Later Review: Is It the Best for Instagram Scheduling in 2024?

A Beginner-Friendly Social Media Management Platform with a Secret

Later is an Instagram-focused social media management platform for editing, scheduling, and automatically publishing social media posts. It also integrates with a couple more social channels, including Facebook, TikTok, Twitter, Pinterest, and LinkedIn.

Although it offers a wide range of plans at different price tags, it’s clear that Later’s primary target audience is Instagram content creators. Although bigger teams and social media agencies can collaborate through Later, the app is missing a few core features, such as message automation and customer relationship management (CRM). That, combined with its limited reporting capabilities (besides Instagram), means you might not know enough about your audience to develop your marketing strategy.

But I wouldn’t dismiss Later as a viable solution too quickly. After all, not everyone needs super in-depth audience insights to run their social media accounts. Later is a well-designed social media management platform with an intuitive interface and easy-to-use tools.

Best of all? You don’t need to break the bank to make the most of this app. With that in mind, I’ll let you in on a little secret. Later’s free plan is great, and its most valuable option is actually NOT the most expensive.

Read on to find out which plan won me over and whether it’s the right choice for YOU.

Later Isn’t as Feature-Packed as Some of Its Competitors

Later has all the tools social media marketers need to schedule posts and stay on top of their busy schedules. It’s an Instagram-focused platform. So if that’s where most of your audience is, you’ll appreciate features such as the Stories scheduling tool and the link-in bio creator.

As a small content creator, Later worked fine for me. I should mention that the platform locks some core features (e.g., collaboration and conversations) behind more expensive plans. Other extra features (e.g., CRM and automatic responses) are missing altogether.

Post Editor

Later integrates natively with Unsplash, allowing you to draw inspiration from millions of royalty-free images. You can, of course, upload your own media if you like – stock images aren’t as engaging as the original content you create. Once you insert your media, editing is super easy with Later’s tools. There are specific crop sizes to fit different platforms, filters, and text options.

That said, you shouldn’t expect Lightroom-level edits from Later’s built-in image editing tool. Popular social media management platforms like Hootsuite and Buffer offer plenty more options.

Once everything looks good, you can use Later’s AI to find relevant hashtags and even have it write a caption for you. Keep in mind that you have to feed it a few keywords before it can come up with anything, and it doesn’t always hit the mark – AI-generated text can be pretty generic. Still, it’s useful, even if just as an ideation tool.

Bulk Publishing

Later allows you to schedule posts on various social media platforms, including Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. As a free user, you can schedule up to 10 monthly posts per channel, and you’re limited to 1 set of social accounts. That’s actually decent, and you get plenty more as a paid user.

I love how you can create Instagram Stories directly through the platform – I’m not a fan of mobile video editing. Due to an API limitation, however, Later (and all third-party apps) can’t publish Stories for you (bummer, I know). When it’s time, Later will send you a reminder, and you can post your Story with a few clicks via the mobile app.

User-Generated Content

User-generated content (UGC) is basically free marketing, and we all love it. But manually scouring social media platforms for hours and keeping track of mentions can get exhausting.

That’s why I appreciate Later’s UGC search tool. You can quickly view all relevant tags, mentions, and hashtags from the main Media menu. It’s easy to repurpose user-generated content and share it with your audience (with proper attribution). I only wish Later offered more social listening insights – you know, so I can better tell how people feel about my brand.

Mobile App

All social media management platforms should offer mobile apps that allow you to stay on top of your scheduled posts on the go. Later has a mobile app, and it’s actually a prerequisite for those who want to use Instagram Stories scheduling.

Later’s mobile app has a user-friendly interface that’s easy to navigate, with a simple and intuitive menu. You can schedule posts and add new media with a few taps. Unfortunately, the mobile version of the platform isn’t fully featured as it lacks collaboration tools and analytics.

Later Features at a Glance

My Experience Using Later – I Had Zero Issues Navigating the Platform

Later might not be as feature-packed as other social media management platforms, but it gets the job done without a fuss. The sign-up process is straightforward, the interface is well polished, and I love how I can drag and drop media onto my calendar and schedule posts in just a few seconds.

Simple Onboarding Process

Later’s onboarding process is swift and easy. Within a few minutes, I had created my account and was already uploading media and scheduling Instagram posts. The platform guides users through setting up their accounts and connecting their social media profiles, making it simple to get started. This is especially helpful for businesses that may be new to social media management tools.

