Running an Instagram profile can be as much or as little work as you want it to be. You can run it extremely casually, posting whenever you feel like it and letting the growth come as it may. You can run it like a business, posting on a schedule and religiously checking analytics. Or you can run it like an enterprise, with a variety of additional tools to help make your profile become an influencer.

If you’re looking to make use of those third party tools, well, that’s what I’m here for! This list will provide you with as many tools as I can find to help you along on your Instagram journey. Figure out what you want, and I bet there will be a tool below to help you out.

1. Iconosquare Audit

Iconosquare is a professional social media management platform, and this tool is one of their free offerings meant to help rope you into more of their services. It’s a free Instagram audit tool that rates you according to a handful of metrics. They rank you based on your account activity, how optimized your posts are for sharing and visibility, how engaged your audience is, and what your account settings are like. It’s a simple free scan, but can give you a lead on where to start with basic optimizations.

2. Iconosquare Pro

The full Iconosquare platform might be overkill for just Instagram, but it works with both Instagram and Facebook, if you’re marketing on both platforms. It has three divisions. One is for Analytics, which can show you a lot of detail about your audience and your engagement, as well as giving you benchmarks to measure your growth. One is for Activity, which helps you monitor content, embark on social listening, engage with your users, and generally keep up with your community. The third is for Publishing, including Instagram-sanctioned scheduled posting, post previews, and an editorial calendar. Pricing starts at $30 per month and gives you most of their features.

3. HypeAuditor

HypeAuditor is a bit like the Iconosquare free tool above, but a bit more in-depth and a bit more expensive. It’s available to any Instagram account with over 1,000 followers. You’re required to buy tokens to use their scan, rather than purchase a service, with tokens costing $2 each without a bulk discount.

The audit itself gives you a report with your account ranks, follower count, engagement numbers, an audience analysis that points out potentially bad followers, some demographic information, and a bunch more analytics.

4. Social Bakers

Social Bakers offers this free Instagram tool. It will do an audit similar to the Iconosquare audit, checking your account against a list of factors they consider as important or essential for running a business account. You can also monitor engagement and “buzz” on your posts.

Why use this instead of Iconosquare? Primarily because it can link into your Google Analytics account, which allows you to cross-reference data between the two, giving you more accurate information than what you might piece together yourself.

5. Social Bakers Pro

The full version of Social Bakers is, like Iconosquare, a more robust and fully-featured platform. They have some very advanced marketing tools, including the ability to create individual audiences and audience personas, a lot of content intelligence and analysis tools to help with production, post performance benchmarking, influencer marketing tools, and a bunch more. Costs for the pro plan start at $20 per social media profile you want to use, per month.

6. UnionMetrics Account Checkup

Another free offering from another larger paid platform, this free checkup gives you some basic information that can help you optimize your presence without too much additional cruft. It tells you your best hashtags, your best posting times, which your best posts have been, and not a lot else. In that sense, it’s at least unique compared to the other tools, and might be worth giving a shot. It’s free, after all.

7. UnionMetrics

Those of you with pattern recognition already understood I would be suggesting this one next. The full UnionMetrics is a unified social media analytics dashboard. You get real-time analytics monitoring on all of your social profiles. You can optimize your media, monitor keywords, get competitive analysis, and perform content research. Pricing is competitive as well, starting at $23 per month for a lite version that works for two profiles with up to 20,000 followers, tracking one topic.

8. Picture.io

A very simple free scan that isn’t attached to a bigger platform – at least, not in as obvious a way as the others – that provides you with a single influence score. The score is “a measurement of the impact of visual content” based on whatever proprietary calculations the engine uses. It’s frankly not all that useful and is similar to Klout, in that it’s a proprietary score measured by a third party tool trying to boots its own reputation as much as yours.

9. Webstagram

This is a pretty simple app that doesn’t require authorization. It allows you to scan a hashtag and see some information about it, like recent posts, related hashtags, and the popular users using it. You can also scan individual users and see their recent posts and some profile information, though it’s not really anything you wouldn’t see just by going to their profile.

10. Social Insider

Another Instagram analytics app. This one is mainly focused on comparative analytics. It will look for your top competitors – or allow you to specify the ones you feel are top competitors – and will compare your analytics to what data they can harvest about the competition. You can also generate reports for various additional subjects, like user engagement, historical post strategies, growth trends, and more. Pricing starts at $30 per month for five social profiles.

11. SmartMetrics

Billing itself as professional-grade account and hashtag analytics, this app just might deliver. A lot of what they measure is audience demographics, including age, geography, engagement rates, and competitive analytics. They check and update hourly, and the whole thing works via web app. It’s also relatively cheap, with plans starting at $9 per month to track up to three total accounts, once of which should be yours. The others can be competitors or other accounts of your own if you want to compare them.

