Metricool

Metricool Review: The Best Value Social Media Tool That Most People Haven't Heard Of

Metricool is the most compelling under-the-radar option in social media management — a Spanish platform with a feature set that competes directly with tools costing 3–4× its price, a free plan genuinely more generous than Hootsuite's was before its 2023 pricing overhaul, and a growing base of users who discovered it as a Hootsuite refugee after that pricing change.

The Free Plan

Metricool's free plan is the most genuinely useful free tier in the social media scheduling category:

• Unlimited social profiles connected
• Unlimited post scheduling
• Analytics and performance data (last 3 months)
• Competitor analysis (5 competitors per network)
• Google Business Profile management
• Basic ad performance tracking

The limitation is that the free plan covers one brand (one set of connected accounts). For a single business managing its own social presence, the free plan provides professional-grade scheduling and analytics with no artificial feature gating. For freelancers managing multiple client brands, each brand requires its own account or a paid plan.

Competitor Analysis

Metricool's competitor analysis is its most distinctive analytical capability relative to its price. Entering a competitor's social profile in the Competitors section begins tracking their post frequency, engagement rates, follower growth, top posts, and best posting times. This data is updated regularly and presented in comparison tables alongside your own account metrics.

Understanding that a competitor posts 14 times per week with an average engagement rate of 3.2%, while your account posts 5 times per week at 1.8% engagement, provides the kind of competitive context that directly informs content strategy decisions. Accessing this capability in Sprout Social requires the Advanced plan at $399+/user/month. In Metricool, it is available on the free plan.

Unified Dashboard

Metricool's dashboard surfaces all connected platform analytics — Instagram, TikTok, Twitter/X, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, Google Business Profile, Twitch, Facebook Ads, Google Ads, and TikTok Ads — in a unified analytics view. The ability to compare organic social performance against paid ad performance for the same campaign period, in the same interface, without switching between Meta Business Suite, Google Analytics, and a social scheduling tool, is a meaningful operational efficiency.

Scheduling and Planning

Metricool's content planning view offers a calendar layout with day, week, and month views and drag-to-reschedule capability. The best time to post recommendation uses historical engagement data from each connected account to suggest optimal scheduling windows — the same feature available in Hootsuite and Buffer but using account-specific historical data rather than industry averages.

Auto-scheduling queues posts into suggested optimal times automatically, reducing the scheduling overhead for teams with regular posting cadences.

Limitations

Metricool's interface has more visual density than Buffer's minimalist design, which can feel overwhelming for users who value simplicity above feature richness. The social inbox (monitoring and replying to comments) exists but is less polished than Sprout Social's Smart Inbox for teams where community management is a primary workflow.

Third-party integrations and the ecosystem of tutorials, courses, and community resources are smaller than Hootsuite's and Buffer's, reflecting Metricool's more recent and European-market-primary growth.

Verdict

Metricool is the best overall value in social media management — particularly for freelancers, small businesses, and teams that want competitor analytics and ad performance monitoring without enterprise pricing. The free plan is uniquely generous, and paid plans are competitive at every tier.

Score: 8.3/10 — Best value and best free plan in the category; interface density and smaller ecosystem compared to established leaders.