Planable vs PostSider: Approvals and Pricing
Planable is the better tool when the client review conversation is the product: its previews, comment threads and annotations are the best in social media tooling, and it reviews briefs and newsletters too. PostSider is the better tool when an approved post has to go straight into a publishing queue across more networks, at a flat price instead of one workspace fee per client. I build PostSider, so read this with that bias, and check both pricing pages before you commit.
Planable vs PostSider at a glance
| Planable | PostSider | |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing unit | Per workspace, one per client, unlimited users | Flat plan by channel count, unlimited team members from Team |
| Entry price | Basic, $39 per workspace per month ($33 on annual billing) | Standard, $20/mo, 5 channels, 1 seat |
| 10 clients | Pro: $590/mo, or $820/mo with analytics and inbox add-ons on every workspace | Team $35/mo (10 channels) or Pro $45/mo (30 channels) |
| Approval depth | Basic: none or optional. Pro: required. Multi-level routing: Enterprise, from $2,500/yr | Draft, review and approve on Team and up |
| Post limits | 60 (Basic) or 150 (Pro) per workspace per month, drafts count | 400/mo on Standard, unlimited from Team |
| Publishing coverage | 9 networks: Facebook, Instagram, Threads, X, LinkedIn, TikTok, YouTube, Pinterest, Google Business Profile | 30+ networks |
| After approval | Scheduled from the calendar | Lands in a next-free-slot queue with Smart Slots and Evergreen recycling |
| Non-social review (briefs, newsletters, ad copy) | Yes | No |
| API | No public REST API documentation found | REST API, @postsider/node, signed webhooks |
| MCP | MCP connector: browse workspaces, draft posts, pull analytics | MCP server on every paid plan |
Planable figures: Planable’s pricing page and help center, checked September 11, 2026, with Pro ($59 per workspace per month, $590 per year), the add-ons and the Enterprise floor re-checked against Planable’s help center pricing article on October 18, 2026. Network list and MCP connector: Planable’s help center, checked October 18, 2026. PostSider figures: the pricing page, October 18, 2026.
Planable earns its reputation on one thing: the review conversation
Planable’s review layer is the best in the category, and PostSider’s is not as good. The comment threads, annotations and previews are the product, and they are worth paying for if sign-off is your bottleneck.
The feature list is real. Planable renders feed and grid previews, lets reviewers comment and annotate on the post itself, keeps version history, and supports team-only drafts and notes. Unlimited users are included on every plan, and the MCP Connector sits as low as the Basic tier. An agency that sends a client a link and gets a clear yes in the thread has had its problem solved, and Planable solves that problem better than anything I have built. If your week is spent chasing a sign-off that keeps slipping, that tooling shortens the chase.
Planable reviews well. The open questions are what the review costs at client eleven, and what happens to the post in the ten minutes after the client clicks approve. The approval workflow I run inside PostSider is built for that second question.
Per workspace means per client, and that is the whole pricing argument
Planable bills each client as a separate workspace, so the bill grows with client count rather than team size. Planable’s own page says the model is “per workspace, with unlimited users. It’s not priced per seat,” and it recommends one workspace per client or brand, naming five clients as five workspaces.
That design has a real upside: your whole team and every client reviewer can sit in the tool at no extra cost. PostSider runs the same idea with unlimited team members on Team. The difference is where the meter sits. Planable meters clients. PostSider meters channels.
So hiring a reviewer is free on Planable, and winning a client costs $59 a month on Pro at the monthly rate, or $49 on annual billing. The bill scales with the thing you are trying to grow.
The bill is $590 a month at ten clients before you add analytics or an inbox
Ten clients on Planable Pro is $590 per month at the monthly rate, or $490 on annual billing, and adding analytics and the social inbox on every workspace brings it to $820.
