Planoly: Social Media Planner Reviews

Update: I appreciate that this app is always adding new features. Being able to crop images in-app now is a game changer. As others have mentioned, I’d like the option of being able to use Planoly horizontally with my iPad Pro/ magic keyboard combo. Also been having some buggy issues recently; images aren’t auto posting as scheduled and now I’m unable to access my metrics in Planoly . Hopefully these things can be resolved soon, I’m a paying user and customer support isn’t the best in normal times, and it’s frustrating to be paying money for an app that isn’t always able to do what I pay it to do. But it’s still the best IG planner I’ve tried.

There’s a lot I love about Planoly; it makes planning my feed so much easier I pay for the pro account and spend $8.99 a month. But often posting images in the 4:5 aspect ratio is not allowed, regardless of whatever app I use to try to use the correct ratio. I’ve reached out to customer support numerous times but have never gotten a satisfactory solution. Sometimes I can upload and auto post images in the 4:5 aspect ratio, sometimes I can’t, good luck figuring out when Planoly is going to allow it. It’s very frustrating, and with the less-than-helpful support, I don’t know how long I’ll continue paying for an app I can’t always use as described. User beware: when Planoly is good, it’s very very good, but when it is bad it’s only helpful at best.

I use this app every month and I just use the free plan. It can be confusing at first that you only get 30 “uploads” not posts. But once you understand that it’s great. I love that it posts automatically to Instagram for me and I don’t have to be available at that time to help upload it through a series of taps like many other schedulers have. I also like the shopping feature as well since I mainly use this app for my skincare instagram profile. It’s nice to link. The only thing that part of this app is missing is being to link to more than one thing. When the item is in one of the stores they use, you can link to many things. But if it’s an outside link you can only link to one thing. You also can’t mix outside links with the store links they have. Those extra features would be great for the shopping aspect. So I would suggest checking the links before you upload because it might be better to make it a stand alone product.

The only thing I wish they had was a plan for $1-3/month. You got 400 uploads a month and 6 months of metrics and analysis. I would definitely buy a plan like that.
But I love all the functionality of this app and it’s definitely worth the free plan for me. Since you only get 30 uploads, I use another app to upload more than one edited version of the same photo to see which one goes best with the other pictures.

Very good features including automated posting. Very intuitive and easy to use. Drag and drop photos where you want them and you’re ready to roll. My only wish would be that more of the history of past posts stayed visible in Planoly grid.

Update: starting very recently they have an inbox feature within Planoly to promote various things. I cannot get Planoly to stop notifying me about these promotional inbox messages. It's distracting and unacceptable. I mean even a notification on the Lock Screen page of my phone! I have tried turning this setting off but I'm still getting the notifications.

There are other functionalities within Planoly where you want to have notifications for Planoly turned on in order to use it fully. I shouldn't have to choose between getting this onslaught of irrelevant notifications or being able to use the functionality of Planoly . I'm pretty unhappy with this glitch and it needs to be resolved sooner rather than later.

I’ve had Planoly since Dec of last year and for the most part it has been fine. I like how you can see your scheduled & unscheduled posts. It’s great being able to plan ahead and move images around and creat hashtag groups. Definitely saves on time. What has been frustrating for me is that there are several instances where I have tried sharing a post with let’s say more than 5 images and it will bomb out on Pinterest on me and not let me post. Super annoying after you have tagged 20 people and have set everything up. To get around this, I would have to post without adding all the tags, location etc. and add them all back in after my post was shared. Most recently what has really annoyed me is that I changed my IG name slightly and now I am getting a re-authenticate message, which is not letting me re-authenticate. I can’t do it by my IG info or Facebook. I have reached out and have received no response. I am paid in full through Dec of this year and would like to get this fixed. I do not want to have to “unlink” my entire account and re-add all photos and prep work because of a slight name adjustment. There has to be a better way. If not, I would like a refund for my remaining months as I am not getting the service that I have paid for.

this app is great. I like it. I just started working on it (on the recommendation of a friend)for one account, and have been considering upgrading so I can use it for all the accounts I manage. But wait...on the iPad Pro, unfortunately, it’s nearly worthless to me. With the advent of the iPad Pro, designed to sit on a keyboard, it’s really unhelpful to have to use an app like this app in Portrait mode. Why would I want to hold a tablet upright in one hand and type with one finger on the virtual keyboard (or lay it flat on the table and still have to type on the virtual keyboard) when everything else I do on my iPad Pro is done with my Smart Keyboard (and the whole point of the iPad Pro is to be a bridge between a mobile and a desktop device)?? The Smart Keyboard doesn’t work as a general easel and won’t connect to the device in portrait mode, and typing with the screen on its side is annoying and not workable.

