Later vs CoSchedule: The Best Social Media Management Tool for You

In the digital age, where social media’s roar drowns out the quietest corners of the internet, finding the right tool to manage your online presence is more than a necessity—it’s a survival strategy. Enter Later and CoSchedule, two titans in the realm of social media management, each offering unique arsenals to conquer the vast social landscape. Whether you’re a small business, a content creator, or a marketing professional, the choice between Later and CoSchedule can significantly impact your digital footprint. Let’s embark on this exploration.

Later	CoSchedule
G2 Score -4.5 out of 5	G2 Score -4.4 out of 5
TrustRadius Score -8.4 out of 10	TrustRadius Score -8.3 out of 10

Ease of Use and User Experience (UX)

In the fast-paced world of social media, where every second count, the usability of a platform can greatly influence your ability to engage with your audience effectively and efficiently. Here’s how Later and CoSchedule measure up in offering a seamless, user-friendly experience.

Later: The Visual Virtuoso

Later is celebrated for its intuitive interface, designed with a focus on visual content, particularly for Instagram enthusiasts. The platform’s drag-and-drop content calendar simplifies the scheduling process, allowing you to visualize and plan your social media feed with ease. This visual approach extends to its media library, where organizing and selecting images and videos for your posts is straightforward, making content curation as simple as a morning breeze. What sets Later apart is its emphasis on visual planning and aesthetic cohesion. The platform provides a preview of your Instagram feed, enabling you to curate a visually appealing grid that tells your brand’s story with grace. This feature is especially valuable for brands and creators for whom image is everything.

CoSchedule: The Organizational Maestro

CoSchedule stands out with its comprehensive approach to social media and content marketing management. It goes beyond simple scheduling to offer a unified marketing calendar that integrates social media posts, blog content, email marketing, and more. This holistic view ensures that your marketing efforts are aligned and orchestrated to hit every note perfectly. CoSchedule’s strength lies in its ability to centralize your marketing strategy, making it an invaluable tool for teams looking for cohesion across various content types.

The platform offers features like ReQueue, which intelligently recycles your best content, ensuring your social media channels stay active without constant manual input. Additionally, its integration capabilities with tools like WordPress, Google Docs, and various email marketing platforms make it a powerhouse for content marketers.

Content Management and Scheduling

Both Later and CoSchedule provide robust solutions for managing and scheduling your social media content, yet they cater to different preferences and operational styles. Let’s examine what each platform offers.

Later: The Visual Content Curator

Later’s content management system is designed with a strong emphasis on visual content, making it particularly appealing for platforms like Instagram and Pinterest. Its drag-and-drop calendar facilitates easy planning and scheduling, allowing you to visualize how your content will look to your audience before it’s published. This feature is invaluable for maintaining a cohesive and aesthetically pleasing social media presence. Later supports auto-publishing for major platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest, streamlining the posting process.

Additionally, its Linkin.bio feature creates a customizable, clickable landing page that mirrors your Instagram feed, linking each post to content on your website, product pages, or elsewhere, effectively turning your Instagram profile into a mini-website.

CoSchedule: The Comprehensive Marketing Planner

CoSchedule takes a broader approach, offering a content calendar that integrates not just social media posts but all marketing activities. This holistic view is ideal for businesses and marketing teams looking to coordinate their social media efforts with blog posts, email campaigns, and other marketing initiatives. CoSchedule’s strength lies in its ability to provide a unified dashboard for all marketing tasks, ensuring consistency and efficiency across your entire marketing strategy.

The platform also features ReQueue, an intelligent automation tool that helps you find optimal posting times and fills gaps in your social media schedule by automatically rescheduling your best-performing content. This feature ensures that your social media channels remain active, engaging your audience with your top content without manual intervention.

Navigating Your Content Strategy

When comparing Later and CoSchedule for content management and scheduling, consider the scope of your marketing efforts and the platforms you prioritize. For a focus on visual social media platforms, Later is an excellent choice for offering tools that emphasize visual planning and scheduling, particularly beneficial for Instagram and Pinterest-focused strategies. For an integrated approach to marketing and social media, CoSchedule is the superior tool, with its comprehensive calendar that accommodates all marketing activities, making it ideal for teams that manage a broad range of content across multiple channels.

