Bonus Material: Free Editorial Calendar Template
Want to jump straight to the answer? The best editorial calendar tool for startups (1-20 person content teams) is StoryChief. For enterprises (20+ person content teams) it is HubSpot.
Overwhelmed with all the editorial content you need to create, publish, and promote?
I personally reviewed 30 free and paid editorial calendar tools you can use to run a simple, scalable content marketing operation.
Grab my editorial calendar template below (for free) to see how it works.
Or quickly filter the list to find “the one” that fits your business and budget by clicking the buttons below.
I want editorial calendar tools for my:
I want tools that are:
StoryChief — Best For Startups
Startup, WordPress Site
Free, Paid, New
The StoryChief content calendar gives you a birds eye view of all your content. You can track what content is planned, scheduled and live in one view, and sync it with your Google, Outlook or Apple calendar.
Cool feature: After a piece of content on your calendar goes live you can set up StoryChief to distribute it on your WordPress site, across email lists you own, social networks you’re on, referral lists you set up, and content hubs like Medium and Blogger.
Price: $120 - $750/month. (free 14-day trial)
Notable Customers: Thomas Cook, Besix, Versele-Laga
Official Website:
Google Calendar
Startup
Free
Google Calendar is a Google app that comes free with all Gmail accounts. It’s simple and easy to share with anyone else who uses Google Calendar. We use this on the Content Mavericks blog in combination with our editorial calendar (pictured below).
After filling our editorial calendar with content topics, I add the live dates to Content Mavericks Google Calendar for the whole team to see what’s coming up. Simple.
Price: Free
Notable Customers: Sumo, Content Mavericks
Official Website:
KanbanFlow
Startup
Free, Paid
Startup
Free, Paid
If you have an eye for simplicity and are a visual person, you’ll love using KanbanFlow as your editorial calendar. KanbanFlow is like Trello + Pomodoro + kanban + awesome UI in one simple tool. It will revolutionize your work habits.
Cool feature: Use KanbanFlow’s Pomodoro technique timer for every task you create. Work with full focus in 25 minute intervals, separated by short breaks, then look back at the end to see how much time you spent on every piece of content.
Price: Free - $5/user/month.
Notable Customers: UCLA, AgileThought, GleSYS.
Official Website:
Startup
Paid, New
ContentCal
Startup
Free, Paid
Startup
Free, Paid
ContentCal is a simple, visual calendar that’s like your spreadsheets and social media scheduler all rolled into one delicious tool. You can set up custom planning channels for your blog, YouTube, etc so you have everything on one calendar.
Cool feature: For an extra cost you can use ContentCal Autopilot to get ContentCal’s team of content creators to fill your social calendar for you every day. All you’ll need to do is tick the posts to be approved.
Price: Free - $59/month.
Notable Customers: Carterham Cars, Village Gym, Gravity Force.
Official Website:
Flow-e
Startup
Free, Paid
Startup
Free, Paid
Flow-e turns your Gmail and Outlook into Trello-like task lists, while letting you add notes, to-dos and due dates to emails. Perfect if you love working out of your email and want to eliminate the need for an external editorial calendar.
Cool feature: Use Flow-e’s timeline view to see your daily schedule visualized in a timeline so you can allocate focused time to writing, and set up meetings with your writing sources without leaving your mailbox.
Price: Free - $5/month.
Notable Customers: Risk Research, Bentley Systems, 18F.
Official Website:
GatherContent
Startup
Paid
GatherContent let’s you move content around on a calendar, set statuses (like draft, ready to publish, published), and assign content to your writers. They have one customer that manages an editorial calendar of 200 articles per month!
Cool feature: Update the status of an article in GatherContent with a link to the piece of content and it will email the writer. It’s great for notifying external contractors without playing email tag all the time.
Price: $15 - $25/seat/month.
Notable Customers: Ogilvy, University of Leicester, New Zealand Red Cross.
Official Website:
Trello
Startup
Free, Paid
Startup
Free, Paid
Trello is a versatile tool with a simple kanban layout where you use “cards” to track every piece of content. On the cards you can add due dates, assign writers, add checklist items, attach images, and leave comments for your content creators.
Cool feature: Use Trello’s Calendar Power-Up to visualize your cards with due dates on a calendar. At any time you can switch between Trello’s kanban view and a calendar view, so content deadlines are easy to visualize.
