Postiz vs Mixpost in 2026: License, Self Hosting, Networks and Real Cost

Postiz is a social media scheduler whose whole code base is public. The Postiz repository is licensed under AGPL 3.0, dates from July 2023 and showed 37,146 stars on October 13, 2026. The Postiz homepage now describes the product as an agentic scheduler: AI agents draft and schedule through its MCP server, command line tool and API, and a person approves on a calendar. Postiz Cloud is the same application, hosted.

Mixpost is social media management software from a company called Inovector, and it ships as a Laravel package you install on your own server. It comes in three self hosted editions. Lite is free and open source: the Mixpost repository uses the MIT license and dates from July 2022. Pro and Enterprise are paid one time licenses. There is also a hosted version, and the Mixpost Cloud docs put its relation to the rest in eight words: "Mixpost Cloud is Mixpost Pro, run by us".

So the two names cover six products: self hosted Postiz, Postiz Cloud, Mixpost Lite, Mixpost Pro, Mixpost Enterprise and Mixpost Cloud. Most confusion in a Postiz vs Mixpost comparison comes from setting the free edition of one beside the paid edition of the other. The tables below keep the editions apart.

We make Spreadcast, so we sell neither tool and compete with both for one kind of reader, an app founder. Every fact here was read on the two vendors' own pages, docs and repositories on October 13, 2026, and is linked where it is stated. We did not install or benchmark either product for this page. For a wider field, see the best Postiz alternatives.

Mixpost Pro free download was the suggestion Google offered most often when we collected Mixpost searches on October 17, 2026, ahead of Mixpost vs Postiz itself, so here is the plain answer: there is no free download of Pro from Mixpost. Pro is not a file you fetch. Mixpost's manual install guide for Pro installs it with Composer, which asks for a username and password: your mixpost.app account email and your license key. The Docker install reads the same key from a LICENSE_KEY line in its settings file. Without a key bought from Mixpost, the install has nothing to download.

Copies of Mixpost Pro offered elsewhere as free, cracked or nulled are a bad trade. The terms forbid redistributing the code, as the license section below explains, so such a copy is unlicensed by definition. It also cannot reach Mixpost's update channel, and this is software that will hold the access tokens for every account you connect. Mixpost's pricing FAQ says a genuine install hashes passwords with bcrypt, encrypts account credentials and tokens at rest and supports two factor sign in; a modified copy from an unknown site promises none of that.

What you can get for $0 is real, though. Mixpost Lite is free under MIT with lifetime updates and publishes to Facebook Pages, X profiles and Mastodon, with a calendar, a media library, post versions, labels and basic analytics. Pro carries a 14 day money back guarantee, so you can install the real thing and ask for a full refund through the chat widget if it is not right. Mixpost Cloud has a 7 day trial, and nonprofits get 30% off Pro.

Does Mixpost Lite support Instagram? No. Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, YouTube, Pinterest, Threads, Bluesky and the other Pro networks start at the $299 license or on Mixpost Cloud. Since Pro 5.0.0, Instagram connects without a Facebook Page. If you want a free Mixpost alternative that posts to Instagram on your own server, that is self hosted Postiz, which has every network in its free edition, with the caveat from the developer apps table below: you still need your own Meta app and its review before Instagram posts go out.

On hosted plans Postiz costs less wherever a team is involved. Three people pay $468 a year on Postiz Team and $948 on Mixpost Business with monthly billing, a gap of $480 ($948 minus $468), because Mixpost's two cheaper plans stop at one member. The one hosted case where Mixpost is cheaper is a solo user on yearly billing: Spark is $249 a year and Postiz Standard is $278, which is $29 less ($278 minus $249), for one account on each of 11 networks, with no API and at most 100 posts waiting in the queue.

On your own server Postiz wins on price at every size, since its license costs nothing: $648 over three years for a solo developer against $947 for Mixpost Pro, a difference of exactly the $299 license. What the $299 buys is a different product shape: isolated workspaces, an approval step, an engagement inbox, and keys you manage in a dashboard instead of in environment variables. If you would use those, $299 is small beside three years of a hosted plan with the same features.

Count the costs outside the table before you decide. Both vendors say developer app approvals take weeks. AI features on a self hosted install bill to your own provider account. X is no longer free to automate either: X's API pricing page describes pay per usage credits with no subscription, and that bill is yours on any self hosted install of either tool. And a Mixpost license covers one year of updates in a year when Mixpost shipped three major versions.

Postiz puts the whole product in one public repository under AGPL 3.0, and its README says the project does not gate features between the cloud and the open source edition. GitHub's summary of the AGPL 3.0 license explains the condition that matters: you may run, read and change the software for free, and when a modified version is used to provide a service over a network, the complete source of that modified version must be made available. A company posting to its own accounts rarely meets that condition. An agency or a SaaS builder who changes the code and gives customers a login should read the license first.

