14 Best Free Content Planning Apps in 2024 (Price & Features)

Imagine this: you're a dedicated content creator or a vital member of a marketing team. Every day brims with fresh ideas and inspirations. Yet, the challenge lies in transforming these sparks of creativity into structured, tangible content. Are you exhausted from trying to mentally map out complex content publication schedules? Do you often find yourself adrift in an overwhelming sea of disorganized information? Whether you're a business professional, a designer, or someone eager to visually streamline your thoughts, encountering project chaos is a common hurdle.

A content planner app simplifies content management. It helps organize tasks, sets reminders, and provides tools for planning and analysis. This makes the process of creating and publishing content efficient and systematic. The app transforms complex content strategies into streamlined operations.

No more headaches! Content planner apps are here to sort out your chaotic content schedule and bring order to your work. In this article, we're going to look at the best 14 content planner apps for 2024. We'll check out what each app offers, along with its benefits and downsides, so you can easily pick the right one for you. Let's dive in and find out how these apps can make your content planning a breeze!

What is Content Planning?

Content planning in digital marketing strategically organizes, develops, and manages content across platforms. It ensures every piece serves a purpose, aligning with broader business goals. Whether for blogs, social media, or emails, it maximizes content impact.

• Strategic Alignment: Align content creation with overarching business goals, ensuring each piece serves a purpose and contributes to the company's objectives. This strategic approach enhances the effectiveness of content in achieving desired outcomes and ROI.

• Audience-Centric Approach: Conduct thorough audience research to understand preferences, needs, and behaviors. Tailor content to resonate with the target audience, fostering stronger connections and engagement. This approach enhances the relevance and impact of the content.

• Content Calendar and Consistency: Develop a well-structured content calendar that outlines the timing and distribution of content across various platforms. Consistency in messaging and timing establishes brand authority and improves audience anticipation, driving sustained engagement over time.

• SEO Integration and Discoverability: Integrate relevant keywords and optimize content for search engines to enhance discoverability. This ensures that the content reaches a wider audience and improves visibility on search engine result pages, contributing to organic traffic growth.

• Metrics-Driven Optimization: Define key performance indicators (KPIs) and leverage analytics to measure the success of content. Regularly analyze metrics to gain insights into audience behavior, adapt strategies accordingly, and continuously optimize content for better performance and impact.

Why Planning Your Content Matters?

In today's fast-paced digital environment, keeping up with content goals and maintaining a consistent publishing schedule can be a daunting task. That's where content planning apps become invaluable tools.

• Staying Ahead of the Curve: The digital landscape is incredibly competitive. A well-planned content strategy helps you stay relevant and interesting, keeping your audience engaged and attracted to your brand.

• Resource Management: Effective content planning allows for better resource allocation. Knowing what content is needed and when helps in optimizing the use of time, manpower, and finances.

• Targeted Content: Planning helps in creating content that resonates with your target audience. By understanding what your audience wants, you can tailor your content to meet their needs and interests.

• Consistency in Messaging: A content plan ensures that all your communications are consistent, both in terms of frequency and the quality of the message, reinforcing your brand's voice and identity.

Process mapping tools are essential for effective content planning, helping teams visualize and streamline their workflows from ideation to publication. By mapping out each step in the content creation process, these tools enable better collaboration, reduce bottlenecks, and improve project management, ensuring that content reaches your audience on time and with maximum impact. Curious about which tools can elevate your content planning? Check out our guide on the_Top 10 Best Process Mapping Tools and Software of 2024 (Free & Paid)_ to find the right fit for your team’s needs.

2024 Best 14 Content Planner Apps You Have To Try

1. AFFiNE

AFFiNE is an amazing app for anyone managing content projects. It's designed to help you organize and handle your work easily. With AFFiNE, you get really cool templates for planning and visual tools like concept maps, which make organizing your ideas a breeze. It's super versatile and perfect for both individual users and teams. AFFiNE makes the whole process of planning and tracking your content projects straightforward and efficient, turning what could be a complicated task into something simple and enjoyable. Whether you're overseeing a big project or just getting your ideas together, AFFiNE has got your back.

Key features:

• Structured Knowledge Exploration (Concept Map Template): This template aids in breaking down complex theories and ideas into digestible diagrams. It's particularly useful for content planners in academic or research fields, as well as for teams in corporate strategy or product development who need to visualize the interplay of ideas.

• Visual Project Tracking: The Project-Tracking Kanban is designed for agile project management, offering a clear visual representation of project progress. This is essential for content planners to track different stages of content creation and publication, ensuring that all tasks are managed efficiently.

