This article will examine apps that offer an alternative to the native Instagram app for both Android and iOS, including several good options that give you much more flexibility, as well as detailed information about the best options for a variety of specific situations.
Table of Contents
Best Apps For Instagram Management
- Iconosquare
Platform: iOS, Android, web
Purpose: Analytics
Price: $29/month
To check the pulse of your audience, you need to have data-driven analytics at your fingertips. Iconosquare is a powerful app that provides detailed reports about multiple social accounts. You can even track your promoted posts in some selected plans.
The dashboard is fully customizable and easy to read. The app lets you publish posts using geolocation and tagging. Your posts get maximum visibility as they’re posted at the best times.
Find out how you stack up to competition. Iconoquare measures industry benchmarks and compares them with your engagement, reach, and community growth. You get a 14-day free full-featured trial after which you can start with their Pro plan for $29 monthly.
Iconosquare social media tool
- Snapseed
Platform: Android, iOS, macOS
Purpose: Photo editing
Price: Free
Snapseed is a photo editing app that you can download free of cost from the Google or Apple app stores. The power-packed app consumes just 22MB storage and comes in 40+ languages.
The app saves your photos without distorting colors and resolution. It has features such as contrast, crop, and rotate. You can annotate images and add vignettes. To retouch old photos, you can use its Brush, Lens, and White Balance features.
Fashion bloggers will love its Glamour Glow feature. Its Face Enhance capability diminishes facial imperfections. You can save your favorite effects and apply them on new images instantly.
Snapseed photo editing app
- VSCO
Platform: iOS, Android
Purpose: Photo/video editing
Price: Free and Membership
Instagram filters are passé. You need professional-grade tools to create stunning imagery that your followers will love. VSCO is a reputable photo editing app for Instagram with a full-featured free version.
The free edition of VSCO comes with 10+ original presets and standard editing tools to modulate contrast, grain, and saturation. You also get to connect with other content creators and learn from their valuable input.
If you need advanced features such as HSL and borders and video editing, you can opt for a VSCO membership, which costs $19.99 a year. For that price, you get 200+ presets and film emulation presets to recreate the vintage look.
VSCO social media tool
- Life Lapse
Platform: iOS, Android
Purpose: Video editing
Price: Free
If you want to create Boomerang-type videos of longer duration, Life Lapse is the app you should download. From a single interface, you can import or capture videos, add effects, and post to Instagram or queue for later. The icing on the cake is that the app is completely free.
You can create stop videos, which are a series of pictures arranged end to end, to give the look and feel of a video. The app lets you add effects to the pictures, adjust video speed, and even add royalty-free music clips from their gallery.
Life Lapse is ridiculously simple to operate. Its image overlay technology creates stop videos in a jiffy. You won’t have to spend hours manually arranging pictures, or invest in costly video editing software.
Life Lapse video editing tool
- InShot
Platform: iOS, Android
Purpose: Video editing
Price: Free
InShot has an edge over other free video editors owing to its remarkable features and user-friendly interface. Its GLITCH video effect was nominated for the #googleplaybestof awards in 2019.
It lets you trim, merge, and splice videos. You can add voice overs to your vlogs or pick free clips from their library. You get a rich lineup of animated stickers that can be added to videos. You can caption and sync text snippets to accompany your video content.
InShot video editing tool
- FilmoraGo
Platform: iOS, Android, macOS
Purpose: Video editing
Price: Free + optional in-app purchases
Wondershare’s FilmoraGo app is great for beginners who are testing the waters. It lets you preview edited videos in real time. You can merge videos and stills, apply transitions to frames, and add themes and filters.
It lets you delay or speed up videos, and create videos that run in reverse. It gives you the option of adjusting the screen ratio to 1:1 (suitable for Instagram) or 16:9. Without spending a penny, you can download several transitions, overlays, music, and elements.
Their support center has comprehensive step-by-step tutorials in multiple languages. You can also hobnob with the community and learn new editing hacks.
- Layout from Instagram
Platform: iOS, Android
Purpose: Layout designing
Price: Free
If you’re in the mood for making collages, Layout from Instagram lets you make some cool ones. You can combine up to 9 pictures from your gallery and arrange them in innovative grid layouts. You can capture varied moods by clicking the Phone Booth feature.