Run it line by line. Ten workspaces at the Pro monthly rate of $59 is $590. The analytics add-on is $14 per workspace per month and the social inbox is $9, so $23 per workspace, which is $230 across ten clients and lands the total at $820. RecurPost’s switching guide reports the same two figures for the same ten-client scenario, $590 and $820, checked on September 11, 2026, and Planable’s help center still lists Pro at $59 per workspace per month and the add-ons at $14 and $9 as of October 18, 2026.
| Plan | Per client | Ten clients |
|---|---|---|
| Planable Basic, annual | $33/mo | $330/mo, 60 posts and 4 social pages each |
| Planable Pro, monthly | $59/mo | $590/mo, 150 posts and 10 social pages each |
| Planable Pro plus analytics and inbox, monthly | $82/mo | $820/mo |
| PostSider Team, monthly | one flat plan | $35/mo, unlimited team members, 10 channels, unlimited posts |
On annual billing the same ten-client bill is $490 a month before add-ons, and $685 with both add-ons at their annual rates of $12 and $7.50 per workspace. Against that, PostSider Team is $35 a month at 10 channels, or $350 a year on annual billing, and PostSider Pro is $45 a month at 30 channels. A ten-client agency that needs more than 10 channels lands on Pro and still pays less than one Planable workspace plus its analytics.
This per-client multiplication is the same pattern that shows up across the category, which I priced out in the per-channel pricing tax.
Approval depth is gated in three places
Basic gives you the None and Optional approval modes, Pro adds Required, and multi-level routing is Enterprise only, which Planable prices from $2,500 per year.
Three gates matter here. Basic cannot require approval at all, so a client who must sign off before anything ships rules out the $33 tier. Pro adds Required, which covers a single approver with a single yes or no. A workflow that routes through a junior designer, then an account lead, then the client is Enterprise, which means a sales conversation and a $2,500 annual floor.
PostSider ships its approval workflow on Team at $35 a month and Pro at $45. If you are shopping for a Planable alternative because a client needs to sign off, the tier that serves you is not the cheapest one.
A post cap of 60 or 150 counts drafts, and that is the quiet constraint
Basic caps at 60 posts per workspace per month and Pro at 150, and drafts count against the cap. The only way past it is the $49 monthly extra-posts add-on, which raises the limit to 500 posts a month across every workspace.
Post volume is where a cap like this stops being theoretical. A client posting twice a day to three networks is scheduling 180 posts a month, and every draft that gets rewritten along the way counts too. Pro’s 150 goes fast, and the answer Planable sells is one $49 add-on that lifts the ceiling to 500 for the whole account.
PostSider Team and above are unlimited posts. It is a small row on a pricing table and one of the most common reasons people move.
What happens after the client clicks approve
In PostSider the approval step and the publishing queue are the same system, so a signed-off post moves into the queue without a second tool, a second login, or a manual copy. That is the whole reason I built it this way.
The queue schedules by next free slot, Smart Slots picks the windows that fit the client’s cadence, and Evergreen recycling puts strong posts back into rotation, all of it inside the Team plan at $35 a month. Per-platform preview sits next to the draft before anyone approves it, and hashtag groups drop the client’s tags in without retyping them, so the reviewer sees the post the way it will actually render.
Planable publishes too, and I am not going to pretend it does not. The difference is coverage and what surrounds the publish step. Planable publishes to 9 networks. PostSider publishes to 30+, including Bluesky, Mastodon, Discord and Telegram, and the same queue is reachable from the social media scheduler API, so a script or an agent can drop a draft into review and read back its status after approval.
One reviewer seat costs nothing on either tool, but one extra client costs $59 a month on Planable
Both vendors give you unlimited reviewers, so reviewer seats are free on each side. Planable bills each new client as a new workspace at $59 a month on Pro, while PostSider adds channels inside a flat plan.
The objection worth answering directly is this: Planable gives every client unlimited reviewers for one flat workspace fee, so it should already be the cheaper model. That is true, and it holds until client number three. Two clients on Basic annual billing is $66 a month, which is already more than Team at $35. Five clients on Basic annual is $165, and ten clients on Pro monthly is $590 before add-ons.
So the structure question is the one to settle first: are you buying a workspace per client, or a set of channels you manage from one place? The workspace-per-client guide walks through how the second model is set up inside PostSider.
What Planable does better than PostSider, stated plainly
Planable’s previews, comment threads, and approval kanban are more mature than PostSider’s, and Planable reviews non-social content such as briefs, newsletters, and ad copy, which PostSider does not do at all.
