The Best Later Alternative for Agencies and SMBs in 2023

Looking for the best later alternatives to manage your social media? We’ve got you covered. Read on to learn more about the Later social media management tool and the top later alternatives that best suit your needs.

Table of Contents

• What is Later?
• Why consider alternatives to Later?
• Hopper HQ: the best Later alternative
• Later advantages and disadvantages
• Later dashboard
• Later reviews
• Later pricing + plans
• The best Later alternative

Social media has become the perfect place for marketing any business, getting clients and staying credible to your audience.

• 73% of marketers find social media marketing effective
• 54% of users study more about products on social media 

So, why not use the power of social media to build your business? 

A dead social media profile isn’t doing your business any favours. People like to see fresh and engaging content on social networks. And creating content for all your social profiles on a regular basis isn’t that simple.

That’s when social media management tools like Later and Hopper HQ enter the scene. 

In this post, we’ll tell you more about Later, its main features, and the top 5 Later alternatives to turbocharge your social media presence. 

What is Later?

Later is a popular social media management platform where users can schedule posts. It works for Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Linkedin, TikTok and Pinterest. Later offers simplified features that make social media more manageable. 

The Later features include:

• Visual uploading
• Scheduling
• Writing captions
• Measuring performance 

Why consider alternatives to Later?

Later helps marketers plan and schedule posts and offers insights to improve their social media marketing efforts. However, it may not be the best tool for everyone, here’s why:

Reasons to consider Later App Alternatives:

• The free version is very limited
• The features in the basic plans are limited 
• You need to upgrade your plan to access key features
• The tool is expensive
• The analytics feature is limited in basic plans 
• The tool is more Instagram-focused
• The features in the basic plans are limited: 

To elaborate; Later’s most basic starter plan starts at $18/month, this, however, only includes 1 user, 30 posts, and limited analytics, without the option to add extra social sets or users.

If you wish to add extra social sets or users, you must upgrade to the growth plan at $40/month, where you can add each social set at an additional $15/month and each user at $5/month in addition to the monthly plan cost of $40.

Hopper HQ, on the other hand, offers a more affordable plan starting from $16/month billed annually, The plan offers 1 social set (6 social accounts), in addition to unlimited posts and users.

Additionally, Later’s analytics is quite limited in the first two packages. Only the premium plan offers advanced analytics. Meaning that if you don’t spend $80/month on the premium plan, you may have to use additional tools for measuring analytics. 

Want to leverage detailed analytics without the extra cost? Try Hopper HQ 👇

Hopper HQ: the best Later alternative

Hopper HQ is a social media management and scheduling tool and one of the best Later alternatives to schedule your social media posts, get insights, manage, and maintain your social media presence.

The Hopper HQ features include:

1. Social Media Posting for Multiple Platforms

• Post on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok and Pinterest
• Automate image and video posting 
• Easy uploading and editing features 
• Fully automate Instagram carousel posts without reminders
• Publish one post on all 6 networks at once
• Schedule and auto-post Instagram reels 
• Plan and schedule Instagram stories

2. Planning Social Posts Efficiently

• Content Calendar to visually plan all your content in one place 
• Create an Instagram grid with easy to use grid planner
• Add unlimited team members 
• Drag and drop feature to save time 
• Find out your best-performing posts with post analytics
• Find out the best time to post on your social for maximum engagement

3. Content Creation & Automation

• Create, schedule and auto-post your first comment
• Get relevant hashtag suggestions for your posts
• Edit and crop all your images 
• Bulk upload up to 50 images and videos at once

Hopper HQ Offers exclusive features to simplify social posting on multiple platforms, with excellent customer support to help you make the best use of the features at every stage. 

With Hopper HQ, you can cut your social media management time. Create one post and quickly post that on multiple accounts. Also, upload tons of visuals at once. There are options to repost and reschedule old posts as well. 

Our image editing options let you fix sizes and dimensions, add filters, text overlay frames, and adjust colours. You can improve your posts with hashtags, mentions, locations tagging and emojis in Hopper HQ. 

Hopper HQ makes everything about managing social media much faster and easier. It also lets you know lucrative insights about your efforts to engage more followers.