To search pictures quickly, you can use the Faces tab. Mirror, duplicate, resize, flip, replace, and zoom images as you need. To up your editing game, add Instagram’s filters to your collage. Save the collage in your gallery and upload to your account.
- Spark Post
Platform: iOS, Android
Purpose: Graphics designing
Price: Free (with in-app purchases)
Adobe’s Spark Post is a feature-rich app you can use for creating crazy layouts and animated pictures. It’s replete with amazing design filters and typography styles. Auto recolor and resize can transform the look of your images instantly.
Render your photos with cut-out, outline, shadow effects to make them even more breathtaking. If you run out of post ideas, go through the tons of professionally-designed design templates. You can also access their free stock pictures and curated fonts and shapes.
You can brand your designs if you buy Adobe’s Creative Cloud subscription. All your artwork is auto backed up on the cloud so that you can edit across devices. Their Starter pack is free and offers limited features. They also have a paid plan that costs $19.99 monthly.
- SproutSocial
Platform: iOS, Android, web
Purpose: Analytics
Price: $99/user/month
While Instagram has a number of free analytics tools, you won’t have access to them unless you have a Business account. SproutSocial has no such constraints. It can schedule your posts in optimal periods and track each post’s performance.
It also monitors your hashtags and comments. If you own multiple accounts, SproutSocial provides you a unified inbox from where you can respond to comments. You can even publish via the app and line up posts for the future.
In the high-end plans, you get a social CRM toolset where you get a panoramic view of each contact’s engagement. Its smart monitoring never lets you miss any comment or @mention. You can repost your followers’ content and strengthen your relationships.
- Command for Instagram
Platform: iOS
Purpose: Analytics
Price: Free (with in-app purchases)
To survive and thrive in the competition-ridden influencer domain, you need to keep an eye on your work as well as of your competitors. Command for Instagram offers insightful reports about other influencers on your radar.
It gives hourly stats about your latest posts. It also scans the network for like-minded influencers with whom you can collaborate. You can get report cards about your account’s health and intelligent suggestions for improvement.
Best instagram management app free
- Pallyy
Pallyy is a complete Instagram marketing toolkit. It includes scheduling, Instagram analytics, comment moderation, competitive research, and a “link in bio” tool. It’s extremely affordable for both individuals and agencies alike.
Pallyy New Homepage April 2022
Pallyy’s scheduling calendar is one of the best we’ve seen. It’s laid out in a grid format, with each cell corresponding to a particular date in the month. You can use it to visually plan your whole feed. Simply drag content from your media library onto any cell in order to schedule your posts for that date.
Pallyy lets you set a caption for the post and even schedule the first comment. The first comment feature comes in useful if you want to keep your caption clean and add your hashtags in the comment section instead.
After you’ve scheduled the post, a thumbnail preview will show up in the calendar cell. You can then look at your filled-out calendar to get an idea of what your whole feed will look like.
Other features we liked about Pallyy include:
Bulk uploads. You can upload images to Pallyy in bulk and then edit them by adding flyers or selecting preset sizing options
Best time to post. Pallyy will show you the best times to post to generate maximum engagement
Canva integration. Create and edit posts using the Canva integration, then schedule your posts with Pallyy.
In-depth Instagram analytics. Find out what your top-performing posts and Instagram Stories are and keep track of both your and your competitor’s engagement rates, follower count, and more.
Reply feature. Manage comments and reply directly to your audience from within Pallyy.
Pricing: Pallyy offers a free plan. You can remove limits and unlock all features for $15/month per social set (discount is applied if you need more than 5 social sets). Unlimited team member accounts available on all paid plans.
Try Pallyy Free
Read our Pallyy review.
- Agorapulse
Agorapulse is the best all-in-one social media tool. You get access to a social inbox, scheduler, social listening, analytics, reporting, and more.
Agorapulse Scheduling
Agorapulse is a little pricier than Pallyy but on the whole, it’s also a much more powerful and flexible social media management solution. It works for Instagram and other popular networks like Facebook and Twitter, which makes it a great choice for social media managers, rather than just Instagram influencers.
