17 Free Instagram Tools to Grow Your Following

free Instagram tools that help you grow your audience

The growing number of Instagram influencers forces new and experienced users alike to publish consistently, measure the impact of their posts, and try the latest features. So, taking advantage of content designing and scheduling tools, and testing hashtags and captions to reach high engagement, is vital.

Standing out on social media may seem distressing if you don’t have the budget and resources for it. Luckily, you can find several free Instagram tools with decent features to help you surpass a great number of creators. The best part is that you don't have to research them, since we've compiled 15 free Instagram tools that will help you speed up content creation and publishing, enrich your posts visually and analyze your performance.

Instagram Analytics Tools

With analytics tools, you can get an insight into influencers’ Instagram performance without asking for access to their accounts. These tools track metrics, including follower growth, views, and engagement, and provide a starting point for influencer evaluation.

Later

Later is a social media marketing platform developed to facilitate content scheduling and publishing across multiple social media outlets. Apart from scheduling, users can design how their posts will look, plan their feeds and boost their bio to drive conversions. With Later you can track and measure crucial metrics, like views, and follower growth, and discover popular hashtags.

Later offers a free plan for those who just started social media marketing. The plan contains their visual planner and Linkin.bio features, plus basic analytics data for the past 3 months.

HypeAuditor’s free Instagram analytics tools

HypeAuditor is an all-in-one influencer marketing platform that helps marketing agencies and brands streamline their marketing efforts. Marketers get a solution from influencer vetting to outreach and performance tracking at every stage of their influencer marketing campaign.

But HypeAuditor also offers a bunch of free Instagram analytics tools to help businesses kickstart influencer analysis as well as creators to get a sense of their performance.

HypeAuditor for Influencers

A platform for influencers to boost their business. Using the new toolkit, creators can now better understand their performance and can build a Media Kit. The platform recommends potential collaboration partners for influencers based on several indicators. A creator can analyze their competitors' performance and see how it compares to theirs.

Free calculators

With HypeAuditor’s free calculators, you can audit Instagram accounts for fake followers and learn about creators’ Audience Quality Scores. You can understand an influencer’s engagement rate and get to know their audience size and the average number of likes and comments their posts receive.

How to check Instagram engagement?
Use HypeAuditor's free Instagram ER Calculator tool!

Instagram Hashtag Generator and Research Tools

To increase the reach and views of a social media post, users must choose hashtags carefully. Hashtag generator tools help you find the right hashtags that match your topic.

Keywordtool.io

On Keyword Tool’s website, users can search for keywords and hashtags for their online content. The tool uses Google’s autocomplete feature and creates long-tail keywords connected to the topic previously entered in the search bar. It helps you discover phrases people regularly search for on search engines.

However, Keyword Tool isn’t limited only to search engine hits. It provides you with many hashtag variations for Instagram as well. Plus, the free version displays search volume, trends, and the level of competition for the first few keywords and hashtags on the list.

All-Hashtag.com 

All Hashtag is a free online hashtag generator tool that enables users to generate top, random, and live hashtags related to their social media content. Besides, listing the most popular hashtags for Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, All Hashtags offers hashtag analytics, a hashtag counter, and a hashtag creator tool. 

All Hashtags, a free hashtag creatorAll-Hashtags’ tools

Instagram Captions Generator Tools

Sometimes it’s challenging to come up with an eye-catching caption for your post that will enhance engagement. Caption generator tools help out users who are out of words and create captions by analyzing their posts and hashtags.

Pallyy

Pallyy is a social media management platform providing a variety of tools from, content scheduling to analytics, making it easier for teams to manage social media campaigns and react to comments in one place. Pallyy offers several features for free, among others an online caption generator that uses AI technology to create captions for your post.

Upon entering the topic, Pallyy’s easy-to-use tool quickly comes up with several caption variations. You can set the caption length and the tone and even select from a couple of templates, depending on the content of your post, like a product introduction, sales, or giveaway. As an optional feature, the tool will create and display hashtags for your captions. Pallyy has a daily limit for generating hashtags without signing up.

Pally, a caption generator toolThe Instagram Caption Generator by Pallyy

Caption Writer

Caption Writer is a mobile app that enables Instagram users to write captions for their Instagram posts. Designed to fix spaces and line breaks automatically, the tool saves users time and stress. The app also provides a large library of editable caption ideas, funny punchlines, and quotes on 35 topics. Users can copy their captions, open Instagram through the app, and start creating their posts immediately.

Caption Writer’s free version is a good starting point for those who need inspiration and a little help in formatting Instagram captions. 

Instagram Scheduling Tools

With Instagram scheduling tools, you don't have to compromise other areas of your life in order to stay on top of social media and make frequent posts. These tools were designed to help you time your posts created in advance, thus saving you time and speeding up your workflow.

Buffer

Buffer is a social media management tool that provides solutions for scheduling posts and measuring their performance. Additionally, Buffer’s dashboard facilitates users to see which comments were not answered and helps them prioritize followers’ feedback based on their sentiments.

Buffer offers a free plan for those just starting social media marketing and who are overwhelmed with certain tasks. It includes three channels and ten posts per channel, calendar view, and saving and storing Instagram posts and Carousel and Reels drafts for later publishing.

Instagram Feed and Grid Layout Tools

These tools help users arrange their images to create coherent and stunning content for their Instagram audience. 

