You are paying for history and one login, not for the numbers themselves
Every platform gives you its own numbers free. What a paid tool buys is history, several accounts in one place, and competitor tracking. Prices read from their own pages.
The honest version first
Start with what you already have. Every platform reports its own numbers free inside its own app, and for a single account that is usually the whole answer. What a paid tool sells is not better numbers, it is three specific things the free tools will not do: keep history beyond the platform's own window, put several accounts behind one login, and track accounts you do not own. If you need none of those, you do not need the tool, and this page will not pretend otherwise.
Side by side
Prices in US dollars, read from each product's own page on the dates in the note. Metricool bills VAT separately in Europe and defaults to annual pricing, so both its rates are given.
| Dimension | What it reports | The limit | Price |
|---|---|---|---|
| The platform's own analytics | Views, viewers, interactions, accounts engaged and follower activity for your own account | One account, one platform, and Instagram holds only the past 90 days | Free |
| Metricool, free tier | One brand, 30 days of analytics, Reels and Stories analytics, and 5 competitor profiles | 30 days of history, which is shorter than Instagram's own 90 | $0 |
| Metricool, Starter | Up to 10 brands, unlimited analytics history, up to 100 competitor profiles, PDF and PPT reports | Reporting, not explanation. It will not tell you why one competitor's Reel beat yours | From $25 a month, or from $20 billed annually |
| Metricool, Advanced | Up to 50 brands, team and client management, custom report templates, Looker Studio connector and API | The same. More reporting is still reporting | From $67 a month, or from $53 billed annually |
| Predis.ai | Competitor analysis runs alongside content generation, from 60 a month on its entry tier | Bundled with a generation tool you may not want | Core, $32 a month, or $24 billed annually |
| Scrptly | Nothing about your account. It breaks down Reels that performed: the verbatim hook, its length in seconds, the structure and the pacing | No reach, no followers, no posting times, no dashboard | 2 analyses free for the account's lifetime, then $19 a month |
What the search data says
Analytics and reporting account for 21,800 searches a month across 72 keywords in our table, which is 3 percent of the 726,796 monthly searches we have priced in this space. Tool shopping overall is 53 percent. So people buy analytics far less often than they buy tools generally, and the analytics they do buy is a small corner of a much larger shopping habit.
Three percent is about right for what analytics can change. A dashboard tells you what happened, and every platform already tells you that for free. The reason to pay is history, several accounts, or watching accounts you do not own.
Sample of 1548 keywords, measured on 2026-09-05. Google Ads Keyword Planner volumes via DataForSEO, United States, held in our own keyword database.
Which one to open first
- If you run one account on one platform, use the platform's own analytics and stop here. You are not missing anything a paid tool would give you.
- Pay when you need one of exactly three things: history past the platform's window, several accounts behind one login, or tracking accounts you do not own.
- When the dashboard says a post underperformed and you want to know why, that is a different question and no analytics tool answers it. Scrptly breaks the Reel down line by line.