Why, just use the web interface in your browser, you say? Nope. this app in my mobile browser won’t load the planner module—it wants me to use Planoly . In portrait orientation. Planoly version doesn’t fit my workflow, which means I may have to abandon this app altogether and continue with Buffer, which will let me work in the mobile browser.

I’ve tried nearly every Instagram planning app out there and can tell you that I love this app far and above better than all the others. The platform is easy to use, the design is simple and efficient, and being able to upload and plan from my computer is a HUGE deal. I love being able to store ideas and themed posts in the drafts so the planning feed doesn’t get cluttered. And the autopost feature is so handy to be able to post at the ideal time for my followers but still he able to have screen free mornings with my kids. this app is a powerful tool for Instagram; if IG is a big part of your marketing plan, this app is definitely a tool you want in your belt!

I do love Planoly in theory. However, there are several ways that it could improve. All of which I have submitted to their Helpdesk and none of which have I ever received a response to.
I love their hashtag tool, but I wish they had the same option for tagging or at least remembered tags. I work in the wedding industry and have to tag at least 10 other vendors for each post. It would be so helpful!!
Also, the drag and drop is just infuriating. I e talked to social media experts with similar feelings. The drag is super slow and pops random things out of place so you start from scratch constantly. I recommended that they have a “bank” of photos on the right with your planned feed on the left. That way you can drag and drop or double click in and out of each box leaving the rest of the grid intact. Rather than slowly dragging a photo down which pops everything else out of place.
The two changes would really make it stand out above the rest.

i have had this app for a good 6-8 months... i LOVED the platform + the visual aspect of planning. it made my life as a SMM seamless! THEN, i went to add 7 more IG accounts into my account (i had 3) AND the this app experience DECREASED. i could NOT get my accounts authenticated. i emailed more than 30 times, sent facebook messages, and COUNTLESS screenshots trying to “resolve the issue”. SADLY, their customer service is limited to email support ONLY. after ONE week of nonstop emails, i am canceling my services with this app. their empathy towards the situation, the ineffective customer service options, and the unwillingness to go above and beyond to assist was ridiculous. AND, when trying to leave a comment on a Facebook post regarding the issue, they DELETED it. for someone in the social media world AND a platform in the social media world i am EXTREMELY disappointed. while the platform is good the customer service is LACKING. the amount of wasted time i have spent working to resolve these issues is sickening. AND, when switching my accounts that i couldn’t get to “work” with this app i had NO issues with Later.

sincerely,
an extremely disappoint social media manager and marketing consultant.

I have been using the free version of this app for about 4 months and just enabled the auto-post tool. It’s really great for weekend posting as it doesn’t interfere with family time. The only downside (and reason for 4 starts instead of 5) to this app’s auto post is that you can’t use the location tag or tag the brands/accounts on your photo in Planoly . This makes my engagement a little less on those posts but it’s worth using auto-post to stay consistent in posting and not being tied to my phone and social media 24/7. During the week I typically plan my photos with this app for the aesthetic and the hashtags I want to use, but post directly through IG. I will say that is a fave feature is the hashtag planning. You can have different groups for the different types of photos you post! Overall this app has helped me create a more cohesive feed and be more consistent in planning out the content I want to put out on Instagram. I would recommend you try it out!

Planoly has a lot of good selling points. However it has just as many bad options. The first thing is the price and the limit as to how many photos can be uploaded into Planoly just to map out how you want your layout to be. You only get 30 a month which means ideally you should only post once a day from Planoly so you can continue to have a flow of content to your page. The second big down fall is the price to upgrade your account to have unlimited uploads. It’s basically $10 a month. That’s insane. While it offers things such as being able to search for IG hashtags within Planoly , create a hashtag catalog that’s easily accessible and a gorgeous design. Another thing that reaaaal irritates me is how the photos has to be moved when mapping feed. Photos as basically just pushed around so it bumps the whole feed and messes everything up. You aren’t able to simply just switch one photo with a different one without every single photo moving. Definitely not worth $10. There are way better apps such as UNUM and BUFFER that can complete this service and cost a fraction of the price.