• Write, Draw, and Plan All at Once: Enjoy your all-in-one KnowledgeOS solution for effortlessly writing, drawing, and planning on a hyper-fused platform. It supports kanban, table, and rich-text paragraphs as building blocks to form pages or whiteboards. It carries out integrated processing here in document editing, data processing, or brainstorming.

Price: FREE! If you are interested, please check the specific Pricing plan.

2. Planable

Planable is an effective content planning tool ideal for teams of all sizes, streamlining collaborative content creation. It's particularly suited for marketers to manage a variety of written content, including social media posts, blogs, and newsletters.

Key Features：

• Content Creation: It allows team collaboration in real-time. Multiple marketers can work simultaneously, using comments and Planable's advanced social media AI tool. The platform clearly defines roles and permissions, distinguishing between content creators and approvers.

• Content Approval: Planable simplifies approval with custom workflows, suitable even for multi-level processes. This feature enables one-click approvals while ensuring all relevant team members are updated.

• Content Scheduling: The tool supports scheduling posts for automatic publishing on major social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, TikTok, Google My Business, YouTube, and Pinterest. The sync on/off feature is useful for managing the same post across different platforms.

Price: starting at $12 per month

3. Notion

Notion, as a content planner application, offers a key advantage in providing an intuitive and efficient platform for managing and optimizing the content creation process. It combines the simplicity of a note-taking app with the functionality of spreadsheet software, allowing teams to plan content, collect ideas, and track goals all on one unified platform. This makes Notion an ideal tool for various marketing needs, adaptable to the rapidly changing demands of content creation while maintaining high organizational and collaborative efficiency.

Key Features:

• Centralized Content Management: Users can capture, store, and organize all content ideas in one place, making it easily accessible and modifiable at any time.

• Flexible Calendar Planning Tool: Offering a visual calendar view, it helps users plan and track their content publishing schedule, ensuring content goals are met on time.

• Collaboration and Feedback Mechanisms: Supports real-time collaboration among team members, including shared documents, comment sections, and tagging, to enhance communication and creative exchange within the team.

Price: free

4. Canva

Canva is famous mainly for being a handy design tool, but it also has a content planner. It’s a basic content calendar for social media with a major advantage — an opportunity to schedule a post directly from your Canva workspace.

Key Features:

• Smart and fast content planning. Teams schedule posts to social media accounts straight from the creation dashboard. Canva also recommends the best time to post for maximum engagement.

• Collaboration tools. Team members who create designs together, plan together, using comments and edits. Canva also has an app to manage assets and content planning on the go. Price: Free trial. Canva Pro Bundle is $12.99 per month.

5.Airtable

Airtable is a low-code platform that combines spreadsheets, databases, and custom app creation. For content masters, it’s a nifty way to organize content and sync on each step in the content creation process. For content folks, Airtable has a pre-made content calendar template. This is a planning and collaboration tool that isn’t specifically for editorial calendars. Teams in all kinds of industries can use it to organize work in either a grid, calendar, kanban, gallery, or form view. The calendar feature in AirTable can help you keep track of campaigns and publish dates. You can also keep track of tasks and communicate with project members.

Key Features：

• Task tracking: Assign different content tasks, set deadlines, track progress, nudge your colleagues, and never miss the deadline again. As a bonus, get a comprehensive look at your content efforts in the calendar.

• Schedule and publish: Once your content is ready, you can post it to your social media platform of choice.

Price: starting at $20 per month

6. ClickUp

ClickUp is a full-featured work management platform that supports marketing teams from planning and ideation to publication. It offers unlimited customization options for every content team, large and small, to manage their projects and campaigns. ClickUp’s Template Center contains ready-to-use templates and workflows, including the Content Calendar Template. This template is a must for content teams producing a lot of content. Simplify complicated or overwhelming tasks and get started quickly with your content planning in no time.

Key Features：

• Six statuses: Open, Writing, Approval, Updated Required, Scheduled, and Published to keep track of progress and give visibility to stakeholders

• Custom fields: Keep track of granular details such as publication date, channel, and pricing

• Views: Choose from a Calendar, List, Board, Workflow, Channels, or Timeline View to help build your content database

• Best use cases: Blog calendar, editorial calendar, marketing strategy, and content marketing

Price: starting at $7 per month

7.Monday.com

Monday is also customizable to your project needs, with Kanban, calendar, and other templates available. In addition to setting a schedule, you can assign tasks to team members and keep track of their progress. It also integrates with your existing project and communications apps, including Excel, Google apps, Trello, Dropbox, and Slack.