Analytics and Reporting

The ability to analyze your social media performance and generate actionable reports is indispensable for refining your strategy and demonstrating ROI. Both Later and CoSchedule offer analytics capabilities, but with varying focuses and strengths. Let’s explore what each platform brings to the analytics table.

Later: Focused Visual Insights

Later provides a suite of analytics tools designed primarily for visual content platforms, with a strong emphasis on Instagram. The platform offers insights into post performance, including metrics like reach, impressions, engagement rates, and more. Later’s analytics are particularly useful for brands and creators who rely heavily on Instagram, as it includes detailed analytics for stories and hashtags, which are critical for engaging Instagram’s audience.

Later’s analytics are presented in a user-friendly format, making it easy for users to quickly grasp the effectiveness of their content and make informed decisions. For businesses leveraging Instagram as a key component of their social media strategy, Later’s focused analytics offer the targeted insights needed to grow and engage their audience effectively.

CoSchedule: The Comprehensive Marketing Analyst

In contrast, CoSchedule provides broader analytics that cover not just social media posts but also other marketing activities. This comprehensive approach allows you to see the performance of your entire marketing strategy in one place. CoSchedule’s analytics include detailed reports on social media engagement, campaign performance, and content effectiveness, enabling a holistic view of your marketing efforts.

A standout feature of CoSchedule’s analytics is the ability to customize reports to focus on the metrics that matter most to you or your clients. This customization, coupled with the integration of analytics from various marketing channels, makes CoSchedule a powerful tool for marketers looking to gain in-depth insights into their overall marketing strategy, not just social media.

Integration and Compatibility

The best social media management tools not only stand strong on their own merits but also play well with others. Integration with other marketing tools and services can greatly improve workflow efficiency and campaign effectiveness. Let’s examine the integration capabilities of Later and CoSchedule.

Later: Streamlined Social Focus

Later primarily focuses on social media content planning and scheduling, with particular strength in visual content management for platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest. Its integration capabilities are designed to support this focus, connecting with key platforms to facilitate content publishing directly from the Later interface. While Later’s direct integrations may seem limited compared to more comprehensive marketing platforms, it covers essential ground for social media marketers focusing on content creation and distribution. Later integrates with Shopify, making it an attractive option for e-commerce businesses looking to link social media efforts directly with their online store. This integration allows for tagging products in Instagram posts and stories, directly driving sales from social content.

CoSchedule: The All-In-One Marketing Hub

CoSchedule positions itself as an all-in-one marketing calendar, designed to centralize not just social media management but all marketing activities. Its integration capabilities reflect this broad approach, offering compatibility with a wide range of tools and platforms. CoSchedule integrates seamlessly with popular content management systems like WordPress, enabling you to coordinate blog and social media content. It also connects with email marketing platforms, analytics tools, and more, providing a unified dashboard for all your marketing efforts. CoSchedule’s strength in integration lies in its ability to bring together various aspects of marketing strategy, from social media and blogging to email campaigns and events, facilitating a cohesive and coordinated approach to digital marketing.

Pricing and Scalability

Navigating the pricing structures and scalability features of Later and CoSchedule reveals their strategic approaches to accommodating different types of users, highlighting the importance of choosing a tool that can grow alongside your business.

Later: Visual Content Planning with Scalable Solutions

Later’s pricing model is designed with visual content creators in mind, offering a range of plans that suit everyone from solo entrepreneurs to larger businesses focused on a strong visual presence across platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest.

Flexible Pricing with Growth in Mind

Later introduces a free tier aimed at new or individual users, providing basic functionalities that help get the visual content strategy off the ground. As businesses scale, Later’s premium plans offer increased posts, social profiles, and access to more advanced analytics and collaboration tools. This tiered approach ensures businesses can incrementally unlock features as their social media demands grow.

