Instagram, side by side
| Instagram capability | snazzy | Buffer |
|---|---|---|
| Schedule Reels | ✓ | ✓ |
| Reel cover / thumbnail control | ✓ | — |
| Stories auto-publish (no phone reminder) | ✓ | — |
| Carousels (2–10, mixed photo + video) | ✓ | ✓ |
| Comment keyword → auto-DM | ✓ | — |
| First comment on free | ✓ | Paid only |
| Post cap on free | None | 10 per channel |
| Instagram-only focus | ✓ | — |
Pricing and features checked against public pricing pages and documentation on 2026-09-02. Products change — if something here is out of date, tell us and we will correct it.
Where Buffer is the better choice
No product wins everything. Buffer beats snazzy on:
- Genuinely excellent, long-standing free plan across multiple networks
- Probably the cleanest UX in the category
- Years of polish, integrations and a large support surface
If any of those are the reason you are shopping, buy theirs. You will be happier.
The short version
Buffer has the strongest free plan in the general market and a famously clean UI. snazzy wins when you want Instagram's native formats — Reel covers, Stories, carousels, comment→DM — instead of a lowest-common-denominator composer.
- Buffer pricing
- From $5/channel/mo (Essentials, billed annually)
- Buffer free tier
- 3 channels, 10 scheduled posts per channel, 1 user, no expiry
- snazzy pricing
- Free forever · paid plans for more accounts
Why snazzy can afford a free tier
Most schedulers run on always-on servers and bill for video storage and bandwidth, so every free user costs them money every month. snazzy runs on Cloudflare Workers, D1 and R2: an idle account costs us essentially nothing, and R2 charges no egress fees — the line item that hurts most for a video product. That is why our free tier has no expiry and needs no card. It is not a promotion we have to withdraw later.
Compare something else
Schedule once. We post it.
Connect an Instagram professional account and queue your first Reel in about two minutes.
Start free — no card