Top Instagram bots are very, very similar.
Top Instagram bots share features, so choosing the best for you is about time commitment. Some are easier to use than others, so they have a steeper learning curve. Is it worth putting your time into? Not really, you have better things to deal with I assume. Automation tools for Instagram all share a baseline list of features and are priced similarly. I don’t recommend everyone to use Instagram bots, since automated activity is monitored much more closely for different niches and different industries. The most popular affiliate niches are a great example of this – fitness, health, vapes and anything marijuana-related are risky to automate activity. It could bring your business to the next level or absolutely destroy everything you’ve worked for. Your call.
1. Ingramer ($34 / mo)
While it isn’t the cheapest Instagram bot for gaining new followers, it’s by far the most effective. You’ve got more important things to deal with, right? Once you’ve set up your account and a handful of hashtags to target, you can just stop thinking about it altogether. Ingramer’s default settings are impressive and will bring in results without fail. That said, it’s not to be written off by those who are more experienced with automation or growth hacking either. Ingramer has some very in-depth targeting options that will allow you to manually optimize over time. I just really love this analytics view too, never seen this before from an Instagram bot!
RIP Instagress 4/20/2017
For a long time, I considered Instagress the best Instagram bot / automation service on the market. The most reasonable price point, targeting options and amazing customer support. Unfortunately for Instagress, Instagram updated their ToS so that 3rd party services using their API weren’t allowed to use “Insta”, “Gram”, or “IG” in their product name. Before this, you were allowed to use at most 1 of them, so the name Instagress was fine. Many major publications are misreporting that Instagram is shutting down automation tools but this isn’t the case.
Ingramer is the best alternative to Instagress.
People are in a panic now looking for alternatives, so this article will give you a few options. I personally haven’t had enough time with these options so for the time being, you’ll have to make your own judgment. I’ll be periodically updating this article to reflect my experience and insight on Instagram automation. For now, let’s review services I’ve used and ones that others have recommended that I’ll try out later on.
The 6 basic features of any top Instagram bot are the following: liking, commenting, following and unfollowing, viewing Instagram Stories and sending DMs. Actually, when you think about it, these are the only 6 actions you can take when interacting with someone on Instagram. Period. Automating these activities comes down to a few settings, but the premise is this: You set hashtags you want to interact with and the bot does it for you. This goes back a couple decades, but I’ll say it: Computers aren’t smart. They think very literally. They’ll only ever do what you tell them to do. This means that researching which hashtags to focus on is crucial to success. One wrong step and your account will be suspended or banned.
Hashtag research is the single most important part of using top Instagram bots.
If you’re going after a hashtag that shitty marketers and spammers are using, you won’t get far. You need to go into a hashtag search and go through photos for hours on end before deciding to add it to your automation targeting. If 95% of the content matches the hashtag, you’re golden. I’ve ran into this problem myself going after regional hashtags like #Bangkok and #Shanghai. Marketers ruin everything and hashtags are no different. Tons of spam accounts and people are frankly are quite vain were using these hashtags to attract likes from people like me who use bots to automate activity. They’re useless to me. They aren’t in my target demographic, so my following became diluted by these people. That’s the result of poor hashtag research. You end up following and liking content that’s irrelevant to you and sooner than you think, your followers are irrelevant to you as well.
What Instagress did so well was that they were always developing new ways for marketers to target the audience they want. They added geotagging as a filter option, meaning you could go after users who have been to a specific location. They added advanced filters, so you can choose exactly who you’re going for. They added simultaneous follow and unfollow cycles, something no other Instagram automation service offered at the time.
Let me put things into perspective for you on just how targeted they allow you to go. In February, I was traveling the southern islands of Thailand. Using Instagress, I was able to automatically leave comments on photos people took within the last 2 weeks on a specific area of an island in Thailand, using hashtags that I specified (so that I was only going after backpackers) and within a certain follower range (500-2000 followers). What was I commenting? I was asking these people for restaurant and hostel recommendations. Boom. 80% reply rate. You can’t beat that level of targeting.
2. Instavast ($10 / mo)
Instavast is one of the cheapest Instagram bots on the market, but it’s incredibly powerful. It takes a likeness to Instazood or BigBangram with very similar features at a lower price point. I highly recommend it as an entry level Instagram bot. They’ve got great resources on learning how to use automation more effectively and its features are very intuitive.
3. BigBangram ($15 / mo)
Easily the best alternative to Instagress in 2018. I only hopped on board recently after reviewing a long list of automation services but I couldn’t be happier. The automation speed is great, they have solid proxy options and post scheduling is as advanced as it gets. You can even schedule the first comment on your posts to leave your list of hashtags. There’s not much I can criticize BigBangram for, honestly.
Give RoboLike a try for the same time period, I’d love to see the comparison in activity and follower growth.
Never heard of it actually. My main problem with alternative services is that they’re either not as targeted or not as fast as Instagress. What’s the hard limit on API requests per day with Robo Like?
Do you even try https://Instazood.com
Its more powerful than Archie and Socedo and cheaper.
Where did you get your information?
Haven’t tried it before, never heard of it actually. I got my information from trying out services myself?
If you work with Instazood, I’d be willing to do a review if you can set up a free trial 🙂
What is your suggestion to use the bot in a way that IG does not ban the account? For how long or how often should I run the bot? Thanks a lot, Chris.
Make sure the account is aged at least a couple weeks and already has an active following before automating anything. Automation is for scaling up manual efforts, it isn’t a shortcut by any means. Start off with slow automation and move it faster as your following grows.
I’ve run Instagress 24/7 for the past 4 months without issues for example.
