Buffer Analytics in 2026: What Insights Shows on Each Plan

Analyze is gone, and Insights is what you report from now

If you learned Buffer analytics a year ago, most of what you remember has been replaced. Buffer launched Insights in April 2026 as a complete rebuild of the analytics that used to live in Analyze, with an all-channel view, detailed metrics for each channel and AI-written Takeaways. For a few months paid customers could still open the old Analyze screens. That grace period is over. Buffer retired Analyze on October 7, 2026 ^[1], so any guide or help page that still sends you to Analyze is out of date.

The other big change is where the line between free and paid sits. Under the old setup, serious analytics meant a separate Analyze subscription. Today the new plans bundle Publish, Analytics and Community dashboards, and the core of Insights is free on every plan, Free included. Paying buys a longer view of your history and client-ready exports, not the dashboard itself. This guide walks through what Insights shows, what each plan unlocks, why its numbers rarely match the networks' own, and a simple routine for a monthly report.

Which channels Insights covers, and which it leaves out

Insights covers Instagram professional accounts, Facebook Pages, X, LinkedIn Pages and personal profiles, TikTok, Pinterest, Threads, Bluesky, YouTube, Mastodon and Substack. That is eleven networks in one place. Some older help pages still say Bluesky has no analytics, but the newer Bluesky and Insights guides describe a Bluesky dashboard with per-post results and Takeaways. Trust the newer pages. Substack is a nice extra for writers, because each Note reports the free and paid subscribers it brought in, plus impressions and follows.

Three kinds of channel are greyed out in the channel filter and left out of both Insights and exports: Facebook Groups, personal Instagram profiles and the Start Page. Google Business Profiles are not supported either, which Buffer blames on API limits, so a local business that leans on its Google listing gets publishing and comment replies but no channel analytics there. If your report has to cover a personal Instagram account, the answer is to switch it to a Business or Creator account.

What a channel page actually shows

Each channel page starts with a Summary of the period you pick, a Metrics chart, and your posts with their results. On Instagram and Facebook you can filter the page by post type, so Posts, Reels and Stories can be read separately. Metrics for Stories you published natively in those apps are captured only from the day the filter arrived in September 2026, not retroactively, and Facebook Story metrics are collected shortly before the story expires. Every metric carries a short definition and a note on how often it refreshes. Read them once. They answer most of the questions that come up later.

Metrics by network

The metrics depend on what each network shares. For X, Buffer reports posts, impressions, engagements, engagement rate, likes, reposts, replies and new and total followers. LinkedIn Pages get followers, impressions, clicks, likes, comments, shares, engagement rate and page views, while personal profiles get a smaller set. Instagram posts and Reels show views, shares, saves, follows, reach and engagement rate in the Sent tab. Pinterest reports saves, impressions and engagement rate. YouTube Shorts stop at views, likes and comments per Short. TikTok shows only basic per-post metrics, because its API does not allow advanced or aggregated reports.

Comparisons, benchmarks and saved views

On a single channel, a Compare to menu sets your numbers against an earlier period, and you can save any mix of date range and comparison as a named view. LinkedIn channels also get a Follower Growth Rate benchmark that plots your monthly growth against the median of similar Buffer accounts. The Visibility view is hidden for X, Bluesky and Mastodon, since those networks report only follower counts at channel level. Share as Post turns your top stats into a 1080x1080 image, sized so the main networks accept it without cropping. Tag performance, which lets you judge a campaign by its tag, is on the web only.

Takeaways do the first read for you

Takeaways are short, readable summaries of how a channel is doing, and each one points to a next step. They sit on every plan, including Free. Since September 2026 they also work on the All Channels view, so you get a cross-channel read instead of opening each network in turn. A repost takeaway, which suggests older posts worth sharing again, appears only once a channel has posts older than four weeks, and it is not available for Bluesky or Mastodon.

Two quirks matter when you quote a Takeaway in a report. First, Takeaways ignore the date range selector, so a note on screen may describe a different window from the Summary beside it. Second, they live on the web only; the mobile app does not show them. Treat a Takeaway as a pointer, not a finding to paste. Check the numbers underneath before you repeat it to a client.

