Social

Vital signs

Why it's on the table

On the table, Social (So) is seat 27 of 58, in the Distribution & Growth family. It is a commodity element — solved and undifferentiated. Spend the minimum here and reinvest the attention in elements that still reward judgment. It is optional: plenty of companies run without it — until a specific trigger (scale, regulation, cost, or customers) makes it essential for them. It sits in the lowest paid band — lunch money against the hours it returns.

Social: the top 5 — v2026.Q3

Edition v2026.Q3 · ranking, pricing and status verified 2026-08-06.

1. 1TypefullyTypefully (Mailbrew team)

   Free (15 posts/mo, agents/API/MCP incl.) · Pro $8/social set/mo annual · Business $18/social set

   Best for Founders who write daily on X + LinkedIn and want a distraction-free editor with scheduling, cross-posting, and AI that mimics their voice — not a marketing suite.

   The founder-brand default: 10,000+ customers with teams at Vercel, Coinbase, and Shopify on the wall, covering X, LinkedIn, Threads, Bluesky, and Mastodon from one draft. It bet on voice over volume — AI that 'learns how you actually write' plus a published stance against slop-flooding automation — and bet early on agents, shipping API/MCP access on every tier including free. Still X-native while rivals dropped or surcharged X.

   Watch A June 9, 2026 security breach (attacker exploited the changelog system to publish a malicious entry) is a real trust scar for a tool holding your posting keys. LinkedIn support has reduced functionality vs its X depth; pricing page is app-rendered, so tiers are aggregator-verified only.

   10,000+ customers; X, LinkedIn, Threads, Bluesky, Mastodon from one editor (Aug 2026) [src] · Free / Pro $8 per social set / Business $18 per social set, agents+MCP on all plans (verified Jul 7, 2026) [src] · Post-mortem of Jun 9, 2026 changelog-exploit security incident published on its own blog [src]
   Site →Docs →

2. 2BufferBuffer (independent, transparent-metrics pioneer)

   Free (3 channels, 10 posts/channel) · Essentials $5/channel/mo · Team $10/channel/mo · volume discount past 10 channels

   Best for Founders who need cheap, predictable multi-channel basics — 11+ platforms including Bluesky and Mastodon — without learning a power tool.

   The category's honest workhorse: $5 per channel per month, a genuinely useful free tier, and the only vendor here that publishes its revenue dashboard — $25.9M ARR, 241,301 monthly active users, $27.24 ARPU as of the Dec 2025 shareholder update. Unlimited AI reply suggestions on paid tiers and 11+ channels make it the widest cheap net.

   Watch A 15-year-old company growing single-digit percent — durability, not momentum. No deep X analytics or thread tooling; per-channel pricing quietly adds up past a handful of profiles; AI features are assistive, not voice-trained.

   $25.9M ARR, 241,301 MAU, $27.24 ARPU on public dashboard (accessed Aug 6, 2026; latest update Dec 2025) [src] · 11+ channels incl. Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads; Essentials $5/channel/mo (Aug 2026) [src]
   Site →Docs →

3. 3Tapliolempire

   From $39/mo (Starter · Standard · Pro) · 7-day free trial with full Pro

   Best for B2B founders whose entire pipeline runs through LinkedIn and who want scheduling, AI drafting, carousels, engagement, and CRM-ish outreach in one place.

   The most complete LinkedIn founder-brand machine: AI post creation and carousel generation, optimal-time scheduling, engagement and connection management, plus a 2026 MCP so you can 'run Taplio from Claude, ChatGPT or any MCP-enabled LLM.' Backed by lempire's sales-tooling distribution, it is the default recommendation when a founder says 'my buyers are on LinkedIn.'

   Watch Priced like a sales tool ($39/mo floor, tiers climb steeply) and its engagement-automation features skirt LinkedIn's automation policies — accounts have been warned before. Vendor page only exposes 'from $39/mo'; exact upper-tier prices were not verifiable.

   'Plans from $39/mo', three tiers, 7-day full-Pro trial (vendor page, Aug 2026) [src] · MCP shipped: run Taplio from Claude/ChatGPT or any MCP-enabled LLM (Aug 2026) [src] · Sibling X tool Tweet Hunter still sold separately at $49–$99/mo (Aug 2026) [src]
   Site →Docs →

4. 4PostizGitroom (open source, AGPL-3.0)

   Free self-hosted (AGPL-3.0, bring your own platform API keys) · hosted SaaS plans available

   Best for Lock-in-averse technical founders who want to own their scheduler — 14 platforms, agent hooks, and no per-channel meter.

   The open-source escape hatch, and it is thriving: 30.4k GitHub stars, 194 releases, v2.21.7 shipped April 27, 2026. Covers 14 platforms including X, Bluesky, Mastodon, and even Slack/Discord, and leans into the agent era with n8n/Make/Zapier integrations plus a CLI agent — self-describing as 'the ultimate agentic social media scheduling tool.'

   Watch Self-hosting means you carry the platform-API-key burden (X's API pricing hits you directly) and the ops. Polish trails Typefully's editor by a distance; AGPL matters if you want to resell it.

   30.4k stars, 194 releases, v2.21.7 (Apr 27, 2026), AGPL-3.0 [src] · 14 platforms incl. X, Bluesky, Mastodon, Slack, Discord; n8n/Make/Zapier + CLI agent [src]
   Site →Docs →

5. 5BlotatoBlotato (Sabrina Ramonov)

   From $29/mo flat — unlimited posts, 20 accounts, no per-post fees · 7-day trial

   Best for Founders who want their AI agents — Claude, ChatGPT, n8n, Make — to draft, repurpose, and publish across 9+ platforms via one API/MCP.