Everything you need to manage your campaigns is included right out of the box, including:
Publishing tools. Plan and schedule content across all social networks from one integrated dashboard. Use powerful features like automated rescheduling to get the most out of your content.
Collaboration tools. Collaborate with your team members or clients with a shared content calendar, shared files, and shared notes. Assign roles to different team members to help manage workflows.
Social listening. Listen in on conversations social users are having about your brand or your competitors. Use this data to extract useful insights, measure brand sentiment, respond faster and tackle issues before they damage your brand.
Unified social inbox. View, manage and respond to all your social media comments and messages in one place to better manage communication.
Pricing: Sign up for a limited free plan (up to 1 user and 3 profiles) or upgrade to Pro from $79/month. A free 30-day trial is also available.
Try Agorapulse Free
- SocialBee
SocialBee is another all-in-one social media management solution that’s suitable for Instagram influencers, SMBs, and agencies.
SocialBee Scheduling
Like Agorapulse, SocialBee is a cross-platform tool that can help you manage your Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest campaigns, in addition to Instagram. You can use it to organize and schedule your content, share it across platforms, and track performance.
They have a bunch of innovative scheduling features that we liked. For example, the content Categories feature allows you to create different categories for different kinds of posts, which can help you to get a balanced content mix. You can also edit all posts in a category at once using the bulk editor, which is a huge time saver.
You can recycle your top-performing content by creating new variations of your posts and rescheduling them to squeeze out even more value. If you’re publishing time-sensitive posts like limited-time promotional offers, you can set expiration dates for all your posts. Alternatively, you can set them to expire after a certain number of shares, which can come in useful when you’re running social giveaways.
Aside from the above, SocialBee also includes excellent Instagram analytics and reporting features, custom short URLs, URL tracking, and more.
Pricing: SocialBee offers a wide range of paid plans suitable for different budgets. Their entry-level plan currently starts from $13.30/month. Plans suitable for agencies start at $79/month. A 14-day trial is available.
Try SocialBee Free
- PromoRepublic
PromoRepublic is a leading social media marketing tool with powerful automation features built-in. It’s designed to help businesses and agencies that need an easy way to manage hundreds of social pages at once.
PromoRepublic Scheduling
You can leverage PromoRepublic’s powerful automation tools to simplify your workflows and save time. These include:
Automatic reposting. PromoRepublic can automatically re-queue content that performed well for a later date to maximize engagement
Done-for-you content templates. Creating great social content takes a lot of time. PromoRepublic can help reduce your teams’ workload by providing you with a wide catalog of ready-made, industry-relevant social content and over 100,000 templates to use in your campaigns, so you don’t have to start from scratch.
Efficient workflows. Easily send social content to different team members or clients for quick approvals to avoid bottlenecks.
Aside from the above, PromoRepublic also comes with in-depth analytics and reporting features, and an awesome reputation management tool that makes it easy to manage and respond to customer messages, ratings, and more in one centralized location.
Pricing: Paid plans start at $9 per month. You can get started with a free 14-day trial.
Try PromoRepublic Free
Read our PromoRepublic review.
- Iconosquare
Iconosquare is a powerful Instagram tool for businesses that stands out for its in-depth analytics, publishing, and monitoring tools.
Iconosquare Scheduling
Iconosquare includes many of the same features as other all-in-one Instagram tools on this list, including a powerful social scheduler and social listening tools. However, it’s better than most when it comes to analytics.
It provides you with a wealth of data and lets you really drill down into your campaigns to find out what’s working and what’s not.
You can easily visualize key performance indicators like follower growth, average post engagement rates, reach, and impressions in easy-to-read graphs.
Then, compare your performance against provided industry benchmarks for over 100 different industries to see how you stack up. You can also compare organic vs promoted posts to see how your promotional campaigns impacted various metrics.
Use the Conversations feature to see how your brand or competitors are being mentioned across Instagram. You can sort mentions by type (e.g. comment mentions, caption mentions, tags, etc) or media type, and respond to any comments you feel you need to jump in on.
Pricing: Iconosquare pricing plans start from $49/month (billed annually). You can sign up for a free 14-day trial with no credit card required.
Try Iconosquare Free
Read our Iconosquare review.
- Sendible
Sendible is a popular Instagram tool used by over 30,000 solopreneurs, bloggers, marketers, agencies, and brand managers.
