Let's get one thing straight. You absolutely can use Juicer.io to fill your social media aggregator needs. We're not here to tell you that you can't or shouldn't. We just here to help you explore a Juicer.io alternative that can give you more bang for your buck, and even gives you more on the free plan.
Let's dive in and explore which aggregator is right for you.
Main differentiator: Curator.io offers more feeds in its free plan PLUS the branding is nearly invisible while Juicer.io inserts their brand into your feed.
| Curator.io | Juicer.io | |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing | Pro plans start at $25 per month | Pro plans start at $19 per month |
| Feeds & Sources on Free Plan | 3 sources and feeds | Only 1 feed and 2 sources |
| Feeds & Sources on Lowest-Cost Paid Plan | 10 sources and feeds ($25 per month) | Only 1 feed with 5 sources, ($19 per month) |
| Branding on Free Plan | No visible branding (small link at bottom of feed) | Very visible branding, with branded images in the feed |
| Branding on Paid Plans | None | None |
| Additional Users & Moderators | Available on all paid plans (starting at $25) | Only available on enterprise plans with custom pricing |
| Add Custom Posts to Feed | Available on all paid plans (starting at $25) | Not available |
We dive into a full comparison including set-up and pricing below.
What to look for in a juicer.io alternative
There are so many different reasons why you'd want to curate and aggregate a social media feed. As a brand, you might want to humanize your content and put your valued customers front and center. You might want an easy way to repurpose the content that your marketing team works hard to create.
Consumers also have their own motivations for aggregating social media content: weddings, birthday bashes, churches, community events, schools, meetups and more. An aggregated feed can help liven up your website, no matter what sort of website you're building.
At the very basic level, you should look for a social media aggregator that offers the networks you need and includes the number of feeds you need. The aggregator should also let you embed the feed on your site with HTML code that you simply copy and paste.
If you have more advanced requirements, you might want to look for all or some of these features:
- Remove the tool's branding, or the tool should have minimal branding
- Edit certain posts
- Pin certain posts
- Add multiple users to your account
- Manage users
- Unlimited page views for feeds
- Analytics / reporting
Curator.io vs Juicer.io
Now let's take a look at some of the key differences between Curator.io and Juicer.io.
Main differentiator: Curator.io offers more feeds in its free plan PLUS the branding is nearly invisible while Juicer.io inserts their brand into your feed.
Juicer.io setup
First up, we're exploring the Juicer.io setup experience. The first step is to add a social media account to start pulling in posts. Unfortunately, I wanted to add Twitter, but that's not allowed on the free plan, so I chose Instagram.
To add your Instagram account, all you need to do is enter the profile and allow access. That's simple enough.
Then you can curate your feed, and delete any post that you don't want showing up in your feed. Simply hit delete and that post won't appear when you embed the HTML code in your site.
Juicer.io does offer some customization, but it's not very visual or easy to use. They don't show you what the feed styles look like, so it's hard to know what to pick. However, there are some basic settings like columns and width which are easy enough to use.
When you're ready, you can copy and paste the embed code and use it in your website. All social media aggregators should allow this feature, so that's not too surprising.
However, there is a link that says "Customize my embed" and it goes to this code customization tutorial that is really long, technical, and confusing. Most users will not want to have to use custom code to change how their feed looks, so this is a poor user experience.
Unfortunately, Juicer's massive branding in the feed makes it pretty much unusable. Who would want their picture and logo showing up like a curated image?
We believe that a free plan should still offer value. With this big ugly image in the curated feed, there's no point in using their free plan at all.
However, if having that image appear after every few posts doesn't bother you, then Juicer.io could still be a viable option.
Juicer.io pros & cons
Let's take a look at some of the pros of Juicer.io:
- Easy to setup a basic feed if you like their default style
- Offers 2 sources on the free plan
However, there are some really big cons of using Juicer.io
- Restrictions on what networks you can use on the free plan (for example, Twitter is not allowed)
- Not easy to get the style that you want without custom work
- The Juicer.io branding is very visible in your curated feed if you are using their free plan
- Only lets you embed 1 feed on the free plan
TLDR: Curator.io offers more feeds in its free plan PLUS the branding is nearly invisible while Juicer.io inserts their brand into your feed.
Juicer.io pro plans
Are you interested in a paid Juicer.io plan? They do offer to remove their very visible branding on the paid plans and they do include reporting, but not advanced user management and access.
