Postonus vs Publer. Publer’s free plan can publish. Ours, honestly, cannot.

The real trade-off: Publer’s free plan actually publishes

This is the one to say plainly upfront. Publer's free tier — 3 accounts excluding X, 10 pending posts per account, 24 hours of post history — can schedule and publish live content for free. Postonus's Free workspace can build content and hold dated drafts, but publishing or scheduling anything live requires a paid plan. If you are testing this category on zero budget and want something that actually goes out, Publer's free tier wins that specific comparison.

Where the story shifts is scale. Publer prices per account — $5/month on Professional, plus $4 for each extra account, and $10/month per account on Business, which bundles AI, analytics, best-time suggestions, and recycling. That per-account model compounds; cost scaling past roughly 10 accounts is a complaint that comes up often in how people describe Publer. Postonus charges per workspace — $12 to $99 a month — with an account cap included in the price rather than billed per seat.

Run the numbers at 15 accounts on Publer's Business tier and you are at $150/month before anything else. Postonus's Pro plan covers 50 accounts for $21/month. The crossover point where Publer's per-account pricing overtakes a flat Postonus plan comes early — usually somewhere around 4 to 5 accounts on Business, fewer on Professional once the per-extra-account surcharge kicks in.

Platforms: 16 vs 13, and one gap in Publer's favor

Postonus covers 16 platforms, Publer covers 13, including Mastodon, Telegram, and WordPress. The WordPress inclusion is worth naming directly: Postonus does not support it. If part of your workflow is publishing to a blog alongside social channels, Publer covers that case and we do not. On the platforms both of us support, character and media limits should be checked per platform rather than assumed identical — see the individual platform pages, for example Telegram, for what each one actually enforces.

When Publer is the better choice

Small scale, need-to-publish-for-free, no X account required: Publer's free tier is a real answer to that, not a teaser. It is also a reasonable pick if the $10/mo Business bundle of AI, analytics, and recycling in one tier appeals more than assembling those from separate Postonus plans — analytics specifically, since Postonus has none at any tier.

What Postonus does not do

No analytics feature, at any price. Publer's own analytics gets called weak in its reviews, but weak is still something — Postonus has nothing to compare it against. The Free workspace publish gate above is the other honest limit: it is a deliberate constraint, not a bug, and it means testing Postonus at zero cost means testing the composer and calendar, not a live feed.

Developer surfaces

Publer's public REST API sits behind its Business and Enterprise tiers. Its MCP access is third-party and community-maintained rather than something Publer ships itself. Postonus's API is available from the first paid plan, and its MCP server — five named tools, OAuth approval, no pasted key — ships on every plan including Free. See the MCP and API pages for the actual surface.

Where this leaves the decision

Publer's honest strength is the low end: cheap per-account pricing and a free tier that publishes, for anyone running a small number of accounts who needs to actually go live without paying anything. Past that low end — more accounts, needing an API on a mid-tier plan, wanting recycling without the top-tier bundle — the per-account math and the tier gates both start working against Publer, and a flat-priced workspace with developer access built in from Free starts pulling ahead.