   The purest expression of 2026's 'AI social agent' turn: a unified posting API and MCP server billed as 'the #1 social media APIs for AI agents', with 10,000+ paying users pushing 667K+ posts per month. Where Typefully schedules what you write, Blotato is the pipe your automations write through — repurposing one idea into per-platform formats.

   Watch All traction numbers are vendor-claimed and founder-influencer-marketed — no independent audit. Fully automated pipelines are exactly the slop that platform algorithms and audiences increasingly punish; keep a human on the voice.

   10,000+ paying users; 667K+ posts published monthly via the API (vendor-claimed, Aug 2026) [src] · $29/mo flat, unlimited posts, 20 accounts; MCP + REST for Claude/ChatGPT/n8n/Make (Aug 2026) [src]
   Site →Docs →

Social: the top 8 compared

Edition v2026.Q3 · ranking, pricing and status verified 2026-08-06.

How to choose your social

If you are the product's public face and post daily on X + LinkedIn

Typefully Pro at $8/social set — writing-first, X-native, voice-trained AI, and your agents can drive it over MCP even on the free plan.

If you need many channels covered cheaply and predictably, not depth on any one

Buffer — start free on 3 channels, scale at $5/channel, and know the vendor's own finances are public.

If your buyers are on LinkedIn and nowhere else

Taplio at $39/mo if you want the full machine; AuthoredUp (~$200/yr) or Supergrow if you only need better writing and analytics without automation risk.

If your content pipeline is an n8n/Claude automation, not a person at a keyboard

Blotato ($29/mo, MCP-native) hosted, or Postiz self-hosted if you want to own it — but keep a human editing pass, because algorithmic slop-penalties are real.

If x is a core channel for you

Check support before buying anything: Hypefury dropped X entirely, Publer and Metricool gate or surcharge it, while Typefully, Tweet Hunter, and Buffer still post natively.

Social: the whole field

14 more tools tracked in this category, including 2 dead, renamed, or sunsetting — a reference that hides the graveyard isn't one. Verified 2026-08-06.

Social: the category in numbers

Edition v2026.Q3 · ranking, pricing and status verified 2026-08-06.

• Buffer's public dashboard: $25.9M ARR, 241,301 MAU, $27.24 ARPU (latest shareholder update Dec 2025; accessed Aug 6, 2026) — the category's rare hard number, and it says 'commodity': huge user counts, low ARPU [src]
• The X API tax reshaped the field by 2026: Hypefury dropped X entirely ('Hypefury no longer supports 𝕏'), Metricool sells X as a $10/mo add-on, Publer excludes X from its free tier — while Typefully and Tweet Hunter stayed X-native [src]
• 2026's structural shift: schedulers became agent endpoints — Typefully ships agents/API/MCP on all plans, Taplio 'runs from Claude or ChatGPT', Supergrow launched its own MCP, Blotato markets itself as 'social media APIs for AI agents' [src]
• Blotato claims 10,000+ paying users and 667K+ posts published per month through agent pipelines (vendor-claimed, Aug 2026) — early sizing of the AI-social-agent segment [src]
• Open source matured: Postiz at 30.4k GitHub stars, 194 releases, v2.21.7 (Apr 27, 2026), 14 platforms, AGPL-3.0 [src]
• Supply-chain risk arrived: Typefully disclosed a Jun 9, 2026 breach in which an attacker exploited its changelog system to publish a malicious entry — posting tools hold your audience keys [src]

Social: method & sources

Ranking criteria: fit for founder-led daily posting (voice, X+LinkedIn depth), price for a one-person marketing dept, 2026 platform-support reality (X especially), and agent-readiness — not enterprise feature count, which is why Hootsuite/Sprout sit in the field. Typefully pricing conflict resolved: vendor pricing page is app-rendered and unreadable, so tiers ($8/$18 per social set) come from efficient.app's Jul 7, 2026 teardown — re-verify on typefully.com before quoting; platform list (incl. Threads/Bluesky/Mastodon) taken from Typefully's own homepage over efficient.app's narrower X+LinkedIn claim. Taplio upper-tier prices and Hootsuite/Sprout entry prices could not be verified this cycle and are flagged in-line. Hypefury's X drop is confirmed verbatim from its own pricing-page FAQ (Aug 2026) despite its homepage still footer-linking X. No social-media-management market-size figure met sourcing standards this cycle (report pages 404'd or were stubs); omitted rather than laundered through an SEO aggregator. Adjacent elements: paid social/ads → Pd; long-form and repurposing engines (Claude, Jasper) → Ce; newsletters (beehiiv, Loops) → Em; being cited by LLMs → Ge; launch-day spikes (Product Hunt, HN) → La. The canon take holds: founder accounts beat brand accounts — schedule the machine, keep the voice human; the 2026 corollary is that fully-agentic posting (Blotato-style) is pipeline until it reads like slop, then it is a penalty. Ranking criteria: verified commercial traction, independent satisfaction surveys, agent benchmarks, and founder-fit (price floor, lock-in, surfaces). Editorial, never paid — the charter. Machine-readable twin: so.json.

Our take

Founder accounts outperform brand accounts roughly always. Schedule the machine; keep the voice human.

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