Mixpost has three licenses, and only one of them is open source. Lite uses MIT, which GitHub's summary of the MIT license calls a short permissive license whose only condition is keeping the copyright and license notices, so modified versions may be distributed under other terms and without source. The repository's README adds a practical limit: Lite's features are kept distinct from Pro's, and Lite stays at three networks.

Pro and Enterprise are what the pricing page calls source available. The full source is installed on your server and you may add features for your own business, but the Mixpost terms of use say you may not resell, redistribute or transfer it. The same terms bind a license to one domain or subdomain, require a separate license for each business, and forbid using a Pro license to build your own SaaS or to sell workspaces. That is what Enterprise is for.

For an agency, both work, under different rules. Self hosted Postiz costs nothing for any number of clients and channels. Mixpost Pro is sold for exactly this use, a team or agency managing accounts for itself or its clients, on one domain, for $299. For a SaaS builder the routes differ more. Mixpost Enterprise is $1,199 once and adds subscription plans, billing, invoices and a customer dashboard, and Mixpost says its own cloud runs on it. Under AGPL 3.0 you may offer Postiz as a service, with the source of your modified version on offer to its users, and the Postiz Enterprise page sells a hosted white label version from $200 a month for 200 channels, though on October 13, 2026 that page said it was not accepting new applications.

This section reports what the license summaries and the vendors' pages say. It is not legal advice, and a lawyer should read the license itself before you build a business on either tool.

One search note. If you typed open source social media scheduler and you need Instagram, LinkedIn or TikTok, Postiz is the only one of the two that is open source for those networks. Mixpost's open source edition publishes to Facebook Pages, X and Mastodon.

Each project documents its own sharp edges, which is a point in favor of both. On Postiz the large one was version 2.12.0, released on January 14, 2026, which made Temporal a required service: existing installs had to move their PostgreSQL volume into a new Compose setup. Postiz's self hosting troubleshooting page lists the day to day ones. Serving the front end and back end from different parent domains ends every connection attempt in an invalid state error. Regenerating the session secret logs everyone out. Building from source can run out of memory on a 2 GB server. And Postiz's provider keys page warns that every platform appears in the Add Channel dialog whether or not you configured it, so an unconfigured one fails without a useful message.

On Mixpost the large one is Pro version 7, released on September 26, 2026. Mixpost's guide to upgrading Pro to version 7 explains that the dashboard moved to the root of the domain, which also moves the callback URL registered with every network. Accounts already connected keep publishing, but reconnecting fails until you pin the old path with one variable or update each developer app. The guide recommends pinning. Installs inside your own Laravel application also need Laravel 12 or 13 and a longer queue timeout, or a post can be published twice.

Two older Mixpost habits are worth knowing. Mixpost's troubleshooting page says that changing the application key makes stored credentials unreadable, so you re enter every service key and reconnect every account. And Mixpost's Pro update guide opens with a warning to back up the database first.

Neither list should scare off someone who has run a web application before. The pattern to notice is the kind of upkeep. Postiz ships often, 40 releases in twelve months, and its Docker Compose guide tells you to pull a fresh file because services and variables change between releases. Mixpost keeps the same stack and asks you to follow an upgrade guide for each major version, and there were three of those in 2026.

Searches for the Mixpost default login and the Mixpost default password come from people who just finished an install and see a sign in screen. The answer depends on the edition. Mixpost's Docker guide for Lite ships a default user, admin@example.com with the password changeme, and tells you to change the password in the Mixpost interface after you log in. Do that before you connect a single account, because anyone who knows the guide knows that password too. The same guide maps Lite to port 9000 when you run it without SSL, so a test install on a public server answers on that port with the default login still in place.

Pro and Enterprise have no default credentials. Mixpost's Docker guide for Pro ends at your app address, where you create the first admin user yourself. Once you are in, turn on two factor sign in for each user, which the pricing FAQ lists for every genuine install.

Postiz works the other way around. Postiz's quickstart guide says you open your own instance and register, and the first account becomes the owner of the organisation. The risk is the sign up page that stays open after you. Postiz's configuration reference describes DISABLE_REGISTRATION: set it to true and Postiz allows one sign up, then closes the page, which also turns off sign in through OpenID Connect and OAuth.

The same habit applies to both tools after the first login. Serve the app only over HTTPS behind a proxy, keep the settings file with your keys out of any public repository, and back up the database before each upgrade, as Mixpost's update guide warns above.