Thanks, Chris. I started using Archie a week ago with nice results 🙂
Late reply, my bad. That’s great it’s working out for you!
i think instazood is better than this three bots
instazood.com
Why?
Used Instagress’s free trial. It was so slow that I eventually stopped it after 2 days. Switched to Instamacro. Much much better, though the targeted options are very limited as compared to Instagress. But >120 real followers added in a day (I check every follower) and high like rate on photos (by about 50%). Will be trying other automation tools over the course of the month. 🙂
If you don’t mind, could you send me over your thoughts on tools you use? I found Instagress to be very good for hyper targeting but you had to play around with multiple accounts linked to a single IG account to take full advantage of it. They gave so many targeting options that your speed ends up being too slow.
Email: [email protected]
Which one would you recommend now Instagress is gone?
I’m trying out a few services over the next month or so and I’ll rewrite this article to reflect that. First on my list is SocialGrow.io, seems very promising. Next is MassPlanner and then a MassPlanner-based product that uses machine learning.
I would really like to hear your results also! I’m so bummed that instagress is gone! I’m not sure what other people are using now but I know there has to be something!
The first one I’m trying out is SocialGrow.io. I’ve been on it just 24 hours now and it’s going well. It’s pretty low maintenance, but I’m not sure if it’s as powerful as other options out there. We’ll see with time though, too early to make a real judgment call.
What is your recommendation to use in the meantime? I’ve been researching Archie and Mass Planner but am seeing pros and cons with each!
That’s to be expected with automation services. I can’t really give a fair assessment of MassPlanner but I’ve had friends use it to get some real results. Archie I’ve actually used though and it was alright. Send me an email and I can update you with my current progress testing out these new bots as I go along: [email protected]
Hey Chris I emailed ya!! Just wanted to make sure it didn’t end up in the span folder! Thanks again for your help!
Hi guys, any luck with finding a good alternative? I tried socialgrow but its so basic and just a liking tool. I want to find one that has scheduling and the ability to really refine who I am targeting.
Hi Chris, I have emailed you too, and also hope it didn’t end up in your spam folder? thanks so much
I got it! 🙂
I heard RoboLike is good. My friend uses them and she said they’re safe because they only focus on auto liking or something like that.
I tried RoboLike for Twitter and the first things it liked was all porn, lots of porn.
All you have to do is delete whatever tag is liking porn. Or just block the person who’s posting the porn and it will stop liking it. Happened to my friend with Instagram but it stopped after she did just that. Im going to try RoboLike my self soon. Ill come back with my thoughts on it.
My favorite list of Instagress alternatives.
1. https://Instajool.com – $2.99 Monthly + 14 days Free trial
2. http://gramista.com – $39 .99 Monthly
3. http://instazood.com – $ 9.99 Monthly
4. http://instaeasy.com – $47 Monthly
5. http://instamacro.com – $59 99 Monthly
INSTAGRESS IS GONE!!! WHAT DO YOU RECOMMEND?!
I AM SO SAD!!! AND DESPERATE FOR SOMETHING LIKE INSTAGRESS!
socialgrow.io is too expensive…. 🙁
Try forestgram?
If you can’t afford $20 a month to grow your brand on Instagram, maybe you should reconsider your efforts of using it as a platform for your brand.
Just discovered this trend after a friend admitted using Instazood, looked it up and discovered just how rife it is.
You could just try growing your brand the normal way, with great well shot content and engaging captions. Build relationships with other page owners, collaborate, educate and inspire others. I have lots of paid work coming in these days and have never used any of these kinds of services. If your content is good then things will happen, if it’s not then they won’t. Problem with using these services is that when people get big and the potential for work comes knocking through the perception of success, will they be able to deliver in the real world?
If you are only after the bragging rights of having a large following then it’s a bit hollow but not too big a deal really.
Hi Chris, thanks for the article. My name is Jingcong and I am a Content Marketing Manager at Socedo. We do not make automation tools for Instagram. What we do is we help B2B marketers reach sales prospects by leveraging intent data from Twitter. We have not ever created automation features for Instagram. Could you please remove Socedo from the article please?
No prob man. I’m updating this article tomorrow (I’m based in Bangkok) to reflect the shutdown of Instagress so I’ll remove Socedo at the same time. Thanks for reaching out. I’d love to do a review of Socedo though if you’re up for that. My articles rank pretty well on marketing automation terms 😉
hey, chris, i wonder how your socialgrow is going?
My theory is that they’re getting hit with a lawsuit over their enterprise API license. MassPlanner allowed others to create their own IG bots using their framework, which is a massive violation of Instagram’s API.
I have tried gramista, it’s a rip-off. Don’t bother!
Got a msg in my Archie account today saying that they’ve been shut down as well. The Archie tool that worked best from my business was targeting ‘Super Users’… basically the bot goes out and likes posts by people who follow particular users (set by me as a super user). Anyone know any tools that also do this?
Yep they´re rip. I have been using it for 4 months. I have been trying to find something new but can´t really find anything as good. Do you know of any?
yeap, forestgram and constantengagement have similar features
I’m sad to report that Archie is officially dead.
Yea man! 🙁 I have been looking for other sites but cant really find anything as good as Archie. Do you know of any that you´re using right now?
RIP Archie too.
Hi There – great blog post – I’m struggling to replace my lovely Instagress, I started following you on Twitter (I’m @steveshawnyc_ ) but having trouble getting a PM to you to get your #1 from this list above as I’m not Twitter saavy. Can I reach out on fb or somewhere else? Cheers.
Thank you!
Also I use IG bots like bigbangram.com It save you a lot of time.