets, so you must pay $10/month for every additional set. This is in addition to $3.33/month for an extra user and $3.33/month for extra AI credits.

As your business expands, you may need to stretch your budget for the added features or subscribe to a higher-tier plan. If you are budget-constrained, this will hinder your business growth.

5. Enterprises

Suitable Later plan for large and multi-brand businesses:

Enterprise plan (30 social sets)

Essential features include:

The Later Enterprise pricing plan is the only one that supports all other plan features with extra features. It has no additional payments for extra users, social sets, or AI credits.

The plan has a built-in social listening feature that allows you to monitor brand mentions and customer sentiments in real time. It lets you proactively engage and manage social content crises.

The plan’s prioritized support allows you to get dedicated and prompt support responses, ensuring you minimize any disorder during high-stake campaigns. Also, the comprehensive AI support comes in handy to automatically generate captions and perform predictions.

Missing Features:

Although Later’s Enterprise plan supports social listening, it does not go beyond monitoring mentions and user sentiments. Comprehensive social listening should give trend analysis, predict insights, segment audience, and benchmark against your competitors. The Enterprise plan does not support all of these.

The lack of a landing page builder means you will miss out on the benefits of a built-in tool that centralizes social media campaigns and drives traffic to your landing pages. You will have to rely on an external platform, which would increase costs and potential delays.

Unlike the other four Later pricing plans, the Later Enterprise pricing option does not offer a free trial. So you have to go all in to use its versatile features. Without a free trial, you may not know if the features offer value for your money.

6. Non-Profits

Suitable Later plan for non-profit organizations:

Starter and Growth plans (1 to 3 social sets)

Essential features included

Later doesn’t have a separate Later non-profit pricing plan but you can capitalize on the Starter (1 social set) and Growth (3 social sets) plans. They run a Later Non-Profit Program, offering a 50% discount on their monthly and annual subscription plans to all qualified non-profits. You can apply here to benefit from the Later non-profit pricing discounts. They even offer a 100% off on their Growth plan for non-profits that are fighting to end racism.

Missing features:

As a non-profit, you may only want to post on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube and skip channels like TikTok and LinkedIn. Still, with the Later plans, you’d pay for the entire social set, not just selected channels.

An Alternative to Later – SocialPilot

Later is a suitable choice for social media management. However, some essential and additional features that businesses require to scale need extra payments. It can frustrate businesses looking to align their goals with a constrained budget.

In addition, only Starter, Growth, and Advanced plans are available for iOS subscriptions, which may limit on-the-go users who do not often access the tool via desktop devices.

SocialPilot comes in to address most of Later’s limitations, offering competitive pricing for individuals, businesses, agencies, and non-profit organizations. Let’s see how they compare against each other.

	SocialPilot	Later
Pricing	Starts at $25/month	Starts at $25/month
Best for	Agencies and small businesses	Influencers, content creators, and small businesses
Social profiles	10	7 (1 social set)
Ease of use
Support
Publishing
Bulk scheduling	500 posts	300 posts
Smart queues
Repeat post
First comment		Only for Instagram
Audience targeting
Content planning and creation
Content library		Media library
Calendar view	Easy to read
Holiday calendar
AI assistant
Instagram collab posts
Location tagging
Custom calls-to-action
Image editor		Basic image editor for cropping and resizing photos
Engagement
Social inbox	Unified inbox	Unified inbox
Reply to reviews and queries
Reply to DMs and comments		for DMs Yes for comments
Analytics
Detailed social media analytics	Easy to read
Custom report builder
Auto schedule report sharing to clients
Post performance
Team and client collaboration
Client management
Approval workflows	Easy and swift	Only for Agency and Enterprise plans
Per post-multi-user collaboration
Approval on the go
White labeling
White label dashboard
White label downloadable report
	Try for free	Later review

When comparing SocialPilot’s features with Later’s, Later does not address most users’ social media expectations. Below are some of Later’s limitations that cause users to look for a superior alternative.

• Later does not have a basic free plan but only offers a 14-day free trial for four plans, except for the Enterprise plan. This can be limiting for large and multi-brand businesses that want to experiment first before diving all in.
• Later loads additional charges for extra social sets, AI credits, and users, which can accelerate the cost for businesses handling many social media accounts.
• Later’s Starter and Growth plans allow scheduling a limited number of posts per social media profile, which limits business expansion. This is not in tandem with users’ needs, especially those who want to do high-volume posting on diverse platforms to grow their audience faster.
• The social listening feature is only available for the Enterprise plan, limiting the strategic and valuable insights that lower plan users can derive from social media data.
• Later’s pricing models do not sufficiently mirror each plan’s functionalities, particularly the comprehensive post-scheduling capabilities.
• Several users have been dissatisfied with the tool’s analytics data, scheduling feature, and video editing glitches, often slowing down their workflows.

The above limitations have created the need for a better alternative to Later, which should be cost-effective, allow for scalability, and have a user-friendly interface. SocialPilot is one such tool that helps users get value for their money. It has comprehensive and versatile features to address your growing business needs.

Below is what users get from SocialPilot:

Overall Verdict

Later is a niche social media tool capitalizing on visual content planning, but it is devoid of the versatility and comprehensive multi-platform applications that SocialPilot offers.

SocialPilot offers comprehensive analytics with all of its plans, but Later only gives you access to up to one year of social media analytics data. Still, Later charges an extra $10/month to add an extra social set, while the comparable price for adding extra social profiles with SocialPilot plans is $4/month, making Later more costly.

To optimize social media management, you should use a tool that balances cost and efficiency, like SocialPilot. Its cumulative features come at a relatively low cost and its plans offer easy scalability options. Try the tools for free to understand their use cases better.