Key Features：

• Team Collaboration and Task Management: It offers robust collaboration tools, allowing teams to work together effectively. The platform's focus on task management helps in organizing and tracking project progress, making it a suitable tool for teams aiming to streamline their workflow.

• Customizable Boards for Project Management: At the core of Monday are its customizable boards, which are essential for managing projects and workflows. These boards can be tailored to reflect specific workflow needs. The platform provides various templates, including those for social media management, aiding in campaign planning and tracking.

• Social Media Campaign Management: Monday includes features specifically for managing social media campaigns. It allows team members to suggest and track social media post ideas and campaigns, with boards that can categorize campaigns into upcoming, live, completed, or stuck statuses, ensuring a clear overview of all social media activities.

Price: starting at $8 per month

8.Brand24

Brand24 is a digital tool primarily focused on brand monitoring and social media analytics rather than content planning. It specializes in analyzing the emotional undertones of brand mentions online, providing crucial insights for reputation management through its sentiment analysis feature. The platform also keeps users updated with real-time alerts on significant changes in online conversations about their brand, enabling prompt and effective responses. Additionally, Brand24 offers robust data exporting capabilities, allowing businesses to generate comprehensive reports and infographics for better strategic decision-making and sharing insights across various departments.

Key Features:

• Detailed Sentiment Analysis: Brand24 delves deep into the emotional context of brand mentions. This feature is crucial for understanding and managing public perception of a brand. It helps businesses to identify the tone of conversations about their brand and respond appropriately.

• Real-Time Alerts: The platform provides immediate updates on significant changes in the conversation surrounding a brand. This feature is essential for businesses to quickly address potential issues or capitalize on positive engagement, keeping them ahead in managing their online reputation.

• Extensive Data Exporting Capabilities: Brand24 allows for the seamless generation of reports and infographics, making it easy to share and analyze key social media monitoring insights across different departments of a business. This feature ensures that valuable information is accessible and usable for strategic decision-making.

Price: starts at $49 per month.

9.Hootsuite

Hootsuite stands as a premier choice in the realm of social media management tools, equipped with a wide array of features ideal for various aspects of social media management. Particularly for content-related tasks, it offers capabilities like automated posting, effective content management, keyword filtering, simultaneous management of multiple accounts, and scheduling of posts. Additionally, it supports collaboration among a small group of marketers, proving to be more economical in such scenarios. On their blog, Hootsuite provides a free, adaptable content calendar template for a weekly schedule, primarily focusing on major social networks like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn. This template is highly customizable to fit different platform preferences and includes a special section for evergreen content, which is valuable for consistently high-performing blog posts throughout the year.

Key Features:

• Limited Social Media Account Management: The Free plan allows you to manage up to two social media accounts, integrating with major platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Pinterest. This feature suits users who are active on a few platforms.

• Basic Publishing Capabilities: Users can schedule a limited number of messages (up to five) at any specific time. The platform also facilitates easy content creation, offering access to free images from Pixabay and supporting drag-and-drop for media uploads. You can post immediately, save drafts, or schedule posts for later.

• Content Organization and Filtering: Social media accounts and their content are organized into separate boards, making it simpler to track scheduled and published content. Additionally, there's a feature to filter posts according to their status, such as viewing only drafts, enhancing content management efficiency.

Price: Priced at $49 per month, it includes 1 user, 10 social profiles, unlimited scheduling, auto-scheduling, a publishing calendar, and more.

10.Loomly

Loomly, initially designed as a user-friendly social media calendar, excels in simplifying the management of social media content. It supports a wide range of social media platforms, including Pinterest and Snapchat, addressing the needs of social media teams efficiently. The platform enables users to manage the lifecycle of social media content — from idea tracking and creation to optimization, scheduling, and performance tracking. Additionally, Loomly facilitates direct engagement with users interacting with your social media posts, making it a comprehensive tool for content marketing campaigns and social media management. This tool is particularly helpful for social media managers in organizing, optimizing, and analyzing content, ensuring effective audience engagement.

Key Features :

• Custom workflow for every calendar: Social media managers can choose how many statuses their content will have and how many approvals it would need to go live.

• Content ideas: Loomly curates post ideas based on your chosen industry, special events, and news. This feature is particularly helpful for social media marketers who need to generate engaging content ideas.

Price: Loomly has four paid plans starting at $26/month.

11.Sendible

Sendible is one of the leading social media scheduling and management tools. It offers a powerful calendar that makes content planning a breeze. You can use its calendar to plan and customize posts for different platforms, assign posts to various team members, and import designed media. If you need to include a client, you can also use it to share content with them for approval before you schedule it for publishing.