✨ Schedule & auto-post your upcoming social media content. Get Started with our 14-day Free Trial ✨

Hopper HQ Pricing

Hopper HQ’s pricing is relatively simpler than tools like Later social media scheduler. Hopper HQ comes with a single plan that allows you to bill monthly or annually. The monthly bill increases with the social sets you choose to have. Meaning you have to pay according to your needs only.

The Hopper HQ plan lets you post on all of 6 supported social accounts and add unlimited team members. If you need Hopper HQ for multiple sets of social media accounts, you can just add the required number of sets. This helps social media managers and agencies with multiple clients adjust their plans according to their needs whenever they want.

Agencies can also benefit from our bulk discount when adding more than 5 social media sets to their plan.

Additionally, you can save up to 15% if billed annually, and get a 14-day free trial to try out the tool. 

In short, Hopper HQ offers a range of features at cost-effective pricing. 

Later advantages and disadvantages

Just like any other tool, Later has its pros and cons. We’ve listed some of the advantages and disadvantages of Later below.

Later Advantages

• Offers a Visual Planner to plan Instagram feed
• The drag-and-drop feature makes scheduling easy  
• The caption saving option allows the reuse of the captions on other content

Later Disadvantages

• Limited features compared to the price
• Unlimited posts are available only in the Advanced plan 
• Advanced analytics are only available on higher plans
• Link in bio and tagging features are not available in the Starter plan 

Later dashboard

Later has a dashboard which shows a media library, calendar, analytics, Linkin.bio tool, as well as conversations. You will need to upgrade to different plans to access all the available features.

Later reviews

1. Great 3rd Party Scheduling App Option 

Very user-friendly and has great insights and tools. I prefer this over HootSuite and other competitors. I’ve also loved the option of posting automatically or manually and the app on a mobile device is easy to use.

Pros
I loved the suggested hashtag feature, saves so much time when posting to Instagram! It’s also a very easy-to-use software for scheduling feed posts and stories.

Cons
The price for multiple accounts is what has moved me to Facebook Business Suite. With a real estate company, we have multiple agents with social media, and it’s too much of a cost when there’s a free option for multiple accounts.

Haley S.
Real Estate, 11-50 employees
Used weekly for 2+ years
GetApp review

2 . Well designed Social Media Management platform with a fatal flaw 

Overall, Later was an incredible platform that offers some incredible features at a price point that cannot be beat – serving as the primary social media management platform for our team for well over a year. However, due to a lack of customer support surrounding a key feature consistently breaking, we were forced to give up on Later and move to competing products.

Pros
Later is an incredibly well-designed platform that offers the best user interface and planning features I’ve encountered across social media management platforms. Setting up Later with our Instagram & Facebook accounts was a breeze, as was configuring the platform to fit my specific needs with custom post-schedules, and their visual planner (offering week views, monthly views & even a profile view) – all available at their free tiered platform. Pay a couple bucks a month, and you get access to even more features – such as suggested posting times (truly an incredible feature), video posting, Instagram story posting, and team management options (such as Contributors) that are truly unbeatable at the price Later offers them.

Cons
While Later’s platform was absolutely stunning & incredibly user-friendly, my issue with Later stemmed from the continued issue of Later failing to post scheduled Instagram posts. I will say, I haven’t used Later since late 2018 (so this issue may have been resolved); but I was continually dealing with this issue for over 6 months – with a scheduled post failing to post, the Later platform marking the post as “failed to post”, and Later refusing to notify me of the failure – despite their fallback feature of notifying the user via the app when a post fails to get posted. With this issue I contacted support, but got given the run-around “Instagram’s API” was down (seems to have happened a lot while I was with Later and never when I switched to another platform), so I begrudgingly made the decision to switch to a more expensive & less featured platform that would auto-post to Instagram. As I mentioned previously, however, this issue may have been resolved in the past 1.5 years since I used the platform.

Darien C.
Religious Institutions, 1-10 employees
Used other for 1-2 years
GetApp review

3. Very useful software for organising and planning social media

Later has helped me with our social media profiles, helped my time management, and it has helped grow our social media presence by increasing our reach and growing our followers across our platforms. There are also a good series of online training videos which I have found helpful.

Pros
Being able to plan and automate our social posts in advance saves me a lot of time and ensures a consistent approach to our socials, which has grown our reach and following.

