Free Engagement Analytics for TikTok, Instagram, X, Telegram, and Reddit

Search "free TikTok analytics" and most of the results are not free. Pentos, Tokboard, Iconosquare, Hootsuite Insights and the rest offer a free trial, then meter the actual data behind a subscription that starts around thirty dollars a month per platform. The qualified search "free" exists because people have learned to filter out the trial-then-pay model. Here is what an actually free engagement analytics workflow looks like, across the five platforms that publicly expose enough data to drive one.

Why "Free" Is the Qualifying Search

The analytics tool category has converged on a single business model: a free trial that lasts a week or two, followed by a subscription. The marketing pages all use the word "free" prominently, but what is actually free is the trial, not the product. Once the trial expires, the data you were looking at gets gated.

Specific examples of how this looks in practice:

• Pentos. TikTok-focused analytics. Free preview of a creator's headline numbers, paid plans for the actual time-series data and historical view.
• Tokboard. TikTok creator and hashtag analytics. Free tier shows summary statistics, real numbers and historical depth on the paid tier.
• Iconosquare. Multi-platform analytics for creators and businesses. Free trial, then plans starting around $59 per month for one platform.
• Hootsuite Insights and equivalents. Enterprise-tier social listening with analytics built in. Months-long free trials are sometimes available; the actual product is priced for marketing departments.

None of these are wrong as products. They are wrong as answers to the search query "free [platform] analytics," which by definition is being typed by someone who has self-selected as not wanting to pay a subscription. A real free tier is a different shape of answer.

What Engagement Analytics Actually Shows

Worth being concrete about what is on the page, since the term covers a lot of ground.

The useful version of engagement analytics for a single creator surfaces a few things:

• Top performers. The posts that did meaningfully better than the creator's median, in a leaderboard view. The fast version of "what worked."
• Engagement volume over time. A line chart of total engagement (likes plus comments plus shares) per post, plotted against the post date. Tells you whether the creator is in growth, plateau, or decline.
• Engagement quality. Per-post ratios: likes per view, comments per view, shares per view. A high view count with low comments is a different kind of "performing well" than a moderate view count with high comments.
• Posting-cadence heatmap. A grid of hour-of-day vs day-of-week, showing when the creator posts. Useful for working out whether a posting strategy is consistent and when audience activity peaks.
• Per-post history. A scrollable list of every captured post with its engagement counts, sortable by any of the metrics above.

What it does not show, and arguably should not pretend to: real-time data. Engagement analytics that depend on public per-item counts get those counts at the time the post was first captured. A "live" version would require constant re-polling, which costs API quota and rate-limit budget for a marginal improvement in the picture.

Which Platforms Expose Enough Public Data

Five of the eight major platforms surface per-item engagement counts in their public interfaces. Three do not. The split:

• TikTok. View count, like count, comment count, share count visible on every public video.
• Instagram. Like count and comment count on Reels and posts. View count on video posts.
• Twitter/X. View count, like count, repost count, reply count, bookmark count visible on every public tweet.
• Telegram. View count and (sometimes) reaction count on public channel posts.
• Reddit. Upvote count, downvote ratio (now derived rather than direct), comment count.

The three that do not, and why:

• Snapchat Spotlight. Public feed, but per-item engagement counts are not surfaced in the same way as the other platforms. The data simply is not on the public page.
• XenForo forums. Forum threads have their own activity model (post counts, view counts on threads, sometimes "like" reactions) that doesn't map cleanly onto the per-creator analytics shape. We covered the forum-specific angle in how to archive XenForo forum threads.
• Web album hosts. Image hosts and album sites typically do not expose per-item engagement at all. There is nothing to chart.

This is a constraint of the platforms, not the tool. Any analytics product that claims to support these three is either calling something else "engagement," or is showing made-up numbers.

The DIY Route

Before getting into the wrapper version, the honest DIY answer for someone willing to roll their own:

• Use a scraper (a Python script, gallery-dl with a custom postprocessor, yt-dlp's metadata output) to pull per-post engagement counts.
• Store the results in a local database. SQLite is fine for this scale.
• Chart the results with matplotlib, Plotly, or one of the dashboard frameworks.
• Schedule the scrape to repeat, so the database stays current.
• Maintain the scraper as the platforms change their public page markup.

This works. We covered the broader version of the DIY discussion in when the DIY combo stops scaling. The summary: it is the right answer for one or two creators, and stops being the right answer once you want a library of fifty creators across five platforms with a charting layer that you do not have to maintain.

The StreamStash Approach

StreamStash is a self-hosted desktop app for Windows that captures social media content from monitored creator feeds and stores it in a local SQLite-backed library. As of v1.7 (May 2026), every monitored feed on a supported platform gets a dedicated analytics page automatically. The data is captured at download time, so the analytics work as a side effect of the archiving the app was already doing.

What that looks like in practice:

• Per-feed analytics page. Each monitored creator on TikTok, Instagram, X, Telegram, or Reddit gets an analytics tab with the five views described earlier (top performers, engagement volume, engagement quality, cadence heatmap, per-post history).
• Hand-rolled charts. The charts are rendered in the app itself, with no external charting library in the bundle. Lighter, faster, no third-party dependency to worry about.
• Local data only. The analytics run against the same SQLite library that holds the captured media. Nothing leaves the machine. There is no account to create.
• Cross-platform creator rollup. If the same creator is grouped across multiple platforms in the library, the creator detail page surfaces a combined analytics view: per-platform line charts on a shared timeline, useful for comparing how the same content performs on TikTok versus Instagram versus X.
• Refreshed on every rescan. Engagement counts are first captured at download time and updated on every monitored rescan, so the analytics page reflects current totals rather than a frozen snapshot. The "Check Now" button on each feed-detail page triggers an on-demand rescan when you want a manual refresh.
• Honest scope. Five of eight supported platforms. Snapchat, forums, and web albums sit out because the data is not there to capture.