What Free gets, and what Essentials and Team add

Free is a usable dashboard for a solo account, with one firm limit: history. Its date presets are the last 7 days, the last 30 days and month to date, and the pricing page puts Free history at 30 days. You can download chart snapshots on every plan. What you cannot do on Free is pick Last month, set a custom range, build a custom metric set, choose a custom comparison period or export the data ^[2].

The grid shows that the paid upgrade is about reporting rather than reading. If you only check your numbers yourself, the free presets may be enough, and a chart snapshot can still go into a slide. What Free cannot produce is the data file behind the chart, or a calendar month that closes on the last day. Once someone else expects a monthly document, the gap becomes real.

The three export formats

On a paid plan, the CSV export arrives as a zip with three files: a summary, the posts and a time series. The Markdown export is a single file with all three sections, which Buffer suggests for pasting into reports, docs or AI tools. The PDF export lets you name the report, choose its sections and add a cover logo in place of Buffer's branding, though it shows at most six metric columns at once. The pricing page lists branded reports with a logo and cover page on Team only ^[3], while Buffer's help center describes a cover-logo PDF on any paid plan, so confirm on Essentials before promising a client a branded file.

Who on a team can export

Seats matter too. Anyone with access to a channel can view its Insights, but exporting needs full Publish access to that channel, so view-only members can look and cannot download. Members whose posts require approval can still view analytics. Essentials costs $6 per channel a month billed monthly, or $5 per channel a month billed yearly ($60 a year), and Team costs $12 per channel a month billed monthly, or $10 per channel a month billed yearly ($120 a year). Three channels at $60 per channel a year come to $180 a year, by our arithmetic. That is the real price of exports for a small account. Essentials has one user, though, so the member roles above apply on Team, where three channels at $120 per channel a year come to $360 a year, by our arithmetic.

How much history arrives when you connect a channel

Insights does not start empty, but how far back it reaches depends on the network, and a trial that converts to a paid plan keeps what was already collected. When you connect a channel, Buffer imports a slice of history and the most recent posts, about 50 of them for LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook and Instagram. Here is the backfill per network, as Buffer's guide to data differences lists it ^[4]:

• YouTube: about 24 months, but only if you grant the YouTube Analytics permission; without it, data starts from today.
• LinkedIn: about 12 months.
• Facebook and Pinterest: 90 days.
• Threads and TikTok: 60 days.
• Instagram: 60 days with Instagram Login, but only 30 days with Facebook Login.
• X: the last month of posts, up to 100, with no older history.
• Mastodon and Bluesky: nothing before the day you connect.
• Google Business Profile: none.

The practical lesson is to connect early. A channel added the week before a quarterly review will show almost nothing for X, Mastodon or Bluesky, and Instagram Stories are collected only from the connection date onward. Small accounts have extra limits. A Facebook Page with fewer than about 100 likes gets only the current day's follower count, and Threads follower data needs a linked Instagram account with more than 100 followers.

Why the numbers differ from the networks' own dashboards

Sooner or later a client opens Instagram or LinkedIn and finds a different number from your report. That is normal, and Buffer explains most of the reasons. Data is collected in daily batches and can take up to 24 hours to appear. TikTok and LinkedIn often lag 24 to 48 hours on recent posts, YouTube channel data updates about every three days, and Bluesky about every ten. Days when collection fails show up as gaps, not zeros, so a dip in a chart is sometimes missing data.

The biggest surprise is how the Summary counts a period. It totals the lifetime stats of posts published inside the date range, so a post from the last week of March keeps adding to March as it gathers views in April. Native dashboards usually count activity by day instead. Definitions differ too. Buffer's engagement on X includes likes, replies, reposts, quotes, link clicks and profile clicks, which is broader than X's own count.

LinkedIn totals in Buffer can run higher because they include reactions on reposts and nested replies. Instagram figures come from the Meta API and can differ from the in-app numbers. Video views follow their own rule. Buffer counts a view as an intentional start watched for at least 30 seconds, while YouTube Shorts count every play. Say which tool a number came from, and keep it consistent month to month. Switching sources between months is how false trends get into reports.