After reading a lot of reviews, I decided to purchase a year’s subscription to this app. My first post to Instagram was a manual post, the post didn’t show up for a couple of minutes on IG so I reposted only to discover there’s a delay. I have to say, the free version of Mosaic and Preview were way better. Perhaps it’s due to the fact that I post manually, but if you offer that option on a paid subscription shouldn’t it work? I messaged this app support, they instructed me to refresh Planoly which I did, the same thing happened again only this time the grid on this app didn’t match the grid on my IG account. I messaged them again, same curt response followed by a “closed ticket” email. Closed ticket the same day I received a response before I had a chance to implement their suggestions or respond? By the 4th ticket, i asked for a refund. Crickets. Zero response. I persisted, they offered a prorated refund as if it were a favor. Not sure why people like this scheduler. They don’t even offer hashtag suggestions or counts like other free schedulers do.

So I just downloaded Planoly today. At first, I thought it was like a godsend because I can do it from my desktop instead of my phone & everything looked so simple, clean, & user friendly but unfortunately, I ran into more than one issue on the first day of using it.

First.
As I was planning my posts on a desktop, I had several planned posts that had just a short sentence or two for a caption & I usually add about 7-10 hashtags but as soon as I began the first hashtag on several of the images, I would get a prompt saying that I’ve already reached my hashtag maximum & to try again in an hour (?!?!) except I hadn’t even added one yet... so there was that.

Second.
I’m not sure if I understand the whole “30 uploads a month” thing correctly or not but I’ve uploaded a couple pictures that I didn’t feel quite fit my feed right so I deleted them & tried to upload different images but was told I was unable to do so unless I upgraded to a paid plan because I had reached my 30 photo limit already even though I only have 25 in queue to be posted.....so what, do even deleted images still count towards my upload limit?? Do I have to actually plan my posts somewhere else to test out certain images I want to use so I have everything nicely curated to my liking without exceeding my 30 photo upload limit?? Because that seems like it defeats the point of your app........might just go back to using Preview honestly.

Even though I’ve been doing social media marketing professionally for years now, I have always posted natively (maybe because I’m a control freak? 😜). Decided to give this app a try after hearing good things & being impressed with their branding & design. Love the ability to see the grid & save hashtags but wish I would’ve understood that “30 uploads” a month was literally that... not 30 scheduled posts. You can only upload 30 images whether you schedule them or not (even if you delete them, the upload is still counted as used). Didn’t want to upgrade to a paid version until I tried it out for a little bit. Especially since this is the first scheduler I have tried. One other thing — was hoping my scheduled posts here would still post to FB automatically (I have it set for that in IG settings) but it doesn’t.

Planoly WAS a God-send when I got it over a year ago. After paying a few months I purchased the year to save since we were new BFFs but since this second annual purchase in October Planoly has been complete trash. It no longer imports multiple pics from a Instagram Sharable Link (aka carousel). It doesn’t copy the caption. It uploads videos as images. The calendar is now seemingly useless to schedule now that they’ve began to add THEIR events into the calendar without giving us the option to even delete it. And the WORST part? I used this for a personal and business Instagram account with my paid plan that offered two accounts and AFTER they got another year out of me, it updated to where I can now only have ONE Instagram and ONE Pinterest. I didn’t buy this for Pinterest! I’ve updated it three or four times since then, same issues. Way to ruin a great app, 👏🏼🙄

As soon as I upgraded to the paid version and started posting directly through this app, instagram would shadowban my posts so that only my followers could see my posts but it wouldn’t show up under any of the hashtags I used for nonfollowers to see. I experimented with posting from this app and I would get 0 likes in fifteen minutes and would delete and then post the same picture with the same hashtags from my phone and would get 20 likes in ten minutes. Instagram must have some information about the paid version that allows them to block posts made with it. I tried it multiple times over multiple days.

Response to response: I don’t understand your response. I am trying to tell you that Instagram blocks the visibility of posts under the post’s hashtags if a person posts via your app with the paid version. Maybe that’s something you want to look into rather than just dismiss. “Official Partner” or not, that is what happens.

Love Planoly, but... in the recent update they made a small change that actually made it harder for me to use Planoly .

In the past, when you typed your photo caption into Planoly the image remained on the screen. Now Planoly takes you to a new window with just the caption, however I actually need to view the image as well to remember to tag relevant profiles and use appropriate hashtags.

I would love if there was a way to have an option to keep the image on the page or to use the pop-out window because I'm having to click back and forth which is a little inconvenient! But love Planoly and will always use it for as long as social media is around!

Update: Planoly is working again! Thankfully. It is a good app. It does auto post which is huge. It doesn’t cost too much, it has various price plans. But I really really miss the easy of scheduling a repost using a simple copy link option and the reoccurring post function- those two things where hugely beneficial for me in apphi.

.............