Cons
Previously you couldn’t post multiple images to a post, but it has been updated so you can now do that. We use the basic paid tier, so there are limitations, you can’t put links into posts on any platform or tag other profiles, which is a shame.

Ellen R.
Philanthropy, 1-10 employees
Used weekly for 1-2 years
GetApp review

Later pricing + plans

Later provides multiple paid tier plans:

1. Starter: $18/month, 1 social set, 30 posts, 1 user 

2. Growth: $40/month, 3 Social Sets, 150 posts, 3 users

3. Advanced: $80/month, 6 Social Sets, Unlimited posts, 6 users

Two separate plans are available for those who manage a number of clients, brands, businesses, & store locations. These plans are called Scale Plans.

1. Scale 15: $200/mo, 15 Social Sets, Unlimited Posts, 10 Users

2. Scale 30: $400/mo, 30 Social Sets, Unlimited Posts, 20 Users

Try Hopper HQ and start scheduling unlimited posts + get your social media team to collab with unlimited users at no additional cost  👇

Here’s a detailed comparison of all the Later features included in each of its plans: 

Planning and Scheduling: 

Linkin Bio Tool:

Analytics: 

Content Collection & Engagement: 

Time Management & Support: 

The best Later alternative

Despite having different features, Later lags in pricing and plans that would suit everyone. There are tons of different social media management tools that are great alternatives to Later, but how to choose the best one for you? 

Here’s a list of the best Later alternatives:

1. Hopper HQ

Hopper HQ is a social media management tool that offers amazing features for agencies, SMEs and social media managers. It’s one of the best Later alternatives with more flexible plans and pricing and a bundle of attractive features.

What makes Hopper HQ a great Later alternative?

The tool offers a platform that is intuitive and super easy to use, with all the features you need to grow your social media presence, at a more affordable price. 

Hopper HQ is the only Later alternative that offers unlimited post scheduling and unlimited users included in its plans, without the need to upgrade or pay more. what does that mean for you? You can schedule as many posts and add as many team members as you want. 

Here’s why you should consider Hopper HQ as an alternative to Later: 

1. Fast & Easy Post Scheduling

Hopper HQ lets you use delightful content scheduling tools. You could use the built-in calendar and grid planner to do the tedious scheduling in minutes. After creating your post, you can determine how the post will look in the feed using the grid planner. You can also drag and drop posts from the grid to your calendar. We bet this is the easiest way to schedule with less effort. 

2. Actionable Analytics & Reports

Hopper HQ offers analytics data on your account, audience, and published content. You can effectively evaluate your account performance as a whole with account analytics, or check the performance of individual posts to better understand what content better resonates with your followers via post analytics. Moreover, the Hopper HQ analytics tool offers  Hashtag Analysis and Best Time to Post data based on your followers most active times. This is very helpful information that helps optimise your posts for better visibility. 

3. Engaging Content Creation

Hopper HQ offers tons of user-friendly options to create posts, stories and reels. Hopper HQ allows you to craft a single post one by one or choose to upload and edit multiple posts at once. It lets you add images and video posts, captions, first auto comment, select location, add hashtags, and schedule to auto-post at your ideal time.  

Hopper HQ is a great option for creators, agencies and businesses of different sizes.

4. Customer Support

Hopper HQ offers excellent customer support on all plans to onboard and guide users and give quick responses and effective solutions if you ever you feel stuck or encounter any issues. 

🗓 Ready to plan your next post? Try Hopper HQ for Free Today! 

Later vs Hopper HQ

Features	Later	Hopper HQ
Pricing	$18/month for the Starter plan	$16/month
Social Sets	1 set for the Starter plan No extra sets can be bought in this plan without upgrading to another plan	Price is per 1 social set Full control over the number of social sets with bulk discounts
Number of users	1 user for the Starter plan	Unlimited users on all plans
Social post numbers	Up to 30 posts in the Starter plan	Unlimited on all plans
Analytics	Limited for Starter & Growth plans	Detailed analytics for all plans
Best Time to Post	Available	Available
Hashtag Suggestions	Available	Available
Visual Grid Planner	Available	Available
Supported Platforms	Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin & Pinterest	Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin & Pinterest
Free Trial	Available	Available
Bulk Upload	Available	Available