Specialized Plans for Diverse Needs

Unique to Later is its specialization in visual content, which is reflected in its pricing plans. Higher-tier subscriptions offer features like hashtag suggestions, best time to post analytics, and user-generated content curation, which are indispensable for brands relying heavily on visual engagement. Later’s emphasis on scalable visual content tools makes it an attractive option for businesses prioritizing image and video content.

CoSchedule: Integrated Marketing Calendars for Comprehensive Management

CoSchedule stands out for its integrated approach to social media management, offering a robust marketing calendar that combines social media, content marketing, and project management into a unified platform.

Tiered Plans for Integrated Marketing Teams

CoSchedule’s pricing is structured around the concept of an integrated marketing suite, with its plans catering not just to social media management but to a comprehensive array of marketing activities. Starting from a base plan that accommodates smaller teams looking to organize their marketing efforts, CoSchedule scales up to more feature-rich plans that support larger marketing departments with complex needs, including advanced analytics, team workflows, and asset management.

Custom Solutions for Enterprise-Level Marketing

For enterprises with extensive marketing operations, CoSchedule offers custom solutions that provide a bespoke set of tools tailored to the organization’s specific requirements. This includes everything from content organization and social media scheduling to global team collaboration features and full-scale project management tools, ensuring that large teams can operate efficiently and cohesively.

Related: Check out our free SEO suite

Customer Support

The level and quality of customer support can greatly influence user satisfaction, affecting how quickly you can resolve issues and leverage the platform’s full capabilities.

Later: User-Centric Support

Later places a strong emphasis on user support through various channels. It offers a detailed Help Center filled with articles, guides, and video tutorials designed to help users navigate the platform and troubleshoot common issues. For more personalized support, Later provides email support, ensuring users can get help for specific problems they encounter. While Later does not offer live chat or phone support, the depth and accessibility of its online resources are commendable, catering well to the platform’s visual content-focused user base.

CoSchedule: Comprehensive Assistance

CoSchedule stands out for its broad approach to customer support, offering multiple channels to assist users, including email, live chat, and a rich knowledge base. Particularly notable is CoSchedule’s live chat support, providing real-time assistance that can be invaluable for resolving urgent issues or getting quick answers to questions. Furthermore, CoSchedule offers detailed training resources, including webinars and a blog filled with marketing tips, ensuring users not only understand how to use the platform but also how to optimize their overall marketing strategy.

Training Resources

Effective use of a social media management tool extends beyond just knowing which buttons to press; understanding best practices and strategy optimization is key.

Later: Focused on Visual Marketing Excellence

Later’s training resources are tailored to its strengths in visual marketing, offering a wealth of content on best practices for platforms like Instagram and Pinterest. Through its blog, webinars, and case studies, Later provides insights into visual content strategy, helping users maximize engagement and aesthetic appeal. These resources are particularly useful for brands and creators focused on building a strong visual presence online.

CoSchedule: Marketing Strategy Masterclasses

CoSchedule goes beyond tool-specific training to offer extensive resources on broader marketing strategy. Its blog, webinars, and downloadable guides cover a wide range of topics, from content marketing to email strategy, social media, and productivity. This wealth of information not only helps users make the most of CoSchedule’s features but also enhances their overall marketing knowledge, supporting a holistic approach to digital marketing

Wrapping Up

Later shines as a platform with a strong emphasis on visual content, particularly suited for Instagram and Pinterest-focused strategies. Its intuitive interface, streamlined content scheduling, and robust visual planning tools make it an ideal choice for brands, marketers, and content creators who prioritize aesthetic cohesion and engagement on visual platforms. Coupled with user-centric support and focused training resources, Later empowers users to elevate their visual content strategy effectively. CoSchedule, on the other hand, positions itself as a comprehensive marketing calendar, offering extensive capabilities beyond social media management. With its broad integration options, sophisticated scheduling features, and detailed analytics, CoSchedule is tailored for marketers and teams looking to consolidate their entire marketing strategy in one platform. The platform’s commitment to comprehensive customer support and wide-ranging marketing training resources makes it a valuable ally for businesses aiming for a cohesive and data-driven marketing approach.