SocialPilot charges $40 a month for ten social accounts and three users. Hootsuite charges $99 a month for ten accounts and one user. That is the entire pricing story, and everything below is detail.
I run Ecommerce Paradise, and social scheduling is one of the few software categories where the cheap option is not the compromise. SocialPilot is priced roughly 60 percent below the category leader for the same job, and the reason is that it does less of the enterprise reporting nobody at a small store reads.
This page is every SocialPilot plan, what each one actually includes, where the add-on charges hide, and which tier a store should buy. Prices verified against SocialPilot’s own pricing page in September 2026.
Manage Ten Social Accounts for $40 a Month
SocialPilot Standard includes 10 accounts and 3 users, with a 14-day trial that does not ask for a card.
Every SocialPilot Plan and Price
All figures from SocialPilot’s published pricing page. Annual billing saves 15 percent across every tier.
| Plan | Monthly | Annual, per month | Social accounts | Users |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Essentials | $20 | $17 | 5 | 1 |
| Standard | $40 | $34 | 10 | 3 |
| Premium | $100 | $85 | 20 | 6 |
| Ultimate | $200 | $170 | 40 | Unlimited |
| Enterprise | Custom, contact sales | |||
Every plan carries a 14-day free trial and SocialPilot does not ask for a card to start it. That is worth noting because most of its competitors do.
Prices are quoted before tax. SocialPilot bills in US dollars and shows local currency equivalents, with applicable tax added at checkout.
The Add-On Charges
Two things sit outside the plan price, and both are cheap enough that they change the buying decision rather than ruining it.
Extra social accounts are $4 a month each on every plan. That is the number that makes SocialPilot flexible, because it means you do not have to jump a whole tier to add two accounts. If you are on Standard with ten accounts and need twelve, you pay $48 rather than $100.
Extra user seats are $5 a month each on Essentials through Premium. Ultimate includes unlimited users, so the seat charge disappears entirely at that tier.
Run that maths before you upgrade. Standard at $40 plus five extra accounts at $4 is $60 a month for fifteen accounts, against Premium at $100 for twenty. If you need fifteen accounts and not twenty, staying on Standard and buying add-ons saves you $480 a year.
What You Actually Pay Per Account
Comparing social schedulers on headline price is misleading because they include wildly different numbers of accounts and users. Cost per social account per month is the honest number.
| Platform and plan | Monthly cost | Accounts | Users | Cost per account |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| SocialPilot Standard | $40 | 10 | 3 | $4.00 |
| Vista Social Professional | $79 | 15 | 2 | $5.27 |
| Buffer Essentials | $50 | 10 | 1 | $5.00 |
| Hootsuite Standard | $99 | 10 | 1 | $9.90 |
| Agorapulse Standard | $79 | 10 | 1 | $7.90 |
| Metricool Starter | $20 | 10 brands | 1 | $2.00 |
Read the users column alongside the price. Hootsuite and Agorapulse both charge per user, so a three-person team on Hootsuite Standard is paying $297 a month against SocialPilot Standard’s $40. That is not a rounding difference, it is a different category of expense.
Metricool is genuinely cheaper per connection and I will come back to why that comparison is not quite like for like.
Which Plan a Store Should Buy
Essentials at $20, If You Are One Person With Five Channels
Five accounts covers Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Pinterest and one more. For a solo store owner posting to the platforms that actually sell, that is enough, and $17 a month on annual billing is close to trivial against what the time saves.
The single-user limit is the constraint. The moment you hire a VA to handle posting, you either pay $5 for a seat or move to Standard.
Standard at $40, the One Most Stores Want
Ten accounts and three users is the sweet spot, and it is the tier I point people at by default. It covers a main brand presence across every platform worth being on, plus room for a second brand or a personal account, plus seats for you, a VA and a designer.
At $34 a month on annual billing, this competes with tools that give you one user and half the accounts.
Premium at $100, Only If You Genuinely Need Twenty
The jump from Standard to Premium is $60 a month for ten more accounts and three more users. Given that extra accounts are $4 each, Premium only makes sense once you need roughly fifteen or more accounts, or once the extra seats matter.
Do the arithmetic rather than assuming the next tier up is the answer. Standard plus add-ons beats Premium until about eighteen accounts.
Ultimate at $200, for Agencies
Forty accounts and unlimited users is an agency plan wearing a store owner’s price tag. If you are managing social for clients, the unlimited seats are the reason to be here. If you run one store, you will not get near this.
Where SocialPilot Is Genuinely Weaker
Cheap is only good news if the tradeoffs do not matter to you, so here they are plainly.
The analytics are functional rather than deep. You get posting performance, engagement and audience growth. You do not get the competitive benchmarking and share-of-voice reporting that Hootsuite and Sprout Social sell their price on. For a store measuring whether social drives revenue, that is fine. For an agency justifying retainer fees to a client, it can be thin.
