Buffer

Buffer is a social media scheduling, engagement and analytics tool for creators, small businesses and small agencies, priced per channel with a free plan.

Buffer is a social media management tool for people who publish to several networks and want one queue, one calendar and one place to answer comments. It is made by Buffer, Inc., an independent and fully remote company founded in 2010 that publishes its own finances openly. Publish holds the schedule: each channel gets its own posting times, a post is written once and edited per network before it goes out, and the calendar shows drafts, posts awaiting approval and scheduled posts side by side. Create is an ideas board that pulls in images from Canva, Dropbox, Google Drive and OneDrive and articles from RSS feeds. Community is the engagement inbox for comments and mentions, with saved replies, AI reply suggestions and a Comment Score that grades response rate and speed. Insights is the analytics layer, with exportable reports, branded on the Team tier, and plain-language takeaways. An AI Assistant that drafts, rewrites, shortens and retones posts is included on every plan, the free one too. First comment scheduling, a hashtag manager, bulk CSV upload, recurring posts, an Instagram grid preview and Shop Grid, and a Start Page link in bio round out the toolset. Beyond the big networks, Buffer publishes to Threads, Bluesky, Mastodon, Google Business Profile, TikTok and YouTube Shorts. Buffer suits solo creators and individuals running their own channels, small businesses on the free plan or a few paid channels, and small agencies that add and drop channels as clients come and go. Teams that need a simple approval step before posts go live take the Team tier, which also brings unlimited team members and access levels. Buffer is sold per channel rather than per seat, on a Free plan and the Essentials and Team tiers, billed monthly or yearly, with the per-channel rate falling as an account grows and a trial of the paid plans. A week on Buffer starts with a queue of scheduled posts that auto-publish, then moves through the content calendar and idea backlog, the comments and mentions from several networks answered in one place, client content approved before it goes out, and one post rewritten into platform-specific variants with AI. It has iOS and Android apps, browser extensions, a public API and MCP integrations for agents, and it connects to Zapier, Make, n8n and IFTTT. The design tool and the networks themselves stay in the workflow; Buffer is the queue between them.