Best Social Media Analytics APIs in 2026

"Analytics API" can mean two pretty different things, and the difference matters a lot when you're picking one.

The first kind is metrics for posts YOU published. Likes on your tweet, impressions on your YouTube video, saves on your Pinterest pin. You authenticate as the owner, and the API hands back what the platform's own dashboard shows.

The second kind is data extraction from any public video on the internet. Transcripts, AI summaries, comment threads, engagement counts on content you didn't post and don't own. Useful for research, competitive analysis, content monitoring, and AI agents that need to read what's on TikTok or YouTube.

Both get called "social media analytics," and a lot of comparison posts conflate them. This one doesn't. I'll walk through four APIs, two from each camp, and tell you which is which.

PostPeer

PostPeer's Social Media Analytics API is the first kind: analytics for your own posts. One endpoint returns likes, impressions, comments, shares, saves, clicks, and views in a unified schema across Twitter, YouTube, and Pinterest today. Instagram, TikTok, and LinkedIn (with the right scope) are next on the list.

The pitch is that the schema is the same across every platform. Twitter calls them "public_metrics," YouTube returns a statistics object, Pinterest splits views and outbound clicks across two endpoints. PostPeer normalizes all of that into one shape with null for fields a platform doesn't expose. Your code stops caring which platform a post was on.

It's also tightly tied to publishing. The same access key that publishes a post pulls its analytics. There's an aggregated field that sums metrics across every platform a post was sent to, so you can sort the list by combined likes without doing the rollup yourself.

Pricing: 1 credit per call, same as a publish. Free tier with 20 credits. Starter is $17/mo for 2,000 credits. Pay-as-you-go credit packs that never expire. Analytics is included on every plan, no add-on.

Pros:

• Unified schema across platforms, fields just stop being null as more launch
• Same access key for posts and analytics
• Free tier and pay-as-you-go option
• Aggregated rollup across platforms a post was published to
• Works for both PostPeer-published posts and external platform IDs (auto-resolves)

Cons:

• Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest today (Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn shipping)

If you'd rather skip the API key for a one-off, the free Twitter Analytics, YouTube Analytics, Pinterest Analytics, and combined Social Media Analytics tools hit the same endpoints under the hood.

SocialKit

SocialKit is the other category: data extraction from any public video. Paste a YouTube, Shorts, TikTok, Instagram Reels, or Facebook video URL and you get back a transcript, an AI summary, comments, engagement metrics, channel details, and more. You don't need to own the account. You don't need OAuth.

That makes it the right tool for use cases PostPeer and Ayrshare can't really cover. AI agents that read competitor content. Comment sentiment for market research. Auto-summarizing every video a creator publishes. Indexing TikTok content for a search product. They also take raw video files (MP4, WebM, MOV) at 1 credit per minute, handy for transcribing recordings you uploaded yourself.

Pricing: 1 credit per call (per video for most endpoints). Free tier with 20 credits. Starter is $19/month for 4,000 credits ($4.75 per 1,000). Cheaper at scale via one-time packs: $49 for 20,000 credits ($2.45 per 1k), $249 for 150,000 credits ($1.66 per 1k). Credits never expire on one-time packs.

Pros:

• Works on ANY public video, no account ownership needed
• Transcripts, summaries, comments, engagement, channel details from one API
• Handles raw video files too (1 credit per minute)
• Cheap at scale via one-time packs (down to $1.66 per 1k calls)
• Free tier with no credit card

Cons:

• Different category from publish-side analytics (it's not a replacement for tracking your own posts)
• Currently focused on YouTube/TikTok/Instagram/Facebook video content (no Twitter or LinkedIn yet)

Ayrshare

Ayrshare is the enterprise pick for first-party post analytics. They've been around longer than anyone here and the platform is mature. Webhooks, advanced insights, integrations with most major social platforms. If procurement is involved and SLAs matter, this is the safe pick.

Pricing: Starts at $299/month with 10 profiles on the Launch plan. Business is $599/month for up to 30 profiles and unlimited team members. Enterprise is custom and adds real-time X webhooks. Analytics is included on every paid plan, no add-on.

Pros:

• Most mature platform on this list
• Strong analytics depth and historical data
• Webhooks and integrations
• Up to 5,000 profiles on Business

Cons:

• Starts at $299/month, no free tier
• Overkill for indie devs and small teams
• 10 profile limit on Launch is stingy for the price

Zernio (formerly Late)

Zernio rebranded from Late and offers analytics as a paid add-on layered onto their posting tier. Coverage is broad (13+ platforms) but the analytics pricing climbs fast as you scale.

Pricing: Analytics is +$10/month on the Build plan ($19/mo base, 120 posts), +$50/month on Accelerate ($49/mo base), and +$1,000/month on Unlimited ($999/mo base). Free tier on the posting side, but no free analytics.

Pros:

• Widest platform coverage (13+ including Reddit, Telegram, Snapchat)
• AI agent integrations (MCP, ChatGPT)
• Comments and DMs API also available

Cons:

• Analytics is a per-tier add-on that scales aggressively
• The base posting plan is already expensive per post
• Requires paying for posting tier even if you only want analytics

Quick comparison

How to pick

It comes down to one question: are the posts yours, or someone else's?

If they're yours and you want a single API for likes, impressions, and clicks across platforms, PostPeer is the cheapest path with a real free tier. Ayrshare is the heavyweight option if budget isn't the issue and you need maturity. Zernio works if you're already paying for their posting plans and need analytics on those, but it gets expensive fast.

If you want data from videos you don't own, SocialKit is the only one of the four that fits. Transcripts, summaries, and comment data on any public video, plus raw video file transcription. The pricing on one-time packs ($1.66 per 1k credits at the Scale tier) makes it the cheapest per-call option in the analytics-API space if you're running heavy research workloads.

The best stack for some teams is both: PostPeer for tracking what you publish, SocialKit for analyzing everything else.