Sendible Scheduling
Being one of the best all-in-one solutions on the market, Sendible comes with publishing and collaboration tools, detailed analytics, social listening, and more. Sendible supports all major social networks, including Instagram.
The built-in image editor is flexible and powerful. You can use it to resize images and even add filters without having to leave the Sendible dashboard. Alternatively, you can use Sendible’s Canva integration to design graphics with Canva and schedule them in seconds.
Not only does Sendible offer a smooth scheduling process when posting directly to Instagram, but they are also one of the first social media management tools to offer direct posting of multiple images to Instagram carousels since IG opened their API.
This feature-rich tool even ensures approval workflows allow for seamless collaboration between team members and clients, while one-click reports make it easy to showcase your results in seconds.
Sendible’s content suggestions also make sure your client’s content is always new and relevant, you no longer need to recall frequently used hashtags from memory or copy and paste them from a saved document elsewhere.
Another feature we like about Sendible is that it has its own mobile app. You can download it to get push notifications/alerts and respond to incoming messages and opportunities on the go.
Pricing: Sendible plans start from $29/month. A 14-day free trial is available.
Try Sendible Free
- Shorby
Shorby is the best Instagram bio link tool on the market. It allows you to build landing pages to house all your links and then generates a short link for you to add to your Instagram bio.
Shorby Scheduling
One of Instagram’s most annoying features is that it only allows you to add one link in your bio. If you want to promote multiple pages through Instagram, this limitation can be frustrating.
Fortunately, Shorby provides a simple workaround. All you have to do is sign up and use the intuitive SmartPage page builder to create a landing page in minutes, then fill it with your priority links, tweak the design to match your branding, and you’re good to go!
You can then grab your personalized shor.by URL and add it to your bio.
The Rich Links feature ensures all your links look super-clickable to improve your CTR, and tracking pixel support enables you to retarget the people who click through (only available in select plans).
Pricing: Plans start from $15/month.
Try Shorby Free
Read our Shorby review.
- SweepWidget
SweepWidget is a powerful social media giveaway tool. You can use it to set up giveaway campaigns, then embed them on your blog to grow your Instagram following, website traffic, and generate leads.
SweepWidget Scheduling
It features an easy-to-use drag and drop builder you can use to create your giveaway content. You can add custom form fields to create surveys, polls, and questionnaires, and customize the look and feel of your contest in the editor.
SweepWidget integrates with 30 apps and supports 90 entry methods. So, not only can you grow your Instagram account, you can grow your other social profiles as well.
Just start your giveaway, add it to a page on your website and share that link with your followers.
The leaderboard competition feature allows users to compete for the number one spot, which can help to incentivize sharing and boost engagement. You can even set up tiered milestones so that when users earn a certain amount of points, they gain instant rewards or coupons as a further incentive.
There’s a lot more we could say about SweepWidget, but we just don’t have time. Needless to say, if you’re planning on running giveaways, you should definitely check it out!
Pricing: A free basic plan is available (very limited). You can upgrade to a Pro plan from $29/month.
Try SweepWidget Free
Read our SweepWidget review.
- Tailwind
Tailwind is a great tool that can help you schedule posts for both Instagram and Pinterest. You can use it to schedule your visual posts ahead of time and it also comes complete with some powerful analytics and creation features.
Tailwind Scheduling
The tool also includes an Instagram bio link feature and a Hashtag generator which is extremely useful for Instagrammers. Overall, it’s a great all-in-one tool for Instagram and Pinterest users.
Pricing: Plans start from $9.99/month.
Try Tailwind Free
- Buffer Publish
Buffer Publish is an Instagram scheduling tool that can help you to plan your content ahead of time and save hours publishing.
Buffer Scheduling
Buffer Publish is the publishing component of the Buffer Toolkit, and it provides Instagram and social media marketers with a completely free-to-use content calendar.
You can use it to plan and collaborate on Instagram content and manage other aspects of your campaigns such as the first comments on your post, shop grid, and more.
If you want to access analytics and engagement tools, you may want to consider paying for the whole Buffer package, which includes these features tools. However, if you just want a simple publishing tool, Buffer Publish is the perfect free option.
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