Social listening is limited. If monitoring brand mentions across the web is a core job, this is not the tool, and you would be looking at a dedicated listening product or Vista Social’s listening add-on at $75 a month.
The interface is dated compared to Later or Buffer. It works, it is fast, and it is not going to win a design award. I have never seen anyone actually leave over this, but it is the first thing people mention in reviews.
I went through the whole feature set in my SocialPilot review, including where the scheduling queue behaves unexpectedly.
Try It Before You Compare Anything Else
Fourteen days, no card required, and 15% off if you commit annually once you know it fits.
What Happens When You Outgrow a Plan
Two mechanics worth understanding before you commit, because they decide how painful growth is.
Adding an account mid-cycle does not force a tier change. SocialPilot lets you buy an eleventh account on Standard for $4 rather than pushing you onto Premium, which is the opposite of how most per-seat software behaves. Hootsuite’s Standard plan caps at ten accounts and the answer to needing an eleventh is a plan upgrade.
Users are the other axis, and it is the one people forget. At $5 a seat on Essentials through Premium, adding a VA is cheap. But Essentials includes one user, so a solo owner who hires help is looking at $25 a month rather than $20, and at that point Standard at $40 with three seats included starts to look like better value than Essentials plus two seats at $30.
Model your account count and your headcount separately. Most people over-buy on accounts and under-buy on seats, then discover the constraint was never the number of platforms.
The Free Alternatives You Should Rule Out First
Before paying anything, know what you get for nothing, because for a meaningful number of stores the free tools are sufficient.
Meta Business Suite schedules Facebook and Instagram at no cost, including Reels and Stories, with basic analytics. If those two platforms are your whole social strategy, a paid scheduler buys you almost nothing.
TikTok, LinkedIn, Pinterest and YouTube all have native scheduling built in. It is less pleasant than a unified queue, and it is free.
Buffer’s free plan connects three channels with ten scheduled posts each, which is a genuine working setup for someone posting a few times a week. Metricool’s free plan covers one brand with twenty posts a month.
The honest case for paying is consolidation. One queue, one calendar, one place to see what is going out. That is worth $40 a month once you are managing four or more platforms or coordinating with anyone else. It is not worth $40 a month to avoid opening two apps.
SocialPilot Against the Cheaper Options
Two tools undercut SocialPilot on price, and they are undercutting it in different ways.
Metricool Starter is $20 a month for up to ten brands, or $16 on annual billing. That looks like half of SocialPilot Standard for the same connection count, and on pure scheduling it roughly is. What you give up is team seats, since Starter is a single user and team management arrives on Advanced at $53 a month. For a solo operator, Metricool is the cheaper answer.
Buffer is $5 per channel per month on Essentials. At three channels that is $15 and beats SocialPilot. At ten channels it is $50 and loses. The crossover sits around eight channels, and Buffer’s free tier is better than SocialPilot’s absence of one.
So the accurate framing is that SocialPilot is not the cheapest tool in the category. It is the cheapest tool that includes multiple users, and for anyone working with a VA or a partner, that is the comparison that matters.
Is the Annual Discount Worth It
Fifteen percent is a modest discount by software standards. On Standard it saves you $72 a year, which is real money but not enough to justify committing to a tool you have used for two weeks.
My rule is simple. Run the monthly plan for two full months first. Post on a real schedule, connect every account you actually intend to use, and see whether you still open it in week seven. If you do, switch to annual and take the 15 percent. If you have stopped opening it, you have learned something worth more than $72.
This applies to every tool, not just this one. The stores I see wasting the most on software are not the ones paying too much per tool, they are the ones paying annually for four tools they stopped using in March.
Does a Store This Size Need Any of This
Worth asking honestly, because I sell against my own affiliate commission here.
If you post twice a week to two platforms, you do not need a scheduler. The native scheduling in Meta Business Suite is free and covers Facebook and Instagram, and you can queue TikTok inside TikTok. Paying $20 a month to consolidate two platforms is buying convenience, not leverage.
The threshold where a scheduler starts paying for itself is roughly four active platforms or two people touching the accounts. Below that, the tool costs more in attention than it saves.
And for a high-ticket store specifically, social is rarely the channel that drives the first sale. Buyers spending several thousand dollars arrive from search with intent, not from a scroll. Social builds trust for people who are already considering you, which matters, but it is not where I would spend the first hundred hours.
If you are still deciding what to sell, the high-ticket niches list is a better use of this afternoon than configuring a posting queue.
The Cost Nobody Puts in the Comparison
The subscription is the small number. The expensive part of social is producing something worth scheduling.
A store posting four times a week across four platforms needs roughly sixteen pieces of content a month, with copy, images and a reason for each one to exist. At even a modest freelance rate that is several hundred dollars a month, or several hours of your own week. The $40 scheduler is around five percent of the real cost of the channel.
This is why I am wary when someone spends three days comparing schedulers. The tool decision is worth about twenty minutes. The decision about whether you have the content pipeline to justify any of them is worth a week.
