Buffer vs Loops
Both are marketing tools. Here is what separates them.
What Buffer is
Buffer is a social media scheduling tool. Posts are written once, dropped into a queue for each connected channel and published on a schedule. It supports Bluesky, Facebook, Google Business Profile, Instagram, LinkedIn, Mastodon, Pinterest, Threads, TikTok, X and YouTube, and runs as a web app, a mobile app and a browser extension. The product is divided into Publish, Create, Community, Insights, Collaborate, Start Page, AI Assistant and API. Pricing is charged per connected social channel rather than per account, and that single decision determines whether Buffer is cheap or expensive for a given team. Essentials is listed at $5 per month per channel and Team at $10 per month per channel with unlimited team members included, so a five-person team posting to three channels pays less than one person posting to eight. Channels 1 to 10 are charged at the standard rate and each channel beyond the tenth costs less, which softens the curve for anyone managing a large roster. The Free plan costs $0, is described as free forever, is for a single user and connects three channels, with a cap of 10 scheduled posts per channel at a time. Paid plans lift that cap to unlimited scheduled posts per channel and add API access, the AI Assistant and unlimited saved ideas. They come with a 14 day free trial. Core analytics are free rather than held back for paying customers. Insights reports reach, engagement, follower changes and top-performing content, compares channels side by side and tracks trends over time. Every metric carries its own definition and a stated refresh frequency, which is useful when a figure disagrees with the native platform and someone has to explain why. Takeaways are AI-generated summaries of performance with suggested actions. Paid plans extend how far back the analytics history goes and add PDF and CSV exports for reporting outside the tool. Start Page is Buffer's link-in-bio page builder, available on the free plan with some feature limits alongside the three connected channels. Its appearance is set with themes, colours, fonts and layouts, and pages can embed videos, products, photos and forms without code. Built-in analytics show which links are getting the most clicks, so the page can be judged on the same terms as the posts pointing at it.
What Loops is
Loops is email software aimed at SaaS teams, covering marketing, product and transactional email in one product rather than splitting them across separate tools. Emails are assembled from themes and reusable components so designs stay consistent across sends, and workflows are built from triggers, branching logic and audience filters. The free plan allows up to 1,000 subscribed contacts and 4,000 sends a month, includes unlimited team seats with no per-seat charge, and adds a Loops footer credit to every email. Paid plans put no cap on the total number of emails a team can send, and Loops charges no separate fee for those sends. Throughput differs too: free accounts are capped at 10 emails per second and paid teams at 1,000, and anything submitted above the per-second limit is queued rather than rejected. Transactional templates can be built in the visual editor or imported as MJML code, though the data variables passed into them accept only string or number values. A transactional email has to be published and its sending domain verified before the API will send it, which is the usual first thing to trip over when wiring up a new project. The API lives at app.loops.so/api and authenticates with a bearer token generated in dashboard settings. Standard endpoints allow 10 requests per second per team, while the content endpoints covering campaigns, components, email messages, themes, transactional emails, uploads and workflows are limited to 60 requests per 60 seconds per team. Requests over the limit return HTTP 429, with response headers reporting the limit and how much of it remains. Each value in a request body is capped at 500 characters including quotes. Loops publishes an OpenAPI specification in both YAML and JSON, official SDKs for Go, JavaScript, PHP, Ruby and Nuxt, and a CLI that installs by curl script or Homebrew tap and reads its API key from the LOOPS_API_KEY environment variable for use in CI. Setting up sending requires SPF, DKIM, MX and CNAME records supplied by Loops, and the recommendation is to send from a subdomain rather than the root domain. Free platform subdomains from Vercel, Netlify or Shopify cannot be used as a sending domain, which rules out the quickest route for a project still hosted on default infrastructure. Prebuilt integrations cover Stripe, Supabase, Clerk, Zapier, Make, Segment, Webflow, Bubble, PostHog, Auth0 and Framer. The Stripe integration accepts 21 event types spanning customers, subscriptions, invoices, checkout sessions, disputes and quotes, and ignores any event that arrives without an email address on it.
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