Blotato vs Postiz: Better Option for Automating Social Media?
Blotato vs Postiz: one is AGPL open source you run yourself, one is hosted. Compare the real cost of self-hosting, API limits, and AI.
Blotato vs Postiz is a rare comparison where the pricing pages agree and almost nothing else does. Both start at $29 a month. Both ship a REST API. Both run an MCP server so Claude can post for you. On a spec sheet they look like the same product.
They are not. Postiz is AGPL-licensed open source you can download and run on your own server for nothing. Blotato is hosted software you rent. That single difference decides almost everything else, including who should ignore the rest of this post and go install Postiz right now.
I want to be straight about something before we start, because a lot of comparison posts in this category quietly get it wrong. Postiz has a real API on its entry tier, an official MCP server, an n8n node, and a CLI. If you came here expecting me to argue that the open-source option is technically behind, that is not the honest read.
Blotato vs Postiz: At a Glance
Postiz is the better pick if: you are comfortable running infrastructure, you want to own your data and your code, or you need networks like Mastodon, Bluesky, Discord, and Slack in one place. If you self-host it, the software genuinely costs nothing.
Blotato is the better pick if: you want AI writing, images, and video bundled at a flat rate, you would rather someone else be on call when an Instagram OAuth token breaks, and your time is worth more than the server bill. You can see what that costs on the flat-rate plans page.
Are Blotato and Postiz Even the Same Category?
Not really, and pretending otherwise would waste your time.
Postiz is an open-source scheduling platform with an AI layer on top. The GitHub repo has more than 33,000 stars, dates back to July 2023, and sees commits most days. It is actively maintained software with a real community, and the README says something most open-core products would never say: there is no difference between the hosted version and the self-hosted version. No feature gating. That is a genuinely generous position.
Blotato is a hosted AI content engine that also schedules. The creation surface is the product, and the scheduling is the last step.
So the question is not really which tool has more features. It is whether you want to run the software or rent it.
Who Postiz Is Built For
Postiz is built for developers, and it does not really hide that. It is built by Gitroom, with Nevo David among its active maintainers, and the whole product assumes a reader who is comfortable with a terminal.
The platform coverage is the standout. Its provider docs list 31 destinations, which is more than almost any hosted tool offers. That count includes Mastodon, Bluesky, Discord, Slack, Telegram, Farcaster, and Nostr, plus blog and newsletter targets like WordPress, Medium, and Dev.to. If you live in the fediverse or you want to push the same update to Discord and a blog at once, there is not much competition.
The AI-agent story is real too. Postiz repositioned hard here, and the homepage now name-checks Claude, ChatGPT, Codex, and Cursor among the agents it supports. Its MCP server exposes nine tools covering scheduling, image generation, and video generation, and the API is listed on the $29 Standard tier rather than gated behind an enterprise call. Nine tools is a genuinely deep MCP surface, and when I compared the posting MCP servers side by side most of the category was thinner than that.
I am not going to cite a G2 score here, because G2 blocks automated access to its Postiz page and I could not read it live. What I can point you to is better anyway: the public issue tracker, which I will come back to.
Who Blotato Is Built For
I am involved with Blotato as a creator and tester, so take this section with whatever grain of salt feels right. I will keep the numbers checkable.
Blotato is built for people who want to make content, not maintain a posting system. The flat $29 Starter plan covers 20 social accounts across 9 platforms with unlimited AI writing, plus credit-based AI image and video generation and ElevenLabs voiceovers. There is a full REST API on paid plans, official n8n and Make nodes, and a hosted MCP server at mcp.blotato.com/mcp.
The reader Blotato is genuinely right for is the one who does the arithmetic on their own hourly rate and decides that a weekend spent debugging OAuth callbacks is not free.
Postiz vs Blotato: Side by Side
| Category | Postiz | Blotato |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing model | Flat per plan, by channel count | Flat rate |
| License | AGPL-3.0 open source | Proprietary, hosted |
| Self-hosting | Yes, free | No |
| Free plan | No (7-day trial, self-host is free) | No (7-day trial, cancel anytime) |
| Cheapest paid tier | $29/mo (5 channels) | $29/mo (20 accounts) |
| Platforms | 31 per its docs, including blog targets | 9 |
| AI text writing | AI copilot and Smart Agent, all tiers | Yes (unlimited generation) |
| AI image generation | Metered (none listed on Standard) | Included (uses AI credits) |
| AI video generation | Metered (3/mo on Standard) | Included (faceless video plus voiceovers) |
| Public REST API | Yes, on every tier | Yes (full API on paid plans) |
| API rate limit | 100 create-post requests/hour on cloud, same on every tier | Not published as an hourly cap |
| MCP server | Official (api.postiz.com/mcp) | Hosted (mcp.blotato.com/mcp) |
| n8n / Make nodes | n8n node, community | Official nodes for both |
| Mobile app | No | No |
| Trial | 7 days | 7 days (excludes the API) |
Two rows matter more than the rest. Postiz gives you 31 destinations to Blotato’s 9, and that is a real win for anyone who needs Mastodon or Bluesky. Blotato bundles AI generation that Postiz meters, and it does not ask you to run a server.