12. Minter.io

I’m honestly not sure why the .io domain got to be so popular for startups and small companies. It’s the country code for the British Indian Ocean Territory, which virtually none of these companies are in any way associated with. I suppose it has to do with the Input/Output thing? Oh well. This app is another pretty simple analytics scanner with exportable reports. Pricing is $9 per month, though it’s limited in what it allows you to do.

13. JustMetrics

How often do you see a brand name labeled so clearly with what it does? This one provides just metrics. It’s basically an extension of the default Instagram analytics dashboard, with a few additional visualizations slapped on top. Pricing is the now-typical $9 per month, though as of this writing they are not accepting new sign-ups. Check back later and, if you see they’re available, let me know in the comments!

14. Snoop Report

This app has virtually nothing to do with Snoop Dogg except using his profile as part of their examples. It’s a competitive analytics app that primarily shows you as much data as it can collect about specific accounts. It doesn’t show anything that’s not publicly available for obvious reasons, but sometimes the visualization can be worthwhile. It only costs $5 for a month, at least.

15. Crowd Babble

What else is there to say? This is another standard analytics suite. It allows you to analyze your Instagram profile, benchmark it and compare those benchmarks to future analyses. This helps you identify ways to optimize your profile. On the plus side, you can schedule future reports and even add collaborators to help do the work for you. Pricing starts at $49 per month, though, which is pretty high for what it does.

16. Sprout Social

Sprout is one of those huge names you see everywhere when talking about social media management. Their platform has some of the most advanced tools available for social media management across all platforms. They have a ton of features, including a multi-platform aggregated inbox, aggregated keyword monitoring and listening, publication and scheduling tools across platforms, a unified social calendar, mobile apps, and a baseline of 10 social profiles. For all that, it’ll run you about $100 per month.

17. Fanpage Karma

Another large-scale tool, this one has an analytics platform with competitive analytics, a user engagement platform with a unified inbox and response tracking, a publication platform with scheduling and a calendar, monitoring and listening, and a team management segment. Pricing for the cheapest plan starts at $70 per month, with scaling plans at higher prices.

18. TalkWalker

TalkWalker is one of those full-service, full-featured platforms that has a lot of variety and a ton of features, but a price to match. It’s very much aimed at enterprise-level needs, for those companies with millions of followers and similarly large budgets. I’m not kidding here; their BASIC plan starts at $700 per month. On the other hand, they have features you won’t find anywhere else, like image recognition for super-advanced social listening, AI-drive sentiment analysis, and unique data presentations that aren’t just reskins and basic visualizations of what the social platforms provide themselves.

19. SquareLovin

Another one of those analytics brands with a smaller Instagram-only app. This one shows you basically all of the same data as the others, with some noise filtering and flags for high quality users you might want to engage.

20. Locowise

Locowise isn’t something the majority of my readers are going to be interested in. If it’s for you, though, it’s one of the best solutions. It’s social media performance measurement with an eye specifically for reporting, because it’s aimed at agencies. If you’re managing the social media for a number of different clients, this is a great single app to help you monitor them and generate reports to show how you’re doing. It helps you keep your existing clients and expand to new ones. Pricing can be steep at $500 per month to start, which covers only 20 profiles, but that’s fairly competitive among agency tools.

21. Keyhole

Keyhole is another high-level analytics suite. I can’t say that they have a ton of features the other apps on this list don’t. Primarily their benefit comes in their optimization suggestions. You can track three keywords and hashtags as well as three accounts with their basic level plan, which is $180 per month.

22. Quintly

Social media tracking, optimization, and benchmarking. Once again, fairly typical offerings, aimed at larger businesses. They cover a variety of social networks including Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest, and LinkedIn. Pricing for five social profiles and three users with all of their core features is $100 per month.

23. Intutel

At a certain point all of these apps start to run together. This one has social analytics across four major channels with deep search monitoring for keywords, mentions, and hashtags. At least pricing is relatively cheap for a full social presence monitor, at $50 per month for up to four channels.

24. SoTrender

Can you tell I’ve run out of things to say? This is another corporate-level analytics platform. It has analytics, reporting, benchmarking, and action tips based on past successes and an analysis of what your profiles are currently doing. Really, the only thing to differentiate most of these platforms is the quality of these tips and their support, which I can’t vouch for. At least this one starts at a mere $50 per month.

25. Sociality.io

Another all-in-one social platform. It has a publication section with editorial calendar functionality, a section for all of your comments and messages on one screen, a social listening and analytics section, and reporting, with the usual competitor analysis as well. Oddly enough, it’s not the usual multiple of $50 for a price; it starts at a nice $69.

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