If you are running the store alone and social is falling to the bottom of the list every week, the constraint is capacity rather than software. That is the case where handing the build and the launch to someone else frees the hours you would otherwise never spend on it.
Get the Store Built So You Can Spend Time on Selling
We handle the supplier outreach, the store build and the launch, so the hours you have go into the channels that actually move revenue.
Common Questions
Does SocialPilot have a free plan?
No. There is a 14-day free trial on every tier and it does not require a card, but there is no permanently free tier. If free is a hard requirement, Buffer and Metricool both have one.
What counts as a social account?
One connected profile on one platform. A Facebook Page and an Instagram profile are two accounts, not one. This is the most common reason people underestimate which tier they need, because a single brand presence across five platforms is five accounts.
Can I change plans mid-cycle?
Yes, and given the $4 per-account add-on you often do not need to. Buy the account rather than the tier until the arithmetic says otherwise.
Is the 15 percent annual discount refundable?
Treat any annual commitment as spent. This is why the two-month monthly test matters before you take the discount, on this tool or any other.
Do I need this if I am just starting?
Almost certainly not. Get the store live, get the legal setup handled, and get one traffic channel working first. Social scheduling is a problem you earn.
Reading a Social Scheduler’s Pricing Page Without Getting Caught
Four traps run through this whole category, and SocialPilot avoids some of them and not others.
Per-user pricing is the big one. Hootsuite and Agorapulse both quote a per-user monthly rate, so the number on the pricing page is what one person costs. A three-person team on Agorapulse Standard is $237 a month, not $79. SocialPilot includes seats in the plan, which is the single biggest reason its real-world cost lands so far below the headline competitors.
Annual rates displayed as monthly is the second. Almost every vendor here, SocialPilot included, shows you the annual-billing figure by default with the monthly rate in smaller type. SocialPilot Standard is $34 a month if you pay for a year and $40 if you pay monthly. Later’s entire pricing page is quoted at the yearly rate. Always check which number you are looking at before comparing two tools.
Profile bundles are the third, and Later is the clearest example. Its plans are sold in social sets rather than individual profiles, where one set is eight profiles across eight different networks. That looks generous until you want three Instagram accounts, which needs three sets rather than one.
Add-ons that are not optional is the fourth. Vista Social charges $29 a month for the X integration and $75 a month for listening on top of the plan price. If either is something you need, the real entry price is not the advertised one. SocialPilot’s add-ons are genuinely optional, which is a point in its favour.
What Changes if You Are Managing Client Accounts
The maths inverts completely once you are doing this for other people, and it is worth covering because a lot of store owners end up selling social management as a side service.
At agency scale the constraint stops being account count and becomes seats and white labelling. SocialPilot Ultimate at $200 a month gives you forty accounts and unlimited users, which across four clients at ten accounts each works out at $50 per client per month before you have charged anything.
Compare that to Hootsuite, where four clients needing ten accounts each puts you on Professional for unlimited accounts at $199 per user per month, and every additional team member is another $199. For a three-person agency that is $597 a month against SocialPilot’s $200.
The tradeoff is the reporting again. Clients paying a retainer expect a branded report that looks like it justifies the invoice, and this is where the cheaper tools show their price. Agorapulse and Hootsuite both sell heavily on client-facing reporting, and if that is what wins you the retainer, the extra cost is not waste.
For a store owner adding social management as a service to existing customers, SocialPilot Ultimate is the obvious starting point. You can always move upmarket once a client asks for something it cannot produce.
The Verdict on Price
SocialPilot Standard at $40 a month is the best value in social scheduling for a small store, and it is not close. Ten accounts, three users, and a per-account cost less than half of Hootsuite’s.
Buy Essentials if you are solo with five channels. Buy Standard if you have a team or more than five channels, which is most people. Add accounts at $4 rather than jumping to Premium until you are near eighteen of them.
Take the 14-day trial first, because it costs nothing and needs no card, and switch to annual billing only once you have used it for two months and know it stuck.
If the accounts and seats do not line up with what you need, the shape of the alternatives differs more than the price does. I compared the realistic options in my guide to SocialPilot alternatives.
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Trevor Fenner is an ecommerce entrepreneur and the founder of Ecommerce Paradise, a platform focused on helping entrepreneurs build and scale profitable high-ticket ecommerce and dropshipping businesses. With over a decade of hands-on experience, Trevor specializes in high-ticket dropshipping strategy, niche and product selection, supplier recruiting and onboarding, Google & Bing Shopping ads, ecommerce SEO, and systems-driven automation and scaling. Through Ecommerce Paradise, he provides free education via in-depth guides like How to Start High-Ticket Dropshipping, advanced training through the High-Ticket Dropshipping Masterclass, and fully done-for-you turnkey ecommerce services for entrepreneurs who want a faster, more hands-off path to growth. Trevor is known for emphasizing sustainable, real-world ecommerce models over hype-driven tactics, helping store owners build scalable, sellable, and location-independent brands.
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