The gaps to know before you rely on it

Insights is open about what it lacks. There is no drag-and-drop custom report builder, no audience demographics yet and no best time to post recommendation inside Insights. The Metrics chart ignores the date and tag filters and always shows the full year. The All Channels chart shows the first five channels by default and up to ten when you filter.

The mobile app shows Insights on Android and iOS, with presets up to the last 90 days and Last month on paid plans, but no custom range, no exports, no snapshots and no Takeaways. The rule that hurts most is about deletion. Disconnecting a channel permanently deletes its analytics, and removing a channel from an organization deletes its analytics as well. A collaborative Instagram post reports its numbers only in the Buffer account that published it.

Buffer also skips several things larger suites sell. It has no social listening, no sentiment analysis and no ads reporting, and comment insights in Community are listed on every plan but still rolling out. For comparison, Later keeps Instagram, Facebook and TikTok analytics for up to 3 months on Starter, up to 1 year on Growth and up to 2 years on Scale, while Pinterest stays at 3 months on every plan and Later's pages differ on Threads. Scale adds custom analytics and competitive benchmarking for up to 20 competitors on Instagram. Buffer's paid plans keep unlimited history but offer nothing like that competitor view. For agency setups with many clients, our Buffer for agencies guide covers the reporting side in more depth.

Pulling post metrics through the API and MCP

Buffer's GraphQL API and its MCP server can read post metrics, with clear limits. Post metrics need a personal API key. Third-party apps that connect through OAuth cannot ask for the insightsRead scope, because of the social platforms' terms. Buffer's own help center calls the post metrics an early preview that it does not recommend for reporting, and there is no analytics CSV export through the API.

The aggregatedPostMetrics query rolls posts up for yearly summaries, channel rollups or a BI export, filtered by channel and tag, with a window capped at 365 days. Every aggregate includes post count, reactions and comments. Mix networks, though, and any metric that not every network reports is dropped rather than padded with zeros, so a LinkedIn-only filter shows impressions, reach and engagement rate that a mixed one hides. Through the MCP server you can ask an assistant such as Claude or ChatGPT about recent results. Per-post analytics are off by default there, and MCP calls share the same quota as the API: 3,000 requests per 30 days on Free.

A monthly reporting routine that fits Insights

Insights rewards a fixed routine more than ad hoc digging, because its windows and lags are predictable. For a weekly glance, the Home screen shows a fixed summary of the last 7 days against the 7 before. The monthly sequence below is the one we would follow on a paid plan, built from the rules above. On Free, swap steps three and five for the last 30 days and a snapshot download.

1. Wait until the third day of the month, so the 24-to-48-hour lag on TikTok and LinkedIn has cleared.
2. Open All Channels and read the multi-channel Takeaways first, noting anything worth checking.
3. Choose Last month and compare each key channel with the period before, then save the view by name.
4. Filter Instagram and Facebook by post type, so Reels and Stories are judged against their own kind.
5. Export the PDF for the client or manager, and the Markdown file if you plan to summarize it with an AI tool.
6. Write down the backfill dates of any new channel, so a short history is not read as a slump.

Keep the export files outside Buffer as your archive. If a channel ever has to be disconnected and reconnected, its stored analytics in Buffer are deleted, reconnecting backfills only the network's window (90 days on Facebook, for example), and your monthly files become the only record of anything older. Clicks need a second tool. Buffer adds UTM tags (campaign buffer, medium social by default) on networks such as Facebook, X and LinkedIn, but not on Instagram or Pinterest, so traffic is read in Google Analytics. For Instagram-specific reporting, our guide to Buffer for Instagram explains which account type unlocks the full set of metrics.

The bottom line

Insights is a solid, free analytics layer, and its Takeaways save time on the first read of a month. The limits are clear. Free stops at 30 days with no exports, Google Business Profile has no analytics, there are no demographics, and disconnecting a channel wipes its history. If you need a dependable monthly report for one person, Essentials covers it; the pricing page lists branded client reports on Team only, while the help center describes a cover-logo PDF on any paid plan. Connect channels early, export every month, and say which tool each number comes from.