UNUM

UNUM’s app offers many solutions for creators to optimize their social media content workflow. One of UNUM's biggest strengths is its design tool, and many of its features are free. The free plan provides storage within the app to design and plan posts, a basic caption tool, a photo and video editor, and a collage creator tool.

Their blog offers plenty of materials on editing, marketing, and social media. UNUM’s solutions allow users to create branded content easily. Their free color palette generator is a great tool for getting to know the colors of a particular image and their font style editor helps influencers produce Instagram post texts, bios, and captions.

My Social Boutique

A website and blog with ideas to boost engagement and create appealing content. My Social Boutique offers a free package of Canva templates for Instagram and a handy tool for creating grid and carousel images. A major benefit is that the entire process can be carried out online with no additional app downloads required. Depending on the size and shape of the image, the image splitter suggests grid or carousel layouts. It's truly a quick and easy solution!

My Social Boutique's grid and carousel generatorMy Social Boutique’s grid and carousel generator

Instagram Graphic Design Tools

Tools for visual content creation facilitate users to design striking online content, including social media posts and banners with a rich library of free templates, photos, and fonts.

Canva

One of the most popular graphic design tools, Canva’s platform is available on mobile devices and for the web as well. Its free plan boasts a library of more than 250,000 templates and many design layouts. Canva’s drag-and-drop solutions and 5GB of free storage ensure hassle-free work. And if all that wasn't enough, Canva has a lot of app integrations, making it even easier to create customizable content.

Canva's interfaceCanva’s interface

Visme

A platform for all things visual. With Visme, users can create presentations, reports, graphs, mockups, videos, and, last but not least, image-laden social media content. Like many other graphic tools, Visme is also available for mobile and the web. Visme’s free plan offers 100MB of storage, many templates, and limited elements of its design assets.

Photo & Video Editing Tools for Instagram

Since Instagram is the number one social media platform for sharing photos and the best marketing platform for advertising with imagery, users go out of their way to use first-class images. They can enhance the visual experience by adding filters and effects and adjusting the contents accordingly with photo and video editing tools.

Snapseed

Developed by Google, Snapseed is a free photo editor app available online and on Android. Snapseed describes itself as an editing solution anyone can use. It contains an array of features that help improve image quality.

Snapseed’s biggest advantage is its first-rate HDR feature to add more depth to the photos and its filter brush to remove small imperfections in the picture. On top of the many tools and filters you can apply to photos, Snapseed maintains high image quality.

Photo editor app, SnapseedSnapseed’s editing solution on mobile

VSCO

VSCO is a photo editing and sharing app enabling users to add layers, masks, and filters to their pictures and share them on the app’s platform or other social media. Originally, the company developed plug-ins for professional photographers until they came out with their image sharing and editing platform.

VSCO’s editing tools are great for boosting color and the platform has a minimal interface. However, VSCO has paywalled several editing features recently and the free version is available with limited features.

Pixlr

Pixlr is a free online photo editor available for web, mobile and desktop as well. The suite offers five tools for photo editing, template designing, photo mashing, background removal, and bulk image editing. In addition to numerous filters, effects, and animation presets, Pixlr also provides a large free template library for various social media layouts, including Instagram posts and Stories.

Pixlr, a photo editor appEditing one of the free templates in Pixlr’s photo editor tool

InShot

A mobile video editing platform, InShot offers plentiful options for video manipulation and enhancement. Users can trim, merge or split videos, add their own music, or choose from the platform’s song templates, and create voice-overs with it. Aside from video filters and effects, this tool also helps users resize videos for various social media channels. A lot of work can be done with InShot’s free version.

MeetEdgar

MeetEdgar is a social media scheduling tool that helps small businesses and entrepreneurs automate content publishing. It allows you to easily organize, schedule, and automate posts, including Instagram stories, feed posts, carousels, and reels.One of Edgar’s standout features is content recycling. Once a post is published, it’s saved in your content library by category, ready to be automatically reused in the future. After all other updates in that category are posted, Edgar will repost them, saving you time and effort.

With its strong emphasis on automation, MeetEdgar is a powerful tool for maintaining a consistent social media presence without the need for constant manual intervention.

Instagram Media Kit Tools

ViralMango

ViralMango features Instagram Media Kit tools that allow creators to design visually appealing media kits showcasing their profiles, engagement stats, and past collaborations. These tools help influencers effectively present their value to potential brand partners.

ViralMango is an influencer marketing platform that helps brands connect with micro and nano influencers for authentic collaborations. It offers tools for influencer discovery, campaign management, and performance tracking. Originally, the platform focused on influencer outreach but has evolved into a comprehensive solution for managing influencer marketing campaigns.

While the platform is user-friendly and simplifies campaign management, some advanced features are available only on paid plans.

Leverage Free Instagram Tools and Start Growing Your Audience and Engagement

You're ready to step up your Instagram game now that you've learned about these free tools! Once you get to know who your audience is, make sure to create a perfect bio, publish engaging content, use entertaining captions and relevant hashtags, post regularly, and track your progress.

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Explore HypeAuditor’s 203.8M+ creator database, vet them for authenticity, and get them onboard to make every campaign count with insights trusted by 8,000+ brands
Author
Anna is an influencer marketing expert and content marketing writer at HypeAuditor. She enjoys discovering new social media trends and features.
Topics:Growing and Managing Your Audience Instagram
March 24, 2023
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Author
Anna is an influencer marketing expert and content marketing writer at HypeAuditor. She enjoys discovering new social media trends and features.
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