With a billion monthly active users, 500 million of which using the platform on a daily basis, Instagram has shown its status to be the primary place to promote brands and personal accounts.
If you've ever tried to manage your own or a brand's Instagram account, by now you’ve probably started to experience increased competition growing with the pressure of standing out and creating more eye-popping content.
Luckily, there are a plethora of Instagram apps and tools to help you do this.
If you don't see yourself a creative content maker or a skilful photographer, don't worry. We’ve gathered some of the top apps for Instagram to help you take your Instagram content and productivity to the next level.
Instagram content planning: Combin Scheduler
This app is a desktop solution for Instagram posts and stories planning. Combin Scheduler is completely free of charge with no hidden fees or trial periods.
Combin Scheduler will streamline the process of content creation by letting you schedule posts and stories for hours, days, or weeks ahead and post them right away. No worries, your content will be published down to the minute!
Whether you’re a regular Instagram user who posts lots of content or a social media manager with 15 accounts to grow, Combin Scheduler will work fine.
The tool also allows you to repost Instagram content with or without captions, manage your hashtags, style your Instagram grid layout with a special design calendar and control your content plan with a weekly in-app calendar. You can also create captions templates to save time when creating similar content.
When uploading captions and images for publishing, you can also schedule a link to go live together with your post or story. Caption font change is also available now!
Instagram media download: Qoob Stories
If you've ever felt the need to download photos, videos, or stories from Instagram, search no further: the Qoob Stories tool does exactly that.
The tool allows you to watch the Instagram feed of your followings without ads, view news feed of people you follow as your own one and even view Instagram stories anonymously! 4K Stogram downloads not just current content but also automatically saves all future posts of an account, geo or hashtag you used as a search parameter.
All you have to do is to find the content or a user you’re interested in and press ‘Subscribe’. All content is saved on your PC as it is on Instagram: original quality and size, captions, and sounds.
Another feature you might find useful is to have your own Instagram account backed-up with Qoob Stories.
Photo editing: Canva, Lightroom, Motionleap, & Facetune 2
Visual concept and aesthetics is a must on Instagram, so we couldn't help but include the photo editing apps in the list. With these apps, you'll surely take your selfies, flatlays and photo content to the next level.
Canva
With the Canva tool, both mobile and web, you'll be able to create appealing photo content. The service has lots of free and paid templates for different purposes and content types: infographics, stories Highlights, stories templates, regular Instagram posts, and more. If you can't find the template you need, you can create your own design from scratch.
Adobe Lightroom
A free and easy-to-use tool that makes your photos look professionally edited. You've probably seen polished images in Instagram influencers' accounts where all photos have the same style and colours. These are more likely edited with the so-called Lightroom presets.
Lightroom presets are pre-made photo settings that are applied to all upcoming images. To create a preset, you need to pick an image and edit as you wish: adjust exposure, temperature, contrast, brightness, colours, white balance and more. Then you just save the settings as a preset to apply the adjustments to other photos. Thus you'll make your images look cohesive and organic.
Motionleap
Have you ever seen Instagram photos with moving details on them? For instance, a moving river at the static picture or flying clouds? Well, you can recreate this effect with the Motionleap app. This is a free tool with paid additional features will help you make creative photo content that attracts the attention.
You can add in-app moving elements, 3D motion, special effects, nature effects, and more.
Facetune 2
The app that no Instagram influencer can do without. The app is a mobile and very easy-to-use photoshop that can retouch and fix any photo or selfie! If you want to add a glowy look to your skin, smoothen the face, remove dark circles under eyes, conceal pimples and even make your body look slimmer or plumper, just try out the app.
Instagram promotion: Combin Growth
Instagram has more than a billion monthly users, so no wonder that the field is quite competitive. To stand out from the crowd, you need not only create appealing content but also reach the right audience. You can easily do so with Combin Growth.
With this tool, you can find your target audience, automate likes, comments, follow people, unfollow those users who don’t follow you back in bulk, and even use mass story viewing! You can easily and quickly find not just followers of a particular account, but its likers and commenters to interact with them later in one click.
Combin Growth allows you to promote up to 15 Instagram accounts at a time and has a completely free version for you to start.
Video editing: InShot, Magisto Video Editor & GIPHY Cam
InShot
Instagram supports different types of content you’re free to create, and images alone are no longer that interesting. With the growing popularity of IGTV and recently implemented Reels, video content isn’t going anywhere. Unfortunately, Instagram doesn’t have an advanced video editing tool so you might want to use third-party apps like InShot.
InShot is an easy-to-use video-editing tool that helps you design your videos right on your smartphone. With InShot, you can trim clips, remove the middle part of the video, split and merge your clips, apply audio effects and change audio speed.
Different filters, animated stickers, text addition, and audio effects (music library, sounds, voice-overs) are also available.
Magisto Video Editor
This Instagram app is an artificial intelligence-powered video tool. Simply, the app uses AI to find the best, most eye-catching parts of your footage to create video that resonates with an audience. It also uses its algorithm to incorporate edits, effects and transitions to take your clip to the next level.
GIPHY
The app that lets you capture and embellish gifs to your heart’s content. Simply record a gif, add effects (moustaches, googly eyes, and other oddball add-ons available) and export your gif for social media sharing. The downside to this app is its functionality is limited to gifs only, but GIPHY is extremely good at it because it’s the only thing they do. GIPHY Cam is available for free on iOS and Android.
Instagram stories making: Mojo, Lalal.ai & Instories
Instagram stories conquered the hearts of users so powerfully that many users prefer making stories instead of regular feed posts. That's no wonder: stories don't require that much of a polish and editing; they feel like in-moment and live content that doesn't need so much effort to make.
Still, there are tools designed specifically for stories which make them look appealing and eye-popping.
Mojo
Mojo helps you make creative and stylish animated stories. The app offers more than 300 great templates, text effects and GIFs. With Mojo, you can also add music to your stories and video collages.
Lalal.ai
Lalal.ai was not specifically designed for stories; this is an online AI-powered service that accurately extracts vocals and instrumental from audio files. With Lalal.ai, you cam split voices and backtracks from any song, podcast or any other audio file and add it to your Instagram story or video!
Instories
Instories has lots of templates of different styles and purposes, such as minimal design, classic, before/after collage, business, coloured, sport, neon and more. Instories lets you add text with different fonts to your stories, as well as music tracks (even if Instagram music isn't available in your region), animated effects, transitions and more.
Instagram fonts: Fonts & Fonts and Stickers Keyboard
Other than default Instagram fonts look great in post captions! If you want to change the font of your caption or Instagram bio, use a font app like Fonts.
Fonts
Fonts, just like its laconic name implies, is an app that was designed to change your keyboard font and emojis to something new. If you want to add to your post captions or an Instagram bio a little bit more creativity, give this tool a shot.
Fonts & Stickers Keyboard
Fonts & Stickers Keyboard brings you many fonts and GIFs, stickers, emojis, animated text effects with different fonts, and all these from your default smartphone keyboard.
Now you know which apps to use and download on your smartphone and desktop to bring your Instagram account to the next level!