Where Postiz Wins
It is free if you self-host it. Not freemium. The whole product, under AGPL-3.0, with no feature gating between the hosted and self-hosted builds. If you have a spare VPS and the skills, your software bill is zero. Nothing in this post beats zero.
The platform list is deeper. 31 destinations against Blotato’s 9. Mastodon, Bluesky, Discord, Slack, Telegram, Nostr, Farcaster, and blog targets like WordPress and Dev.to. If your audience is in the fediverse, Blotato simply does not go there.
The API is on the entry tier. $29 gets you the REST API and webhooks. Blotato’s own 7-day trial explicitly excludes API access, so a developer who wants to test an integration on day one has an easier path with Postiz.
You own your data. The database is yours. For anyone with a compliance requirement or a strong opinion about where customer data lives, that is not a preference, it is a requirement.
It ships fast and it is genuinely maintained. Commits land most days and an active maintainer is merging pull requests. This is not an abandoned project you would be betting on.
Where Blotato Wins
There is no hourly API ceiling to design around. If you are building an agent that posts on a schedule, read this one before the others, because it is the only item here a good developer cannot shrug off. Postiz’s public API docs cap the create-post endpoint at 100 requests per hour on cloud. It is not an account-wide throttle, it lands on the exact call an agent makes most, and it does not scale with your plan. Paying $99 for Ultimate does not lift it. Self-hosted installs sit at 90 an hour, adjustable with the API_LIMIT variable, which means the fix for the ceiling is to go run the server yourself.
For a person posting a few times a day, this is invisible. For a Claude agent working a backlog, or an agency pushing scheduled content across 40 client accounts, an hourly wall you cannot buy your way past is an architectural constraint, not a footnote. Check it against your real throughput before you commit either way.
The AI is bundled, not metered. This is the clearest gap at the entry tier. Postiz’s $29 Standard plan lists 3 AI videos a month and does not list AI images at all. Blotato’s $29 Starter includes unlimited AI writing plus 1,250 credits a month spanning images, video, and voice. If AI creation is why you are shopping, the two $29 plans are not comparable products.
Nobody sends you a server bill. Postiz’s own system requirements put the supported floor at 2 vCPU and 2 GB of RAM, and recommend 4 vCPU and 8 GB for a team of 20 or fewer, plus PostgreSQL, Redis, and a Temporal stack. To be fair to them, the official Docker setup is tested on a 2 GB VM, so a single-user install on cheap hardware genuinely works. The docs are candid about the edges: building from source can run out of memory on a 2 GB box, and strict egress firewalls will break OAuth. That infrastructure is not free, and neither is the evening you spend on it.
Someone else owns the OAuth problem. When Instagram changes its API, that is my problem to solve, not yours. On a self-hosted install, every provider is configured by hand in your .env file, and the docs are explicit that no providers are configured by default.
The Real Pricing Math
| Plan level | Postiz | Blotato |
|---|---|---|
| Entry | $29/mo, 5 channels | $29/mo, 20 accounts |
| Mid | $39/mo, 10 channels | $97/mo, 40 accounts |
| Higher | $49/mo, 30 channels | $499/mo, Agency |
| Top | $99/mo, 100 channels | Not applicable |
| Self-hosted | Free (AGPL, your infrastructure) | Not offered |
Now the entry tier, capability by capability.
| Capability at the entry tier | Postiz Standard ($29/mo) | Blotato Starter ($29/mo) |
|---|---|---|
| Channels or accounts | 5 | 20 |
| Posts per month | Unlimited | Not capped by post count |
| AI text writing | AI copilot | Unlimited |
| AI image generation | Not listed on this tier | Included (uses credits) |
| AI video generation | 3 per month | Included (uses credits) |
| REST API | Yes | Yes (paid plans, not the trial) |
| MCP server | Yes | Yes |
At the same $29, Blotato covers four times the accounts and does not meter the AI. That is the price-to-value argument in one table.
Here is where that argument stops working, and you should hear it before you decide:
If you self-host, Postiz costs nothing and the comparison is over. A $5 VPS beats $29 a month every time. If you enjoy running your own infrastructure, stop reading and go install it.
If you need more than 20 accounts, Postiz gets cheaper fast. Postiz Ultimate is $99 a month for 100 channels. Blotato’s answer at that scale is the $499 Agency plan. On raw account count, Postiz wins that matchup decisively.
If you barely touch AI, you are paying Blotato for surface area you will not use. If you write your own captions and just need them scheduled, Postiz’s bundled AI is a rounding error and the extra channels matter more.
If you need Mastodon, Bluesky, or Discord, Blotato does not have an answer. No pricing table fixes a platform we do not support.
The Part Nobody Puts in the Comparison Table
Open source shifts the failure to you, and that is worth pricing honestly. I have written up the real cost of self-hosting versus a managed API at length, but the short version lives in the issue tracker.
