Ranked for the trades

Best AI social media tools for contractors in 2026

Seven tools ranked by how much of the weekly job each one takes off a trades business, with every price read from the vendor's own pricing page on one named date by a company that sells one of them and says so first.

Start free

Ours is the entry that starts free every week: 3 posts, 1 video, 1 cross-post, plus 300 credits a month refilled forever. No card asked for, and free-plan media carries a small watermark.

Apaya is the best AI social media tool for contractors who want one bill and no weekly homework: it reads your website, writes the posts, makes the graphics and publishes them, at $69 a month billed monthly or $55 a month billed annually, which its page prints as $662 a year (apaya.com/pricing, read 28 August 2026).

SpeedRun Social, our own product, does those same jobs and adds short video, and it sits second because you can run a week of it without a card. Five more tools follow, each priced from the vendor's own page on 28 August 2026, and the ranking criterion is written out below the list.

The seven tools, ranked by how much they do

Every priced claim below links to the vendor page it was read from and the date it was read. Where a vendor publishes a monthly price and an annual one, both are quoted, because most of these pages open with the annual figure already chosen for you.

  1. Apaya

    Writes the posts, makes the media, publishes them

    Takes the most of the job for a contractor who will pay for it

    Point it at your website, and it produces and publishes without asking you for anything weekly. It is also the only tool here selling itself to the trades by trade, with separate pages for roofers, HVAC firms and landscapers, so the sample content a buyer sees is already about their work.

    What it costs
    Its plan cards print both modes at once, with the annual figure as the headline. Spark listed $69 a month billed monthly and $55 a month billed annually, printed as $662 billed annually, for 1 brand, 4 social accounts and 1 user. Blaze read $129 monthly and $103 a month billed annually, printed as $1,239 a year. Supernova read $229 monthly and $183 a month billed annually, printed as $2,198 a year. Enterprise is quoted on request, and its pricing FAQ prices extra brands on the Spark and Blaze plans at $59 a month billed monthly or $49 a month billed annually. apaya.com/pricing, read 28 August 2026
    Best for
    A contracting business with nobody on marketing that would rather pay a fixed monthly bill than touch social media at all.

    Honest limitation

    There is no free plan, only a 3-day trial, which is a short window to judge a month of output. Its own comparison table also lists four jobs it does not do on any tier: paid social advertising, community management, social listening and influencer outreach. Its contractor landing page headlines Plans from $55/month, which is the annual rate, rather than the $69 the same tier costs billed monthly. apaya.com/pricing, read 28 August 2026

  2. SpeedRun Social

    our product

    Writes the posts, makes the media, publishes them

    Takes the same job and starts without a card

    It builds a brand kit from your own website, then generates captions, images and short video together and parks them in an approval queue until you release them. Disclosure: this is our product, on our own list, and it is ranked second rather than first.

    What it costs
    Free plan: 300 credits/month refilled forever, 1 free campaign/week (3 posts + 1 video + 1 cross-post), no card required, watermarked media on free. Paid plans are $49.99, $99.99 and $199.99 a month billed monthly, or $39.99, $79.99 and $159.99 a month billed annually. speedrunsocial.com/pricing, read 28 August 2026
    Best for
    A trades business that wants to see a real week of its own posts before deciding, and that wants video in the mix rather than photos alone.

    Honest limitation

    Media generated on the free plan carries a watermark, and there is no shared inbox and no brand monitoring, so answering customers stays wherever you answer them now. We are also the newest product on this list and have very few customers, which is a real reason a cautious buyer starts a trial somewhere with more road behind it. speedrunsocial.com/pricing, read 28 August 2026

  3. Syllaby

    Makes the media, publishing depends on the tier

    Makes video first, and schedules it in bulk

    Built around generated video rather than still posts, with faceless and avatar formats, a script writer and a bulk scheduler behind them. It keeps a contractors page among its industries, and every tier includes bulk scheduling rather than holding it back for the expensive plan.

    What it costs
    This page opens on monthly. Billed monthly it listed Starter at $9 a month, Basic at $29, Standard at $78 and Premium at $153, with Starter marked monthly billing only. Switching the toggle to Annually, save 15% changed the figures to Basic $24.67 a month billed $296 annually, Standard $66.33 billed $796 a year and Premium $130.08 billed $1,561 a year, and Starter left the annual view entirely. Credit allowances run 100, 500, 1,500 and 5,000 a month. syllaby.io/pricing-plan, read 28 August 2026
    Best for
    A contractor who has decided short video is the format that sells the work, and who wants a lot of it for a small monthly number.