Intuitive Post Scheduling Interface

Later’s scheduling interface is both pretty and functional. The drag-and-drop calendar makes it easy to schedule posts, and the ability to preview what each post will look like on each social media platform is a helpful touch. The Instagram Stories tab is also quickly accessible via the calendar, but note that it’s not currently possible to auto-publish these – blame it on Instagram.

Easy Collaboration Tools

I like how Later prioritizes team collaboration with a couple of useful features. You can invite members to join Later with a simple link. Once they create their accounts, you can assign roles and change permissions in a few clicks via the settings menu. You can have multiple people working on your posts, but make it so that nothing goes live without your approval.

Your team (aka Access Group) can easily add notes to uploaded (or downloaded) media, categorize them using labels, and even leave notes directly on the calendar. It’s also possible to invite contributors to share images with you without actually having to join the platform – which can save you a lot of time.

Later’s Analytics Suite Is Great, Provided Your Focus Is on Instagram

Later offers a variety of reports to free users, including engagement metrics, impressions, reach stats, follower growth, and post performance for all major channels. Upgrading to a paid plan will unlock access to more advanced analytics, such as Instagram hashtag analytics and audience insights (i.e., age, gender, location), which are invaluable to businesses that rely heavily on social media marketing.

I like how Later provides insights and recommendations based on analytics data. Even as a free user, you’ll be informed about the best times to post and the most effective hashtags.

One of Later’s strengths is its real-time analytics, which allows businesses to track the performance of their social media campaigns in real time. This feature is particularly useful if you want to stay on top of trending topics and respond quickly to changes in your industry or market.

I also like how you can customize reports so that they prioritize or only show the metrics that matter most to your business. If you’re a paying user, you’ll also be able to export and share your reports with the click of a button.

I have two main complaints. The first is that analytics on channels other than Instagram are somewhat limited – which might or might not be an issue for you. The lack of a sentiment analysis tool is also potentially problematic. If I don’t know how my followers feel about my content, it might be difficult to inform and improve my strategy – raw numbers don’t always tell the whole story.

Responsive but Access to Live Chat Support Requires an Upgrade

Free users are limited to Later’s knowledge base and can submit tickets via the chatbot for the first 30 days after signing up. Indefinite ticket support is included with the Starter plan. That said, only users on the Advanced plan have full access to the platform’s live chat, which is available 8 am to 4 pm EST, Monday to Friday.

Customer support through social media is also available, and you can get help from the community forum. Unfortunately, Later doesn’t have phone support – not even on its expensive enterprise-level Scale plans. While that’s not a real problem for me (I’m not a fan of phone support), it might be important to you.

I fired up the chatbot and asked a simple question at around 6 am EST on a Thursday:

“Can Later set up saved messages and autoresponses to reply to followers?”

The bot had trouble understanding my question and coming up with an answer, requesting I simplify my request. Instead, I asked if I could be connected with a representative. That’s when Later reminded me that since I was on the Growth plan, I could only use the chat to send a ticket to support. And that’s exactly what I did.

I received an email about 26 hours later. I was disappointed with the answer, but I like how Later’s representatives encouraged me to use the community forum to submit new feature ideas.

Overall, although I did receive help within a reasonable amount of time, I can’t say I’m thrilled with Later’s support. I’m not a huge fan of chatbots, and there’s only so much you can do with a knowledge base. Putting live chat behind such a huge paywall is never a great idea.

Later’s Pricing Is Both Reasonable and Highly Flexible

Later’s plans are competitively priced, and the free option is quite good. If you’re unsure whether this social media management platform is the right choice for you, Later has a 14-day trial you can take advantage of to test all relevant features.

The free plan has many restrictions, but that’s to be expected. You can schedule up to 10 posts per channel, access basic analytics, and even create your own link-in bio page.

Later offers plenty of paid options, progressively including more monthly posts, users, and features as the price increases.

The Starter plan includes core features such as Instagram Stories scheduling, carousel scheduling, best post times, and analytics for Twitter and Pinterest. You should consider this plan if you want to do more than just schedule image posts and would appreciate some quality-of-life improvements (e.g., drafts).

Later also recently introduced a Creator plan that’s a few dollars cheaper than the Starter plan, shares many of the same features, but offers fewer monthly posts (10, same as the free plan). I’m not a fan.

Later’s Growth plan is $40.00/month, offers the best value for money, and includes all advanced features (e.g., unlimited access groups, collaborations, conversations, advanced analytics, and report exporting). The Advanced plan throws a few more users into the mix and lifts the post limit. Honestly, I’m not sure that’s worth paying double for unless you run a marketing agency managing multiple brands simultaneously.

Users on the Growth and Advanced plans can purchase additional social sets and users.