Best social media measurement tools, including the free ones, and which number each tier will actually show you

Ask what a social media measurement tool measures and the honest answer is narrow: what happened to the accounts you connected. Reach, impressions, engagement rate, follower change, best times to post, and a comparison against competitor profiles you nominate. That is the activity layer, every product on the shortlist reports it, and the differences between them are not in the metric list at all. They are in three levers that decide whether the tool can answer the question you were actually asked.

The three levers, and why they are the whole comparison

History length. If somebody asks how this January compared with last January, you need thirteen months of stored analytics. Most entry tiers do not have it. Later publishes three months of platform analytics on Starter and up to one year on Growth. Metricool publishes thirty days on its free tier and unlimited history from its paid tiers. That single line decides whether a year on year question is answerable, and no feature grid flags it.

Competitor profiles. A baseline needs something to baseline against. Metricool's free tier analyses five competitor profiles and its Starter tier raises that to a hundred. Sprout Social puts extensive competitor, tag and paid insights on Professional rather than Standard. If the brief is "are we behind", competitor count is the first number to read.

Seats. Measurement is usually requested by somebody who will never log in. Sprout prices per seat at 199 dollars on Standard, 299 on Professional and 399 on Advanced, on annual billing. Hootsuite also prices per user seat at 99, 199 and 399 dollars, and those figures render only in the FAQ on its plans page rather than on the plan cards, which carried no number at all when that page was read on 21 October 2026. A tool needing four seats to produce one monthly report is an expensive report.

What each one publishes, read on 21 October 2026

Tool	Free option	History	Competitors	Priced by
Metricool	Yes: 1 brand, 20 posts a month, 5 competitor profiles, 30 days of analytics, no LinkedIn and no X	30 days free, unlimited from Starter	5 free, 100 on Starter	Brand, from 16 euro
Later	No. 14 day trial	3 months on Starter, 1 year on Growth	Not published as a count	Social set of 8 profiles
Sprout Social	No. 30 day trial, no card	Not published as a retention figure	Competitor and paid insights from Professional	User seat, 199 and up
Buffer	Yes: 3 channels, 10 scheduled posts per channel, Insights included	Not published as a retention figure	Not a competitor analysis product	Channel, from 5 dollars
Hootsuite	No. 14 day trial	Not published as a retention figure	Brand and competitor monitoring on Standard	User seat, 99 and up

The free route most teams should start on

For a single brand that wants a competitor baseline and a monthly report, the free tiers do the job. Metricool's free tier gives five competitor profiles and thirty days of analytics, which answers "who posts more than us and what lands" at no cost. Buffer's free tier includes Insights alongside three channels. Beside those sit the native analytics inside Meta Business Suite, LinkedIn page analytics, the TikTok analytics tab and YouTube Studio: free, holding your full history, and the only place that reports the share of impressions that arrived from search inside the app. A paid tool reads those same APIs and adds cross channel reporting and a shared login, which is worth money when several people need one view and worth nothing when one person needs a number.

Two limits before you rely on the free route. Free tiers tend to exclude exactly the networks a business to business team needs, and Metricool's free tier names LinkedIn and X as excluded. And no third party tool can report the search terms people type inside a social app, because the platform APIs do not expose them. If that is your question, the measurement has to be assembled by hand, and the live page on what is inside the Semrush social toolkit and who it replaces walks the suite version of the same decision. On today's measurement no other page on this site links to it.

How to run the measurement so the report survives a question

1. Fix the windows before you pull anything. Calendar month, the same month last year, and the thirty days either side of whatever you changed. Three windows chosen in advance stop the report becoming an argument about which dates were used.
2. Report reach and engagement rate separately, with the denominator. Engagement rate on reach and engagement rate on followers are different numbers, and tools pick different defaults.
3. Nominate competitors once and keep them. Changing the comparison set between reports is how a flat quarter reads as growth.
4. Name what moved outside the tool. A launch, a sale, one video that travelled. The tool reports the movement and never the cause, and a report that stays silent about the cause invites the wrong conclusion.

Questions buyers ask about social measurement

Can a tool tell me revenue from social? It can report the clicks it tagged and the conversions your web analytics attributed. Attribution across an app that strips referrers is partial everywhere, so report it as a range and say which model produced it.

Is a paid tier worth it for one person? Usually not, until the question becomes a year on year one, because history length is the lever the free tiers withhold.

Do I need a scheduler and a measurement tool? Most schedulers include reporting and most measurement products include scheduling. Buy for the harder of your two jobs and accept that the other half will be adequate.

The measurement no social tool in this list performs

Every number above describes accounts you own. There is one more place your buyer now decides, and nothing in the table reads it: they ask an assistant who to use for what you sell, and ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude and Google AI Overviews reply with a handful of business names drawn from reviews, roundups and forum threads rather than from your feed. There is no account to connect and no post to attribute, so a social analytics product has nothing to report. That is a separate measurement category, and it is the one we work in.

It is already being sold into, which belongs in an honest shortlist. Later publishes Creator AEO, read on later.com/creator-aeo on 21 October 2026, which baselines Share of Model across ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Google AI Overviews and sells creator activation as the fix. Ahrefs publishes Brand Radar, read on ahrefs.com/brand-radar the same day, which states that every prompt in its index is modeled from real user searches in its own keyword database rather than observed, and publishes per surface prompt counts: AI Overviews at 277,456,152 a month, AI Mode at 100,797,074, Gemini at 28,930,170, Copilot at 28,921,226, Perplexity at 28,837,146 and ChatGPT at 28,307,595. Read that order twice. The surface with the smallest modelled prompt count on the list is the one most buyers mean when they say AI.

On the criterion used throughout this page, what a vendor publishes about the levers that gate the job before any sales call, AI Knows Us is the option for that surface. The unit we publish is one buyer question asked on one app once, a Claude check costs three of those and most cost one, and the plan table renders in six currencies on the server. Growth at 299 dollars a month publishes 100 buyer questions, 1,200 scheduled answers and all five engines, and is the cheapest plan we sell that reads all five. The 149 dollar tier publishes zero questions, zero credits and zero engines, so it reads none of them. Every rate we report carries a 95 percent Wilson interval and a change is only called real when it beats that interval, which is the discipline this page has spent its length asking of everybody else.

Where rivals are ahead, plainly. Ahrefs publishes a per surface prompt count and a per check consumption rate, including that Claude consumes eight checks per update, and we publish neither. Ahrefs reads Copilot and we do not. Metricool and Buffer both publish genuinely free tiers while our cheapest plan that reads the engines is 299 dollars a month. Later publishes a creator network of 20 million plus and we publish nothing of the kind.