Curator.io setup
Now let's take a look at the Curator.io process. Curator.io is a Juicer.io alternative that offers you more value on their free and paid plans.
First up, we get a very helpful onboarding checklist that shows us what we need to do first. As a heavy software user, I always love onboarding checklists!
The first step is to select a network. I'm choosing Twitter, but there are over a dozen popular networks to choose from. You can even pull in your Slack conversations, which would be really cool if you're building a community and want to showcase how valuable it is.
Next, you pick the type of source. You can pick a hashtag, a profile, or even a geolocation. Picking a geolocation is a great idea for an event or a university or a city government. For this example, I'm picking a hashtag, #photooftheday.
Next, it's time to curate the feed. On the paid plan, you can even edit the posts, which is extremely useful. For now, I'm just deleting a duplicate image.
Then I can choose the style of the feed. What I love about this process is that there are pre-designed feeds ready to go in several different formats:
- Waterfall
- Carousel
- Panel
- Grid
- Grid carousel
- List
It's so great to have the feed styles visually showcased so it's easy to pick the right one. Each format has different free and paid plan options to choose from.
Next up, the easy part! Copy and paste the code to put in any blog post, web page, sidebar, footer widget, etc.
Curator.io also gives you the option of using their Wordpress plugin instead of copying and pasting, if you have a Wordpress site.
Here's the feed posted in my site. What's really cool is that it automatically uses the colors of my website's theme. That teal color is my link color, and so that's what is used for the name of Twitter user in each post.
However, if you don't want to use your website default colors, you have the option of customizing your feed, with absolutely no coding required! You can update the icon color, text color, link color, border color, post background color, and feed background color.
For sure, my absolute favorite feature is the barely noticeable branding! Unlike Juicer.io's massive images showing up in my feed, all I see on the bottom of my website is a small text that reads "Powered by Curator.io." you have to scroll to the very bottom of the feed to even see it, and most people will never scroll that far. Even if they do, it's so small it doesn't matter
I love that you can use the free plan without having to be embarrassed about it.
Curator.io pros and cons
Here are the pros of using Curator.io
- Gives you more feeds and embeds on the free plan (3)
- Lots of pre-built beautiful feed styles to choose from
- Easy customization to any feed style
- Minimal branding on the free plan (just small "Powered by Curator.io" text on the bottom of the feed, which most people will never see)
And here are the cons
- Only 3 feeds allowed on the free plan, and even though all 3 can be embedded in your site (unlike Juicer.io which only allows 1), that still might not be enough for your needs
- Only lets you curate Instagram business accounts not personal accounts, but if you have a business account this isn't a problem
Curator.io pro plans
Do you want to know more about what the Curator.io paid plans have to offer? While Juicer.io offers more feeds and embeds, this competitor also offers advanced user management, post editing, and post pinning.
The ability to pin your favorite posts instead of watching them disappear is so important for brands and event organizers alike. Plus, the post editing feature means that if an image has a caption you don't like, you can change it instead of having to delete the post altogether. That feature is so useful.
Curator.io vs. Juicer.io pricing comparison
Let's dive deeper into what you get for your money with either option.
Free plan - Curator.io gives more feeds and has less visible branding
- Curator.io: 3 sources or feeds, 2000 page views and very minimal visible Curator.io branding
- Juicer.io: 2 sources, only 1 feed, very visible Juicer.io branding
Mid level - Curator.io works out to $2.50 per embeddable feed, while Juicer.io is $19 per embeddable feed
- Curator.io: $25 for 10 sources or feeds, 15,000 page views, remove Curator.io branding, ability to edit posts, multiple users, all feeds can be embedded
- Juicer.io: $19 for 5 sources and only 1 feed, no Juicer.io branding
Higher priced - Curator.io works out to $3.33 per embeddable feed with user management, while Juicer.io works out to $33 per embeddable feed
- Curator.io: $50 for 15 sources and embeddable feeds, unlimited page views, no Curator.io branding, ability to edit posts, multiple users, user management
- Juicer.io: $99 for 15 sources and only 3 embeddable feeds, no Juicer.io branding
While not every Juicer.io competitor will be worth exploring, Curator.io clearly offers more in both their free plan and paid plans. If you'd like to give Curator.io's free forever plan a spin sign up today.