    Honest limitation

    The plans are metered in credits, and the same page prices a faceless video at 13 credits and an avatar video at 30, so the $9 tier works out at roughly seven faceless videos a month. There is no free plan, and the pricing FAQ confirms a free trial exists without naming its length. The feature table on that page listed Premium at $155 a month billed monthly while the card above it said $153 on the 28 August 2026 read; on a 31 August 2026 re-read the cards read $153 consistently. syllaby.io/pricing-plan, read 28 August 2026

  4. Predis.ai

    Makes the media, publishing depends on the tier

    Cheapest generated images and carousels, if you publish them

    A generator for single images, carousels and short video with captions attached, priced lower than anything else here that makes media. The catch sits inside the tier list rather than the headline number, and it is spelled out in the limitation beside this.

    What it costs
    The page opens on Annually with a 50% off badge. Billed annually, Core read $19 a month printed as $230 a year, Rise $40 a month printed as $474 a year and Enterprise+ $212 a month printed as $2,540 a year. Clicking Monthly changed the same three to $32, $79 and $249 a month, billed monthly. Monthly credit allowances are 1,300, 3,200 and 10,000, which the page translates for Core as about 86 AI images or 9 videos. predis.ai/pricing, read 28 August 2026
    Best for
    A contractor happy to press publish, or somebody already paying for a scheduler, who wants the picture-making part alone at the lowest price.

    Honest limitation

    The cheapest tier will not post for you. Core is listed as No Auto Posting with 1 brand and publishing to 10 channels, and auto posting first appears on Rise at $79 a month billed monthly or $40 a month billed annually. The pricing page shows no free plan and names no trial, so the entry price is the real entry price. predis.ai/pricing, read 28 August 2026

  5. SocialBee

    Publishes what you already shot

    Best queue for jobs you want posted more than once

    A scheduler that sorts posts into categories and cycles them, which suits a trade whose best content stays true all year: the same drain-clearing explainer, the same winter service reminder, back around on a rotation instead of dying after one outing.

    What it costs
    The page opens on Yearly with a 16% off badge. Its own plan comparison table gave a Monthly price row of $29, $49 and $99 a month billed monthly for Bootstrap, Accelerate and Pro, and a Yearly price row of $290, $490 and $990 a year billed annually for the same three. The accounts they cover are 5, 10 and 25 social profiles. socialbee.com/pricing, read 28 August 2026
    Best for
    A contractor sitting on a folder of job photos and tips that could run again every quarter without looking stale.

    Honest limitation

    There is no free plan, only a 14-day trial the page marks as needing no credit card. It also does not solve the problem most contractors actually have: somebody still has to take the photo and write the first version of the post before a queue has anything to cycle. socialbee.com/pricing, read 28 August 2026

  6. Buffer

    Publishes what you already shot

    Cheapest way to schedule photos you take on the van

    A calendar and a queue, and very little else in the way. For a crew already photographing finished jobs on a phone, this is the smallest possible step from a camera roll to a posting schedule, and the free plan can carry it indefinitely.

    What it costs
    A fresh load opens on the Yearly toggle, where Essentials showed $5 and Team $10 per channel per month billed annually. Clicking Monthly changed the same two to $6 and $12 per channel per month, each labelled Billed monthly. The free plan is listed as free forever for up to 3 channels, with 10 scheduled posts per channel, 100 ideas and 1 user account, and paid tiers carry a 14-day free trial. buffer.com/pricing, read 28 August 2026
    Best for
    A one or two truck operation that already shoots its own work and only needs the posting to stop being manual.

    Honest limitation

    It publishes what you bring and generates no images or video, so the empty-calendar problem stays yours. Pricing is per channel, which means the bill grows with every account a growing contractor connects, and the free plan holds 10 scheduled posts per channel and a single user. buffer.com/pricing, read 28 August 2026

  7. Hootsuite

    Publishes what you already shot

    The full suite, and the highest entry price here

    The incumbent, and the only tool on this list that answers messages and monitors mentions as well as publishing. It ranks last on the criterion this page uses and near the top on a different one, which the method section below says out loud rather than hiding.

    What it costs
    The plans page listed Standard at $99, Professional at $199 and Advanced at $399, each per user per month and each billed annually, with Enterprise quoted on request. The page carries no billing toggle and publishes no month-to-month price, so the annual rate is the only rate it states. Standard covers up to 10 social accounts and comes with a free 14-day trial. The figures render several seconds after load, and an early read of the page finds no dollar sign on it at all. hootsuite.com/plans, read 28 August 2026
    Best for
    A larger contracting firm with staff who already live in a shared inbox all day, and a budget that treats social media as a department rather than an evening job.