Well I did like Planoly- I used it to replace Apphi when it went bottoms up and left us all stranded. I enjoyed this app the best and it is affordable compared to the alternatives. I really wish it had the ability to schedule posts in a reoccurring manner or even simply schedule a previously posted post again. But all that aside, there is a bigger issue in that this most recent update has resulted in a total crash!

I thought this app was going to be my answer. I love the look of it and it’s super user friendly. I love that I can upload photos and move them around and put in my text and schedule my posts. I also like that it gives the character count so you know where you’re at as far as planning out text. I’ve also been excited to use the Story part of it once that app is develops a bit more.

I’m bummed that the formatting doesn’t work with Instagram, though. It doesn’t keep all of my paragraph breaks when it posts. It works in Buffer, so I may have to switch back to Buffer solely for that purpose. I’ve also not had luck getting the posts to actually work when I schedule them. It’s fine when I post immediately, but if I schedule them, I only get a notification that something went wrong and my post was unable to post.

I use Planoly for a corporate business that I work for, and am always ahead of the game. Not only do I impress my bosses, but I do it with ease. When I have time I put together months of posts on this app and schedule them with ease to post when I want. I also use this on my personal accounts. It’s simple, easy, and highly effective.
My only issue is with hashtags. Most of the time it does well with telling me how many posts are using a particular # but sometimes it just doesn’t even show it, so I have to log into Instagram just to see what hashtags I want to use. It doesn’t happen all the time, just sometimes, so that’s why I still have them a 5 star.
Even with this set back it is easily the easiest insta planner out there.

I just downloaded Planoly along with two other to see which one was the best (offered the best feature) and so far I’m loving this one.
As I started my journey into traveling, being able to plan my post on isn’t Instagram is a big plus, for I know there will be times when I don’t feel Inspired, but with Planoly i won’t have to worry about that.
It is also amazing that it allows you to see which post are doing better by week, months and year and it’s amazing the fact that it allows you to schedule your stories.
It also keeps track of the time you post which is amazing for it allows you to see which is the best time for you to post.
Thank you so much for creating Planoly

It used to be that when you used this app, when you started to type hashtags or usernames, the hashtags and usernames would populate from Instagram and tell you how many posts were in each hashtag right in Planoly . This was an extremely useful feature that is no longer available. Now you have to bounce back and forth between this app and IG to figure out which tags to use - super annoying this app blames Instagram for this change and insists it has to “abide by the rules of IG” but if they’re supposed to be an official Instagram partner I’m not sure why they couldn’t keep it. It seems they are “partners” with IG in name only, they don’t actually work with IG to make their app better. I was considering buying the premium version of Planoly before this change, but I will no longer even consider purchasing it unless they reinstate this feature

I’m convinced every review above 3 stars for Planoly must be fake. First, there’s an upload limit if you don’t want to pay. Second, you can’t tag people. Third, unlike other instagram scheduling apps, you can’t save captions or hashtags for more efficient and time saving posting. Fourth, they make scheduling bulk posts such a drawn out process. You have to individually go into one of your selected posts, come up with a caption, select a time, etc etc, then repeat the process. you might as well just post on instagram normally. I like Apphi a lot better because they have designed their app to be a lot more efficient, time saving, they don’t have any of the above issues, and they even have bonus features which allow you to change the font of your captions and access text symbols. The only reason why I tried Planoly is because Apphi has a 10 post maximum, and this one has 30 but it’s still just not worth it.

There’s one thing this app has mastered and that is design and formatting. Both Planoly and the desktop version are sleek, minimal and easy to navigate. Other than that, it’s just like any other Instagram scheduler only much more expensive than most (especially if you have 2 usernames). I recommend Later or Tailwind for Pinterest scheduling. this app’s customer service is also subpar. I’ve had to contact them numerous times which led to apathetic responses. Lastly, I don’t admire their own Instagram feed. The company obviously has a liberal bias having posted quotes from Barak and Michelle Obama multiple times as well as other left-leaning celebrities. Not once have I seen a quote from a conservative social figure like Melania, Ivanka, Trump, or any of the other conservative First Ladies from before. Does this app only want a liberal follower and subscriber base? There are so many great quotes from people on the other side, but I guess this app isn’t into featuring diversity of thought.

If you’re looking for a way to plan out your feed without posting and deleting when you decide something doesn’t fit your theme, then download Planoly. this app saved my feed, my dignity, my life. I swear by Planoly, and never post without planning it out on this app before, so that I know what my feed will look like multiple posts in advance, and I can play around with the layout before ever actually posting. It makes it super easy, plus there’s an option to post through Planoly , or even schedule posts to automatically post if you’re too busy but you want to keep a schedule. Download Planoly, you won’t regret it !!