Price: Free - $20/user/month.
Notable Customers: Buffer, Zapier, Mashable.
Official Website:
Brightpod
Startup
Paid
Brightpod is a general project management software with a built-in drag-drop blog editorial calendar. It gives you an overview of all your tasks across all your projects (aka pods) and allows you to move and edit tasks right inside the calendar.
Cool feature: If you run an agency, you can use Brightpod’s Smart Filters to filter your calendar by client and task type (e.g. blog posts, videos, podcasts). This is a big time saver if you’re an agency managing multiple clients.
Price: $29/month - $199/month.
Notable Customers: Technicolor, The Marketing Technology Blog, FoxyMoron.
Official Website:
DivvyHQ
Startup
Paid
DivvyHQ is a content marketing platform used by content marketing teams of all sizes. It’s similar to Google Calendar, where you can see at a glance what’s due, what’s done and what your team is working on right now.
Cool feature: Use DivvyHQ’s multi-calendar architecture to share different content calendars (e.g. blog content, social media content, product content) with different team members in your company.
Price: $29 - $159/user/month.
Notable Customers: Virgin Mobile, WWE, National Geographic Channel.
Official Website:
Asana
Startup
Paid
Asana is a project management tool with a built-in editorial calendar. You can make a list project with sections to see your content by week or month, or you can use a board project to see your content by stage (i.e. ideas/drafting/editing/published).
Cool feature: Use Asana’s Workload feature to get an immediate snapshot of how much work your team members have. Then reassign or reschedule tasks to keep work balanced across your editorial team.
Price: $9.99 - $23.99/user/month.
Notable Customers: ConvertKit, G2 Crowd, Sony Music.
Official Website:
https://asana.com/templates/for/marketing/editorial-calendar
Airtable
Startup
Paid
Airtable is an all-in-one collaboration tool with powerful editorial workflows. On the editorial calendar you can easily switch between kanban, calendar, table, and gallery views. You can also add “blocks” to extend the functionality of your calendar.
Cool feature: Use Airtable’s Time Tracker Block to measure the minutes or hours in a day spent on a specific piece of content.
Price: Free - $24/user/month.
Notable Customers: BuzzFeed, Medium, Time.
Official Website:
Monday
Startup
Paid
Monday is a team management software that can be easily converted into a content calendar. The clean, tabular layout makes it easy to add each blog post on it’s own row. You can then add columns for writer, status, publish date, etc.
Cool feature: Use Monday’s Groups feature to group your blog posts into months so you have a clear, structured overview of all your content month-by-month (like pictured below).
Price: $25 - $72/month.
Notable Customers: Carlsberg, Wix, Discovery Channel.
Official Website:
Content DJ
Startup
Paid
Content DJ is a content curation tool with a built-in editorial calendar designed to manage multiple clients content across multiple channels. It integrates with Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and WordPress, and you can drag and drop to schedule posts.
Cool feature: Give Content DJ a hashtag and it will find you quality content you can add to your/your clients editorial calendar for posting on social media.
Price: $29 - $69/user/month.
Notable Customers: Uber, Grasshopper, Swarovski.
Official Website:
ClearVoice
Enterprise
Paid
ClearVoice’s editorial calendar lets you add individual pieces of content to marketing campaigns. At a glance you can see what content is planned, in progress, and approved with three different color codes that show where the status is at.
Cool feature: For an extra cost you can access ClearVoice’s talent network of freelance content creators and assign them content on your editorial calendar.Price: $500/month.
Notable Customers: Intuit, LifeLock, Cabela’s
Official Website:
Contently
Enterprise
Paid
Contently is a content marketing platform used by Fortune 500 companies. It helps with everything from coming up with a content strategy to finding global talent that can help publish original content on and off your site.
Cool feature: See metrics like average completion time for content you add to your calendar, so you can fix any bottlenecks in your content production.
Price: Contact Contently for pricing.
Notable Customers: Google, Microsoft, Walmart
Official Website:
NewsCred
Enterprise
Paid
NewsCred is a content marketing platform with a built-in editorial calendar. It lets you create workflows for blog posts and other content, plot them on a calendar, and manage all the writing, editing, publishing, and distribution in one place.
