One of the best things about Later is it's media library which enables you to effortlessly source content from a variety of sources to have ready to drop into your feeds. We also loved it's 'first comment' feature that auto-posts all your hashtags neatly into a comment underneath your post. It does provide an all-in-one solution to your Instagram account from managing your one clickable bio URL with linkin.bio to being able to schedule your Instagram stories on top of regular posts. However if you just want to plan your Instagram feed these added features can bring some unnecessary complexity to the platform. It has some great functionality such as the ability to cross-post content on multiple platforms.

Later is a much more powerful social media scheduler than some of the other apps we reviewed. In a rush to make a decision and just want to get planning? Skip straight to our summary at the end!

Professional and power-users will likely need more functionality than what the basic free versions of these apps supply but for your average user they will be more than sufficient. Most of these apps have premium versions accessible via a paid subscription but for a level playing field we will be comparing just the free versions and functions of these apps.

We've rounded up our top free apps and are discussing every detail that might help you decide which is the one for you. Each time we revisit our go-to apps we are impressed with the additions of more powerful features, better integrations and smarter ways to add media. Creative people flock to Instagram daily for its bounty of delicious eye-candy and designing the perfect stream of posts to keep your audience satisfied is an art-form in itself! At Creatively Squared we are always keen to curate the most amazing looking Instagram grid to help inspire our community and we've been reviewing the top apps to do just this for a number of years now.

Instagram tile layout