Postiz moved fast and in small steps: 40 releases between October 20, 2025 and October 11, 2026, from version 2.8.0 to 2.25.1. The structural change was Temporal in January 2026. The positioning changed as well. The homepage now leads with AI agents, every plan includes the MCP server and command line tool, and the pricing FAQ says self hosting is a secondary option and that agent features reach the hosted version first.

Mixpost Pro shipped three major versions in 2026, more than in any earlier year on its release page. Version 5.0.0 on April 17 added advanced analytics, Instagram without a Facebook Page, several AI providers and brand voice. Version 6.0.0 on June 25 added the engagement inbox, the MCP server and Pixelfed. Version 6.3.0 on July 29 added single sign on. Version 7.0.0 on September 26 brought a new interface, a queue for each account, best posting times, mentions, a media library with folders, dark mode and a retry for failed posts, followed by ten patch releases in sixteen days. Lite received three small releases, for Facebook API versions and the X pay as you go tier.

For a buyer the two histories point the same way: both are alive. The difference is who gets the new work. On Postiz the releases are the free edition, even if agent features reach the hosted version first. On Mixpost new work lands in Pro, Enterprise and Cloud, and reaches a license holder only while that license's year of updates runs.

Everything above compares two ways to publish a post that already exists. Neither Postiz nor Mixpost decides that today there is something worth posting, lays out the image and writes the captions. Postiz's agent drafts from a prompt you type, and Mixpost's assistant rewrites what you give it. If you ship an app and the feed is empty, the missing piece is usually the post itself.

Spreadcast designs that post and publishes it for you. You paste your App Store link once at the start page. Spreadcast reads the public listing every day, and each new version, each new 5 star review and each rating milestone becomes a designed post built from your icon, screenshots and colors, with a caption written for each network. In a week with no release it drafts a post about one of the app's features. On Pro it publishes to Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, Facebook, Threads, Pinterest, Bluesky, Mastodon, Telegram and Discord, plus YouTube for video posts, after one tap of approval or on full autopilot. A post that quotes a reviewer always waits for you, because Apple's ratings and reviews guidance allows reviews in marketing only with the reviewer's permission.

The free plan drafts every post for 1 app, ready to download with a small Spreadcast mark. Pro is $29 a month flat, with design, captions and publishing to 8 networks included. Set that beside the two tools here. Postiz Standard is also $29 and stops at 5 channels, so those 8 networks need Team at $39, which is $10 more ($39 minus $29) for an empty calendar. Mixpost Spark is $29 for one account on each of its networks, which covers 7 of the 8 because Mixpost has no Telegram, and leaves every post to you as well. There is no server to run and no developer app to register on any network.

Self hosting is where the other two cost less, and the arithmetic should be on the page. A solo developer pays about $216 a year to run Postiz and $515 in year one for Mixpost Pro, against $290 for Spreadcast Pro on yearly billing. Over three years that is $648 and $947 against $870. The difference buys the posts themselves, designed, captioned and published, and removes the server, the upgrades and the app reviews.

Spreadcast is built for apps on the App Store and makes still image posts, with basic post stats. Pick Postiz or Mixpost instead if you have no app on the App Store, if you need video, an inbox or an API, or if you post to X, which Spreadcast does not publish to. If you only want Claude or ChatGPT to work in your social tool, Spreadcast has an MCP server as well, where the assistant designs posts in your app's brand, writes captions and schedules them, drafts only by default. Many app teams run both kinds of tool: a scheduler for one off posts and Spreadcast for the recurring app posts. See how that works for indie hackers, read how an AI social media manager differs from a scheduler, or check pricing.

We make Spreadcast, a different kind of tool for a narrower reader, and this page was written to be useful to someone who will never use it. Both products got the same questions in the same order: license, price, stack, networks, features, automation, project activity, limits and the way out.

Everything was read on October 13, 2026. For Postiz: the pricing page, homepage, Enterprise page and its own comparison page, about 50 pages of its docs, and the GitHub API for the repository, releases and issues. For Mixpost: the pricing, Cloud, features, X and terms pages, the release notes for Lite, Pro and Enterprise, about 50 pages of its docs, and the GitHub API for the Lite repository. Server prices are DigitalOcean's, and license summaries are GitHub's. Search suggestions collected from Bing and DuckDuckGo on October 12 and 13 showed both Postiz vs Mixpost and Mixpost vs Postiz, which is why this page exists.

Some things could not be verified, and the page says so where they matter. Mixpost's renewal price and minimum server size are not published. Mixpost's pages disagree on whether Cloud supports X and on the names of two Cloud plans. Postiz's comparison page claims an inbox that its docs do not describe. Review sites refused our requests, so there are no star ratings, and forum threads are not cited. We did not install either product, so nothing here is a measurement of speed or reliability.

Postiz and Mixpost are trademarks of their owners. Neither company is connected with Spreadcast or reviewed this page.