Cool feature: Use NewsCreds content recommendation algorithm to find the most buzzworthy content you can create for your brand.
Price: Contact NewsCred for pricing.
Notable Customers: Bank of America, Twitter, Panasonic
Official Website:
KaPost
Enterprise
Paid
Kapost is great for brands that create a large volume of content. Big brands use the built-in editorial calendar to launch one piece of pillar content at the start of the month, then plan all the micro-content to promote it during the rest of the month.
Cool feature: Centralize all your content (blog posts, social posts, sales presentations, data sheets, etc) inside Kapost. It will then tell you which content your sales reps recommend the most, and find hidden gaps in your content strategy so you have content for all stages of the customer journey.
Price: Contact Kapost for pricing.
Notable Customers: Content Marketing Institute, CBS, Cisco
Official Website:
HubSpot — Best For Enterprises
Enterprise
Free, Paid
HubSpot is a full stack of software for marketing, sales, and customer service. Inside HubSpot’s Marketing Hub there is an editorial calendar where you can add different types of content to your calendar and schedule them to publish.
Cool feature: Use HubSpot’s inbound marketing tools to add email collection forms to your blog content and send email drip campaigns to turn your blog readers into paying customers.
Price: Free - $3,200/month.
Notable Customers: Shopify, Trello, Subaru.
Official Website:
Percolate
Enterprise
Paid
Percolate’s editorial calendar will manage and visualize your entire content lifecycle. You can manage content at scale by dragging and dropping content through a Kanban board, assign content to creators and change deadlines.
Cool feature: Percolate’s Integrated Asset Management gives you centralized access to all marketing content, files, and assets. A must-have for large enterprises producing content at scale.
Price: Contact Percolate for pricing.
Notable Customers: McDonalds, MasterCard, Levi’s.
Official Website:
ScribbleLive
Enterprise
Paid
ScribbleLive is a content marketing platform that helps you plan, create, and distribute your content all in one place. Inside there is an editorial calendar where you can see all your content and it’s status.
Cool feature: Use ScribbleLive’s content creation network of 1,000+ vetted freelancers to create premium visual content like videos, ebooks, and micro sites at scale. It’s how brands like Red Bull create visual content that performs.
Price: Contact ScribbleLive for pricing.
Notable Customers: Marvel, UFC, Red Bull.
Official Website:
Skyword
Enterprise
Paid
Skyword is a content marketing platform that puts content at the core of your marketing activities. In the editorial calendar you can quickly see what’s In Progress, In Review, Approved, and Published across multiple sites (i.e. APAC, EMEA, US).
Cool feature: Use Skyword Video to scale video production. Push a creative brief live to video professionals in Skyword’s global network and get bids from a team of script writers, editors, set designers, actors, animators, and sound technicians.
Price: Contact Skyword for pricing.
Notable Customers: IBM, Iron Mountain, Colgate.
Official Website:
Sprinklr
Enterprise
Paid
Sprinklr is a content marketing platform that’s a great fit for large consumer brands. You can plan, publish, and distribute content across multiple marketing channels, markets and business units.
Cool feature: Use Sprinklr’s AI-powered Smart Alerts to monitor your content on social media and automatically alert a team when there are anomalies in a social conversation (i.e. viral content or overly negative comments).
Price: Contact Sprinklr for pricing.
Notable Customers: Alamo Drafthouse, Santander, Starwood.
Official Website:
Oracle Content Marketing
Enterprise
Paid
Oracle’s editorial calendar is built for global marketing teams that want to coordinate cross-channel content marketing activities across different departments. It lets you organize content by persona in every sales stage.
Cool feature: Once all your content is organized by persona and sales stage, give your sales team access so they can find and share your content with leads in your sales pipeline.
Price: Contact Oracle Content Marketing for pricing.
Notable Customers: LifeSize, MongoDB, Far East Hospitality.
Official Website:
https://www.oracle.com/marketingcloud/products/content-marketing/
Mintent
Enterprise
Paid
Mintent is a content marketing platform for B2B and B2C businesses focused on optimizing the entire content marketing process. It has a color-coded editorial calendar based on content type and lets you schedule content months in advance.
Cool feature: Use Mintent's proprietary tracked links technology to see your buyer’s entire digital journey both on and offline. Then use that data to find the best types of content that generate ROI, so you can double down on what works.