The full per-platform scope rules and the Acceptable Use Policy that defines what counts as in-bounds capture both apply: the analytics use public engagement counts on public posts.

Cross-Platform Creator Analytics

The interesting view for creators who post the same content to multiple platforms is the cross-platform rollup. The same clip on TikTok, Instagram Reels, and an X video post tends to perform differently. The platforms reward different things, and the audiences overlap less than people assume.

Concretely, if the library has the same creator grouped across TikTok, Instagram, and X, the creator detail page shows a stacked line chart on a shared timeline. Each line is one platform; the x-axis is post date. You can see at a glance which platform is the strongest distribution channel for that specific creator, whether one platform's curve is decoupling from the others, and whether a particular post broke through on one but not the others.

This view is one of the harder things to assemble manually, because it requires the same creator's data to be linked across platforms. The library does that as part of the grouping, so the rollup is automatic.

The Free Tier Mapping

The pricing is one-time payments with lifetime updates, not subscriptions. The analytics coverage by tier:

• Free (£0, no card needed). TikTok and Twitter/X analytics. Limited to 5 monitored feeds and 1 live monitor.
• Personal (£20 one-time). Adds Instagram and Telegram analytics. Same monitoring limits relaxed.
• Power (£40 one-time). Adds Reddit analytics. Plus the rest of the Power-tier stack: unlimited monitored feeds, AI semantic search across the library, Snapchat Spotlight archiving, XenForo forum scraping, web album archiving.

The free tier is a real free tier, not a trial. There is no clock running on it, no card required to sign up, no upgrade prompt that limits what you can see. If TikTok and X analytics are what the search query was actually about, the free tier ends the search. The platform-specific archiving guides for TikTok, Twitter/X, Instagram, Telegram, and Reddit have the per-platform setup details.

Honest Scope

One more set of caveats so the picture is accurate:

• Five of eight platforms. Not all eight. Snapchat, forums, and web albums sit out because their public interfaces don't surface per-item engagement.
• Rescan-driven, not real-time. Engagement counts update on every monitored rescan rather than streaming live. The "Check Now" button on each feed-detail page lets you force a rescan on demand if you need fresher numbers in the moment.
• Public counts only. Whatever the platform shows publicly is what the analytics use. No private API calls, no internal-account access, no creator-studio scraping.
• Self-hosted, Windows desktop. The app runs locally on your Windows machine. macOS, Linux, and Docker support are on the way, not shipped today.

The scope is small enough to describe precisely, which is itself a useful difference from the trial-then-pay tools that promise everything in the marketing copy and quietly cut features at the upgrade wall.

Why This Matters

The wider point: a tool that captures a creator's content as part of an archive workflow has the engagement counts already, as a side effect. Treating those counts as data and charting them is a small amount of extra work for the tool and a meaningful unlock for the user. Once the archive exists, the analytics page is essentially free to provide. That is why the free tier is real.

The same pattern shows up in the rest of the v1.7 feature set: storage management is free because the archive is on your disk anyway, deleted-on-source detection is free because the tool is checking the source on each poll regardless. None of this is the same offering as a SaaS analytics dashboard whose entire business is the data. It is a different product with different economics.

FAQ

What's the best free TikTok analytics tool in 2026?

Most named tools (Pentos, Tokboard, Iconosquare) gate the actual data behind paid trials. The honest free option is a self-hosted archiver that captures public engagement counts at download time and surfaces them in a dashboard. StreamStash covers TikTok analytics on its free tier alongside Twitter/X, with no card needed.

Do I need to upload my data to use it?

No. The analytics run entirely on the local machine. The dashboard is rendered in the desktop app, the data lives in a local SQLite library, and nothing is sent to a third-party service. There is no account to create.

Which platforms have engagement analytics in StreamStash?

Five platforms: TikTok, Instagram, Twitter/X, Telegram, and Reddit. Each surfaces enough public per-item engagement data (likes, comments, shares, views) to drive a useful analytics page. The remaining three platforms StreamStash supports (Snapchat Spotlight, XenForo forums, web album hosts) don't expose per-item engagement counts, so they sit out of analytics regardless of tier.

Is Snapchat Spotlight or forum analytics supported?

No. Snapchat Spotlight, XenForo forums, and web album hosts don't surface per-item engagement counts in their public interfaces, so there's nothing to chart. The platforms themselves don't expose the data, so no third-party tool can show analytics on them honestly.

Does this work for creators I don't own?

Yes. The analytics use public engagement counts captured at download time, so they work on any monitored creator (yours or someone else's), as long as the platform exposes those counts publicly. The same archiving workflow that keeps the library current also keeps the analytics current.

What about platforms like Pentos that say they're free?

Most named analytics tools in this space offer a free trial, not a free tier. The data is gated behind subscriptions starting around $30 per month per platform once the trial ends. The qualified search "free" filters out the trial-then-pay model. A self-hosted tool with a real free tier is a different shape of answer.