Key Features :

• Comprehensive Social Media Management: Sendible's unique "Services" feature allows users to manage various social media channels and profiles effectively. This includes capabilities like Facebook moderation, where it can automatically remove comments and posts containing specified words or phrases, and the ability to upload and schedule Facebook Page cover photos to align with marketing campaigns.

• Content Scheduling and Publishing: Sendible excels in scheduling content across social platforms and drafting and publishing posts on major blogging platforms. The tool includes a powerful calendar for planning and customizing posts for different platforms, and it integrates with Canva for creating social media graphics. Users can also use Sendible’s Google Chrome Extension to publish or schedule content found on the web.

• Content Discovery and Sharing: The platform offers a content discovery tool, RSS feeds, and Google Alerts integration, assisting users in finding high-quality content to share with followers. It also features smart queues to ensure a consistent flow of evergreen content.

Price: starting at $25

12.Google Docs

Google Docs, a product of Google's extensive range of internet applications, revitalizes your documents with its advanced editing and formatting capabilities. It offers a dynamic platform for content creation, enabling you to incorporate images, drawings, and hyperlinks, along with a variety of font options — all at no cost. A standout feature of Google Docs is its auto-save function, ensuring every change is immediately stored as you work. Additionally, the platform's revision history is a powerful tool, allowing you to track past document versions, including details of edits and editors. While Google Docs was once the go-to choice, it now faces competition from a range of content planning tools, though it remains a valuable resource, especially for collaborative efforts.

Key Features：

• Collaboration Tools: Google Docs is renowned for its robust collaboration capabilities. Multiple users can work on the same document simultaneously, making real-time editing and feedback possible. This feature is particularly useful for team projects and content planning, as it allows seamless cooperation among team members.

• Advanced Editing and Styling Tools: Google Docs offers a wide range of editing and styling tools. These include various font choices, the ability to add images and drawings, and smart paragraphing. These features enhance the visual appeal and readability of documents, allowing for the creation of professional-looking content.

• Automatic Saving and Revision History: An essential feature of Google Docs is its auto-save functionality. Every change made in a document is saved automatically, eliminating the worry of losing progress. Additionally, the revision history feature allows users to view previous versions of the document, including details about when each edit was made and by whom. This is invaluable for tracking changes over time and understanding the evolution of a document.

Price: Free

13.Agorapulse

AgoraPulse equips you with a robust suite of Content Planning Tools, making it a powerhouse for teams and agencies. Its features are designed to optimize and schedule content across multiple platforms, ensuring your posts are perfectly timed and crafted. The platform’s Writing Assistant aids in enhancing the quality of your content, while real-time collaboration tools keep your team in sync. UTM tracking and consistent branding tools are also included, providing a comprehensive solution for your content planning needs. AgoraPulse’s all-in-one social inbox and detailed analytics help you stay on top of your social media game.

Key Features:

• All-in-One Social Inbox: Centralizes all social media interactions in one place, significantly enhancing the efficiency of managing and responding to messages, comments, and mentions across various platforms.

• Detailed Analytics: Offers comprehensive insights into social media performance, allowing for data-driven decision-making. This feature helps in understanding audience engagement, measuring ROI, and identifying successful content strategies.

• Content Planning and Scheduling Tools: A robust set of tools for optimizing and scheduling content across multiple social media platforms. This feature ensures posts are crafted and timed perfectly, facilitating effective and consistent content delivery.

Price: Priced at $49 per user per month, billed annually.

14.Slickplan

Slickplan offers a specialized suite for website planning, equipped with integrated collaboration features, ensuring smooth transitions and interactions among users. Our top-tier tools, renowned in the industry, consistently attract customers for repeated projects. This suite encompasses a visual sitemapper and site crawler for efficient site layout planning, a diagramming tool to map user flows, enhancing user experience, and our comprehensive online content planner for streamlined content management.

Key Features:

• Diagramming Tool for User Flow Mapping: Enhances the planning of user navigation and improves website user experience.

• Online Content Planner: Simplifies the content creation and management process with drag-and-drop content blocks.

• Collaboration Capabilities: Supports teamwork with multiple editors, enabling collaborative content creation.

Price: Access to the content planner tier (and many other tools) begins at $31.49/month when paid annually.

With top-notch software like AFFiNE at your disposal along with its diverse range of templates and user-friendly features, creating concept maps has never been easier or more effective. Commence concept mapping by using AFFiNE's user-friendly tool. Presently, AFFiNE has launched its Stable Version, with ongoing efforts to develop a more comprehensive and dependable iteration. Join us on our voyage through our social media channels and be part of the experience. Come and join us on our journey over on our media platforms. 🚀