    Honest limitation

    It is the only tool here with no free plan and no month-to-month option published, so the cheapest honest way in is an annual commitment per user. For a two-truck shop that is the whole objection, and it is the reason this page ranks it where it does rather than by reputation. hootsuite.com/plans, read 28 August 2026

How this list was ranked

The stake first: we build SpeedRun Social, it is entry two on this list, and Apaya is ranked above it. A roundup written by a vendor is worth a contractor's time only when the vendor says so before the ranking rather than after it, so it is said here.

On 28 August 2026 every vendor's own pricing page was loaded in a browser and read. Five of the six ship no prices in their raw HTML and paint them in JavaScript, and Hootsuite's take several seconds to appear at all, which is why a quick look at that page can find no figures on it. Nothing on this page comes from a review site, another list or an assistant's answer.

Three of these pricing pages open with the annual price already selected, and a fourth prints the annual per-month figure as its headline, so the first number a contractor sees is usually a yearly commitment. Every priced entry here gives the monthly-billed figure and the annual one, since our own plans are quoted monthly and putting somebody's yearly rate beside a monthly one flatters whoever is being quoted annually. Hootsuite is the exception, and it is labelled rather than patched: its page has no toggle and no month-to-month price, and making one up for symmetry would be worse than the gap.

The ranking measure is how much of the weekly job a tool takes off a business with nobody on marketing, with the entry cost breaking ties. Entries one and two write the posts, make the images and publish them. Three and four generate media, and differ on whether their cheapest tier will publish it. Five, six and seven publish what somebody at the company already shot. Hootsuite lands last on that measure and would place far higher on another: a firm that needs a shared inbox and mention monitoring should read its entry first rather than last.

There are no scores, stars, testimonials or customer counts anywhere on this page. We have very few customers, and a rating would imply a bake-off nobody ran. Prices move, so open the linked page before any number here decides anything.

Questions contractors ask about this list

  • What is the best AI social media tool for contractors?

    Apaya, for a contracting business that wants the whole weekly job handled and will pay a fixed bill for it. Its Spark tier listed $69 a month billed monthly or $55 a month billed annually, printed as $662 a year, and it sells trade-specific pages for roofers, HVAC firms and landscapers (apaya.com/pricing, read 28 August 2026). SpeedRun Social, our own product, does the same jobs and adds short video and a free plan. A contractor who only needs the posting automated should look at Buffer instead.

  • What is the cheapest AI social media tool for contractors?

    On the pages read on 28 August 2026, the cheapest way to make content was Syllaby Starter at $9 a month, which its page marks as monthly billing only, followed by Predis.ai Core at $32 a month billed monthly or $19 a month billed annually. The cheapest way to schedule content you already have was Buffer Essentials at $6 per channel per month billed monthly or $5 billed annually, and Buffer also keeps a free forever plan for up to 3 channels.

  • Is there a free AI social media tool for contractors?

    Two on this list keep permanent free plans rather than trials. Buffer's is free forever for up to 3 channels, with 10 scheduled posts per channel and 1 user account. Ours is 300 credits/month refilled forever, 1 free campaign/week (3 posts + 1 video + 1 cross-post), no card required, watermarked media on free. Everybody else runs a trial only: Hootsuite and SocialBee 14 days, Apaya 3 days, Syllaby an unnamed length its FAQ confirms exists, and Predis.ai's pricing page names no trial at all.

  • Which of these actually makes the photos and videos, and which just post them?

    Apaya, SpeedRun Social, Syllaby and Predis.ai generate the media. Buffer, SocialBee and Hootsuite publish media you bring, which for a trades business usually means somebody still has to photograph the finished job and write the caption. Predis.ai is the one that sits on the line: its Core tier generates images but is listed as No Auto Posting, so publishing only comes in from the Rise tier upward.

  • How much should a contractor expect to pay for one of these?

    On the figures read on 28 August 2026, a trades business doing this properly lands between roughly $19 and $103 a month. Predis.ai Core was $32 a month billed monthly or $19 billed annually, Apaya Spark $69 monthly or $55 billed annually, and our own ladder is Paid plans are $49.99, $99.99 and $199.99 a month billed monthly, or $39.99, $79.99 and $159.99 a month billed annually. Hootsuite sits well above that at $99 per user per month billed annually, with no month-to-month price published.

Keep reading

Try it on your own jobs

The free plans and trials above exist so a contractor can put one real week of their own work through two tools and compare what comes out. Ours is the entry with no countdown on it, and every post waits for your approval until you turn that off.

Start freeSee real output

Every vendor figure on this page was read on 28 August 2026. Prices move; the links exist so you can check theirs and ours.