Postonus vs Buffer. One prices by the channel, the other does not.

The real trade-off: per-channel vs per-workspace

Buffer's pricing is simple to explain and expensive to scale. Essentials runs $5 per channel per month, billed annually, and Team runs $10 per channel per month. Add a fifth account and your bill grows by a fifth. There is no included allotment — every channel is billed the same rate, from the first one on.

Postonus prices the workspace, not the channel. Hobby includes 10 social accounts for $12/month, Pro includes 50 for $21/month. If you run 8 channels, you are paying Buffer for 8 channel-slots but paying Postonus for one Hobby plan with headroom to spare. If you run 2 channels, the math flips: Buffer at $5/channel/mo can beat Postonus's flat rate.

There is no universally correct answer here. It is arithmetic, and it depends on how many accounts you actually run. A concrete example: at 20 channels, Buffer's Essentials rate works out to $100/month before Team-tier features are even in play. Postonus's Business plan is $99/month flat with no account limit at all, so past a certain channel count the per-channel model stops making sense regardless of which features you need.

Platform coverage: eleven vs sixteen

Buffer covers Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, Threads, Bluesky, YouTube Shorts, Pinterest, Google Business Profile, Mastodon, and X — eleven platforms. Postonus covers all of those except Mastodon, and adds Reddit, Discord, Telegram, Tumblr, WhatsApp, and Snapchat, for sixteen. If your audience lives on any of those six, Buffer is not an option regardless of price. If it lives on Mastodon, we are the wrong tool. Character and media limits per platform live on each platform's own page — see X (Twitter) or Discord rather than a hand-typed number here.

When Buffer is the better choice

Be honest about this one: if you manage three or four accounts, all within Buffer's eleven platforms, and you want an AI tool that reshapes one post into several channel-specific variants automatically, Buffer's AI Assistant does that today. Postonus's assistant drafts and refines; it is not built for that specific cross-channel reshaping workflow. A small, simple setup on supported platforms is Buffer's strongest case.

What Postonus does not do

No analytics feature exists in Postonus — not a light version, not a beta. Buffer at least has reporting, even though weak analytics shows up repeatedly in its own user complaints. If dashboards and engagement charts matter to your workflow now, look elsewhere for either tool, or treat Buffer's as better-than-nothing.

Postonus's Free workspace can build content and hold dated drafts, but it cannot publish or schedule anything live — that requires a paid plan. It is a real gate, not a soft nudge.

Developer surfaces, without the exclusivity pitch

Both ship a Model Context Protocol server. Buffer's is at mcp.buffer.com/mcp and works on every tier, including free. Ours is at the same shape — every plan, Free included — with five named tools: list_channels, list_queue, get_best_times, schedule_post, reschedule_post. Neither of us invented this category. What differs is the CLI: we have not found one for Buffer, and Postonus ships one alongside the API. See the MCP page and CLI page for the actual tool list rather than a marketing claim about being first.

Where this leaves the decision

If channel count is small and every platform you need is on Buffer's list of 11, price it out at your actual account count before assuming Postonus is cheaper — it might not be. If you are past a dozen accounts, need a platform outside Buffer's list, or want recycling and bulk import that already shipped rather than sitting in beta, the arithmetic and the feature list both point the other way. Neither answer is universal, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling something.