Jetpack Social Plugin Alternative Because Jetpack Is Garbage Now

So The Jetpack Social plugin has turned into a greedy money grab

I have been a die-hard Jetpack user for over a decade. I was first a user of the Askimet spam blocker they created way back in the day when blogging was really fun for the spammers to try and post their crappy spam links into your blog comments.

They’ve expanded to other popular plugin ideas like the related posts feature you see at the bottom of every post on this site, the social share icons at the bottom of every post on this site, SEO features (I don’t use this, I have a better one), and the ever-so-popular automatic social share that would share your post automatically to all of your connected social networks whenever you posted something new.

So why delete Jetpack?

So over the past few days, I noticed that the automatic social share feature says I have 0 shares remaining and that I should purchase more.

What the heck? I’ve been using this feature forever and never had a limit to how many times I could share my posts automatically to all my connected social networks. What is going on? Why are they doing this for a feature that is something you can actually do yourself manually? Why would anyone want to pay for this?

Yes, having it automatically post for me instead of me having to click on the share icons at the bottom of my post for all of my connected social media connections is a lot better, but not over $160 better!

Surely this is some kind of mistake, is it? Well, nope. And I’m not the only one pissed by this change in the plugin. The reviews on the WordPress plugin site over the past couple of months show that there are a lot of Jetpack users upset over this change and how they are deleting the plugin instead of falling for their ridiculous money grab.

Their description is a big lie also

So, first off they state that the plugin is free. Well yes, it is, but to a limit, which isn’t uncommon with most plugins. You sometime will need to pay a premium price for extra features.

So apparently, even though the plugin is free there is a limit to how many times a month you can use it. They claim that you can use it 30 times a month for free. Well, OK, that’s fine. I usually post once a day through the weekday and have the moderators take the weekend off. So we’ll probably not use the whole 30 uses a month anyway.

Well, on the date of this post, we’re currently on the 9th day of the month and we’ve only made less than 5 posts this month so far and they’re telling me that I have used all 30 tries and have to purchase their upgrade for more. Smells like a scam at this point and there’s no way that I’m going to pay their crazy price for their upgrade either!

$162 for a year of automatic sharing to the three social networks they offer to share for you, (Facebook doesn’t work) for something that can be done for free with other plugins. Yeah, no way Jetpack. You can go pound dirt!

While I was using it, it only automatically shared to my Twitter, Linkedin, and Tumblr social media connections. Facebook didn’t work at all because I use the Facebook business version on Facebook and the Jetpacks Social plugin wasn’t compatible. You’d think that if they wanted customers to give them money for something they’d have that one Social Media platform working. Especially when there are big businesses marketing their content on Facebook, and are most likely using the Facebook business platform.

And Tumblr is a dying platform that hardly anyone uses anymore, so not sure why you’d want to pay $162+tax on sharing to that platform. Twitter posting with Jetpack was always hit-and-miss for me. Some posts would post properly, and then most times wouldn’t and I would end up having to do it manually anyway. Not gonna spend $162 on that headache!

What’s a good Jetpack Social Alternative?

So after a quick search on google for top auto-share plugins for WordPress, Blog2Social came up a lot with great reviews. So I installed it and gave it a go. It’s still free and you can share to a lot of social platforms, some I didn’t even know existed. I ended up connecting to 9 out of the 12 or so they offer for free. There are a ton of extra features in their premium plans.

The caveat with this plugin is it doesn’t auto-post to your connected social networks when you publish a post with the free version. You can still mass share by going into the plugin dashboard and manually sharing to all your connected social media platforms all at once with a single click. Still much better than having to do it one network at a time as far as I’m concerned. And I can now share to more than three networks, including Facebook! Unlike the 3 that Jetpack offered.

Even the premium option is better than Jetpack. If you wanted the auto-post feature that will automatically share to all of your connected social network platforms when you published a post, then you could get the Premium SMART plan to start with at just $7/month which is just around $100 CAD yearly. Even that is better than Jetpacks 3 social network choices compared to Blog2Social’s 19 or so networks they automatically share to. If you’re a full-time blogger then you might want to consider their higher tiers like the PRO one for $11/month or if your running a business then the BUSINESS tier at $29/month would be more fitting for you. They have more options for more users also.

Conclusion…

So there you have a little rant followed by an Alternative to Jetpacks burning dumpster fire. If Jetpack decides to start charging for their Askimet feature, I’ll be deleting it for good and I’ll have to try and find another Spam blocking alternative. As far as the related posts feature, there are a dozen other WordPress plugins for that all over the web.

The Jetpack also features SEO tools that I don’t even use because I use something way better called RankMath. If you need a really good SEO plugin for WordPress I highly recommend it because as you’re writing your content it makes sure you’re getting all the checkmarks down the list of important SEO keywording and so on. I wrote a post on it here.

I’ll be sticking with Blog2Social from now on for all my social sharing and if things pick up here and it becomes feasible, I’ll upgrade to the SMART plan and go from there.

I hope it was worth a huge following of users Jetpack because we all think you are out of your mind for making this change. We had a good run, but it’s time for the pasture for you I think.