Price: Contact Mintent for pricing.
Notable Customers: YMCA, Chapman’s, Carnegie Corporation of New York.
Official Website:
Curata
Enterprise
Paid
Curata is a content curation and content marketing platform that helps you discover, curate, and share content from around the web. The built-in editorial calendar lets you plan content across contributors, channels, and timelines.
Cool feature: Use Curata’s Content Enrichment feature to enrich your content with rich metadata like pictures, quotes, and videos suggested by Curata’s self-learning content recommendation engine.
Price: Contact Curata for pricing.
Notable Customers: JP Morgan, Zendesk, Symantec.
Official Website:
Zenkit
Startup
Free, Paid
Startup
Free, Paid
Zenkit is a project management tool that can be used as an editorial calendar. With one-click you can switch between a kanban board with a visual representation of your content pipeline, to a calendar view where you can schedule posts in advance.
Cool feature: Use Zenkit’s import feature to import your Trello boards, Wunderlists or Asana projects into Zenkit so you don’t lose any downtime.
Price: Free - $9/month/user.
Notable Customers: Apple, Home Depot, Cirque Du Soleil.
Official Website:
Kordiam
Enterprise
Paid
Kordiam (formerly Desk-Net) is a purpose built editorial calendar tool for mid-large size editorial teams. It will automatically set up posts in WordPress based on story data you add to it. And any changes you make in your WordPress site will sync back to your calendar.
Cool feature: Use Kordiam’s Availability feature to see who’s available, who’s busy, and what each person on your team is working on.
Price: $525 - $1,100/month.
Notable Customers: Los Angeles Times, Allianz, Spiegel Online.
Official Website:
Nelio Content
WordPress Site
Free, Paid
WordPress Site
Free, Paid
Nelio Content is the best drag-and-drop editorial calendar for WordPress. You can drag-and-drop your posts on Nelio Content’s calendar, and the scheduled date on your WordPress posts will update automatically. Time saver!
Cool feature: With 1-click Nelio Content’s Social Automations feature will analyze which of your WordPress posts get the most social engagement, then fill your calendar automatically with social posts promoting your content.
Price: Free - $48/month.
Notable Customers: WP Mayor, Cloudways, Petful.
Official Website:
CoSchedule
WordPress Site
Paid
WordPress Site
Paid
CoSchedule wins the award for best-looking editorial calendar. Using the recurring checklist feature you can schedule an idea for a post then easily apply your blog post production checklist so everyone on the team can see their task from designer to editor to writer.
Cool feature: CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer will analyze your headlines word balance and give it a score out of 100. You can use that data to optimize your headline for more social shares, traffic, and search engine ranking.
Price: $80/month - $400/month.
Notable Customers: Campaign Monitor, Smart Passive Income, Convince & Convert.
Official Website:
WordPress Editorial Calendar
WordPress Site
Free
WordPress Site
Free
WordPress Editorial Calendar is a simple editorial calendar plugin for managing your WordPress posts. While not as powerful as other tools on this list, it’s a great way to get started and more familiar with using an editorial calendar.
Cool feature: In the WordPress Screen Options change the “Show on screen” setting to “8 weeks at a time” to get a 30,000 ft view of all the blog posts you’ve got planned over the next 8 weeks.
Price: Free.
Notable Customers: DemosWP, Chris Lahay, The Photographers Element.
Official Website:
What Editorial Calendar Tool Should You Use?
The tool you use will depend on your team size and how you like to work (i.e. out of Gmail, WordPress, web app, etc).
If you run a small 1-2 person content team I recommend starting off with a simple spreadsheet, like this one we use on the Content Mavericks blog:
With this template you can:
- Plan out all your content for the year.
- Assign writers to the topics you have planned.
- Set the status (Production, Editing, Scheduled, Promotion, Done).
- Set due dates for your first draft and publish date.
- Prioritize your topics by “traffic potential” (which I explain how to do here)
To get this template, click the button below to download it, then click File > Make a copy to get your own copy.
If you have more than one person on your content team and you want to scale your content, pick from one of these top-rated companies:
- StoryChief — Best for startups (1-20 person content teams)
- HubSpot — Best for enterprises (20+ person content teams)