Postiz’s public issue tracker is the most useful thing about evaluating it, because it is the one source competitors never read. One open thread titled “Could not add provider” has drawn 57 comments from people who cannot connect the accounts they installed the tool to reach. Connecting each platform is the step self-hosters have to configure by hand, and it is where a fair number of them get stuck.
The one worth reading is issue #832, which is closed now. A user reported that posts published to Instagram were never marked as published, so the worker retried in a loop, and they flagged the risk of Instagram treating the account as a bot and disabling it. Be precise about what that is: one user’s report on a public tracker, since resolved, not a verdict on the product. Every scheduling tool has bad bugs and this one got fixed. It is on the list because it is the honest shape of the trade. When you run the software, the retry loop is yours to catch, and the fix arrives when a maintainer gets to it.
I am not raising this to score a point. Every issue I have linked is public because Postiz chose to develop in the open, which is more transparency than most hosted vendors offer. You just want to know what “free” actually costs before you pick it.
One More Thing If You Plan to Self-Host Commercially
Postiz relicensed to AGPL-3.0 in January 2025. It was not always AGPL.
AGPL is a network copyleft license. If you self-host it and offer it as a service over a network, you are obliged to make your modifications available under the same license. For personal use, an internal team tool, or a client’s accounts you manage yourself, this does not matter at all.
If you were planning to fork it and quietly resell it as your own white-label product, talk to a lawyer first. That is not a knock on Postiz, it is what the license says, and it is exactly the detail the “best free tools” roundups skip.
Use Postiz If
- You are comfortable running PostgreSQL, Redis, and Temporal
- You want to own your data and your infrastructure
- You need Mastodon, Bluesky, Discord, Slack, or blog destinations
- You want API access on the cheapest paid tier
- You want 30 or 100 channels without a big pricing jump
- Free software matters to you on principle
Use Blotato If
- You want AI writing, images, and video bundled at one flat price
- You would rather not be paged when an OAuth token expires
- 20 accounts across the major platforms covers your needs
- You want faceless video and voiceovers without another subscription
- Your time is worth more than the difference between $0 and $29
- You want the vendor to own the retry loop
Sabrina’s Final Take
If you are technical and you like running things, install Postiz. I mean that. It is well-built software, it is actively maintained, its platform coverage beats ours, and self-hosting it costs nothing. There is no version of this post where I pretend $29 beats free for someone who enjoys the work.
If neither of us is quite right, that is a fair conclusion too, and I ranked eight other Postiz alternatives including Mixpost for people who want to keep self-hosting on a lighter stack.
Blotato is for the other reader, the one who opened four browser tabs to compare tools and does not actually want to become their own DevOps team. If that is you, the Starter plan is $29 flat for 20 accounts with the AI included. One honest caveat if you are here for the API or MCP: our 7-day trial excludes API access, so plan on starting the subscription rather than trialing that specific piece. Postiz is more accommodating on that front, and you should know it before you sign up.
Blotato vs Postiz FAQs
Is Postiz really free?
The software is, under AGPL-3.0, if you self-host it. You still pay for the server, and Postiz recommends 4 vCPU and 8 GB of RAM for a small team, plus PostgreSQL, Redis, and Temporal. The hosted plans start at $29 a month. So free means free of license fees, not free of cost or effort.
Does Postiz have an MCP server?
Yes, an official one at api.postiz.com/mcp, exposing nine tools including scheduling and image and video generation. It authenticates with the same API key as the REST API, and API access is listed on the $29 Standard tier. Blotato also runs a hosted MCP server at mcp.blotato.com/mcp. Both are genuine options for Claude users.
Is Blotato cheaper than Postiz?
At the entry tier they are both $29, but you get 20 accounts with Blotato against 5 with Postiz, plus unbundled AI. Above 20 accounts, Postiz gets cheaper quickly: its $99 Ultimate plan covers 100 channels. And if you self-host Postiz, it costs nothing. The answer depends entirely on your account count and whether you run servers.
Which tool supports more social platforms?
Postiz, and it is not close. Its docs list 31 destinations against Blotato’s 9. The caveat is that the 31 includes blog and newsletter targets like WordPress and Dev.to, and counts LinkedIn profiles and Pages separately, so it is not 31 social networks. If you need Mastodon, Bluesky, or Discord, Postiz is your option.
What does the AGPL license mean for my business?
If you self-host Postiz for yourself, your team, or clients whose accounts you manage, it means nothing you need to worry about. If you modify it and offer it as a network service to others, AGPL-3.0 requires you to release those modifications under the same license. Postiz relicensed to AGPL in January 2025. Get legal advice before building a commercial product on it.
Is Postiz or Blotato better for agencies?
It depends on your appetite for infrastructure. Postiz Ultimate is $99 a month for 100 channels, far cheaper per account than Blotato’s $499 Agency plan, but you own the uptime and the OAuth breakage across every client. Blotato costs more per account and takes the operational risk off your desk. Agencies with a technical lead should look hard at Postiz.