Metricool’s the value pick in social media software and nobody serious argues otherwise. The free plan is a real product, not a demo. The paid plans undercut most of the market. If what you need is one dashboard across every platform you touch, it’s probably the right call. So this isn’t a fight about price. It’s about a question Metricool doesn’t ask.
What you get with Metricool
A lot. Analytics and scheduling for Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, X, Twitch and even Google Business Profile, plus web analytics and ad-campaign reporting in the same window. The free plan covers one brand with a 30-day window and five competitor profiles. Starter opens at $20 a month as of July 2026, with unlimited history, up to 100 tracked competitors and PDF reports. Advanced, from $53, adds teams, approval flows, report templates and a Looker Studio connector.
That’s a fair price for a control room. Budget agencies and multi-platform creators get a lot of room to work here.
Breadth and depth are different products
Every number in Metricool describes what already happened: impressions this month, follower delta, engagement per post, how fast a competitor posts. Line it all up on one screen and you know exactly where you stand. What none of it touches is why. The dashboards stop at the precise spot the interesting question starts, which is what the winners have in common that the losers don’t.
That question lives inside the content, and answering it means looking at the content. Metricool doesn’t look. Highviz does little else.
What reading a post actually means
Highviz puts every post and reel through a vision pipeline: dominant colours, faces and where they sit in frame, the objects present, any on-image text, and how each reel opens. Each attribute gets tied to your own engagement history, and the differences that hold up become findings, stated plainly, each with a confidence label. Those findings combine into a recipe for your account, you score a draft against it before publishing, and on Pro you can ask questions about your own data in plain English.
None of that replaces a dashboard. It answers the question the dashboard leaves open.
The cheapest complete stack in this market
Because Metricool has a genuinely free tier and Highviz Pro is $8.25 a month billed annually, the pairing is quietly one of the cheapest serious setups an Instagram creator can run: Metricool free for the monitoring and the planning, Highviz for the findings and a review on every new post the day it goes up. You can weigh it before you spend anything, since your first week of reviews is free.
Where each one is the right answer
- Metricool for multi-platform monitoring, client reporting on a budget, or when you mostly want scheduling with credible numbers attached.
- Highviz if Instagram is the platform that matters and the decision you keep stalling on is what to make next, not which chart to export.
- Both, if you want both jobs covered for less than most single subscriptions cost.
Metricool wins on breadth and price against the entire industry. Highviz isn’t playing that game. It reads your posts, which Metricool never does, and it reviews every new one the day you publish it.
A free read of your account, plus a week of free reviews on everything you publish. Read-only, no card needed.
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