That last point is worth repeating because it decides real cases. If your agency approves a newsletter and a social post in the same pipeline, Planable is the only one of the two that does both jobs. Its pixel-level feed and grid previews are ahead of mine, and its version history in the review thread is ahead of mine.
On PostSider’s side, the honest list of things it does not have: social listening, a unified DM inbox, competitor benchmarking, ad reporting, helpdesk or CRM integrations, and SSO. If you need those, you need a second tool or a different tool, and no pricing table changes that. AI inside PostSider is the Post Checker and caption rewrite, nothing more.
Choose Planable when, choose PostSider when
Choose Planable when:
- The review conversation is the product, and clients comment on pixel-level feed and grid previews.
- Briefs, newsletters and ad copy run through the same approval pipeline as social media posts.
- You need multi-level routing (designer, then account lead, then client) and will buy Enterprise to get it.
- You manage two clients or fewer, where Basic at $33 per workspace on annual billing is still close to a flat plan.
Choose PostSider when:
- Approval is one step in a production line, and a signed-off post has to land in a queue, recycle when it works and publish on schedule.
- You manage five or more clients and the per-workspace bill has passed $165 a month on Basic or $295 on Pro.
- Clients post on networks Planable does not cover, such as Bluesky, Mastodon, Discord or Telegram.
- Scripts or AI agents need to create drafts, request approval and read results through a REST API, the Node SDK or MCP.
- A client posts more than 150 times a month and you do not want drafts counting against a cap.
The agency scheduler page shows how the client workspaces and roles are set up on the PostSider side.
The migration takes an afternoon, not a quarter
Moving takes an afternoon: reconnect each platform account inside PostSider, rebuild the channel list and the approval roles once, and use CSV bulk import on Pro and Ultimate to bring the backlog across.
Nothing here is a quarter-long project. The first cycle is the manual one, reconnecting profiles through each platform’s own OAuth flow, and every cycle after that runs inside the queue. The signed webhooks with HMAC-SHA256 and three delivery attempts, the Idempotency-Key header on POST requests, and the audit log on Pro exist so the paper trail survives the move.
The plans, the channel counts, and the 7-day trial are all on the pricing page. Bring your client list to it and check the arithmetic against your own numbers.
Lukasz Blania is the founder of PostSider. He writes about solo-founder content operations and runs PostSider’s own social accounts through the product.
Approval pricing changes with the seat model, and the Socialrails workspace and seat comparison shows where a flat tier lands.
Frequently asked questions
Is Planable cheaper than PostSider for an agency?
Only up to about two clients. Planable Basic is $33 per workspace per month on annual billing, so two clients cost $66 a month against PostSider Team at $35 a month flat. By ten clients, Planable Pro is $590 a month before the analytics add-on on each workspace. Check both vendors' current pricing pages before you commit, because plan structures change.
Does Planable publish posts or only collect approvals?
It publishes. Its plan list includes scheduling and direct publishing, its approval modes run from none to required, and multi-level routing sits on Enterprise only. It also reviews non-social content such as briefs and newsletters, which PostSider does not do.
What is the best social media approval tool for agencies?
Planable if the review conversation is the product, because its comment threads and post previews are best in class. PostSider if the approval has to end in a published post, because the queue, Smart Slots, and Evergreen recycling sit in the same flow and start at $35 a month with unlimited reviewers.
Do Planable's post limits apply to drafts?
Yes. Drafts count against 60 posts per workspace per month on Basic and 150 on Pro, and the extra-posts add-on costs $49 a month to raise the ceiling to 500 posts across all workspaces. PostSider Team and above have no post limit.
Does Planable have an API or an MCP server?
Planable has an MCP connector: its help center explains how to add it to Claude Desktop, ChatGPT, Gemini or another MCP client so an assistant can browse workspaces, draft posts and pull analytics. I could not find public REST API documentation from Planable as of October 18, 2026. PostSider ships a REST API, the @postsider/node SDK, signed webhooks and an MCP server on every paid plan.
Can clients approve in PostSider without a paid seat?
Yes. PostSider Team includes unlimited team members, and Planable includes unlimited users on every workspace, so reviewer seats are free on both tools. The difference is that Planable bills each new client as a new workspace while PostSider adds channels inside one flat plan.