Awful for Instagram – Buffer: Plan & Schedule Posts Review

I was led to believe Buffer can do it all so I’ll be clear if you’re looking for an IG scheduling platform, this ain’t it: 1) Because of IG’s platform, no scheduling tool can help autofill accounts to tag. No problem, but if you don’t correctly type out the handles, it won’t post. When I switched to Later it doesn’t do this, it’ll just skip over the tag that’s misspelled and still post. Buffer will just come to a full stop. 2) Don’t bother uploading portrait/vertical photos with tall aspect ratios. 50% of the time I could not get a tall photo to upload even when I followed the 5:4 ratio specs per their guidance. Not only will Buffer support tell you it’s IG’s finicky pixel tolerance, you can’t use their auto cropping tool to fix it either. There’s no auto-crop in the browser and if you use the mobile app which has it, it adds a thin white line. This was never fixed even though I submitted several tix on this—I still saw account that has Buffer experience this white line effect to date. Later’s tolerance works 99% of the time, and if it doesn’t it lets you auto-crop in both the browser and app. 3) Support gets 5-stars for being responsive and always super kind. Their transparency report is actually very commendable. However support will also blame IG for issues that are non issues in Later. Support also told me to just use square photos because they themselves experience issues with portrait/vertical photos on their own platform. Support will also tell you things are fixed when they aren’t. Support will kindly tell you to resubmit a request to add a feature they once had and took away without notifying its users. 4) Technical team keeps rolling out new features and never fixed recurring issues. 5) Go read tweets that @ Buffer and Later. Constant technical issues for Buffer. I could’ve saved myself hours had I just started with Later. Later even lets you save captions, tag photo sets with metadata for search, has a grid preview tool, and seldom glitches (apart from having to reconnect accounts sometimes). If you’re reading this, please don’t use Buffer for Instagram. My team was so happy when we made the switch.
Review by Supervy on Buffer: Plan & Schedule Posts.