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Choosing a tool

How to choose a social media aggregator.

There are four ways to get a social feed onto a website and they are not competing on the same axis. Three of them are right for somebody. This page is about working out which one is right for you, including when that is not us.

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The short version

Use the network’s own embed for one post on one page. Use a plugin if you have one site and intend to keep it. Use a hosted aggregator for several networks, several sites, or any wall strangers can post to. Build it yourself only if you need the data rather than a display of it.

The four approaches

Named vendors appear below as examples of a category rather than as recommendations. Which category you belong in is a much better question than which product is best, and it is answerable.

The platform's own embed

Free, official, and shows one post or one profile in that platform's styling.

Every network publishes an embed of its own, a single post, a timeline, a channel. It costs nothing and it is guaranteed to keep working. What you give up is everything else: one network per embed, the platform's visual language rather than yours, an iframe that will not inherit your fonts or your width, and a third-party script from the network on every page that carries it. Stack four of them on a page and you have four different design systems and four sets of cookies.

Right when
One post quoted in an article, or a single channel on a single page.
Breaks down when
The moment you want two networks together, your own styling, or any control over what appears.

A plugin for your website builder

Deep integration with one CMS, and a dependency that lives inside your site.

Most website platforms have an ecosystem of feed plugins, Smash Balloon is the best known on WordPress, and Shopify, Wix and Squarespace all have app stores carrying equivalents. These integrate tightly with the host platform, which is genuinely the right answer if you have exactly one site on exactly that platform and intend to keep it. The costs are structural: another thing to update, another thing that can break on a core release, code running inside your site rather than beside it, and no path at all if you later add a second site on a different platform.

Right when
A single site, on a platform you are committed to, managed by whoever also manages the plugins.
Breaks down when
Across several sites, several platforms, or an agency's client list where every project would need a different one.

A hosted aggregator

A separate service that collects, curates and serves the feed; you paste a snippet.

This is the category Vitraz is in, alongside Juicer, Curator.io, Taggbox, Walls.io, EmbedSocial, Flockler and Tagembed among others. The shared shape is that collection, moderation and rendering happen outside your site and arrive as an embed, which means one approach works across every platform you build on and the vendor absorbs API changes. They differ from each other mainly in how much curation control they give you, whether the embed is an iframe or real page content, how fast feeds refresh, and how the meter is drawn, which is what the section below is for.

Right when
Several sites, several networks, or anyone who wants moderation to be a real workflow rather than an on-off switch.
Breaks down when
If you need the data itself rather than a display of it, or your requirement is genuinely one post on one page.

Building it against the platform APIs

Total control, and a permanent maintenance commitment nobody costs correctly.

For teams with engineers and an unusual requirement, going direct is legitimate. You get the data, not a rendering of it, and you can do anything with it. What is consistently underestimated is that this is not a project, it is a subscription paid in engineering time: OAuth flows and token refresh per network, an app review process per network before you see a single post, rate limits, and a platform API that will make a breaking change on a schedule you do not control and did not ask about.

Right when
Product features built on social data, or requirements no display tool covers.
Breaks down when
As a way to put photos on a marketing page. The ongoing cost dwarfs the licence it replaced.

Seven questions that actually decide it

Feature grids in this category are close to interchangeable, which is why comparing them rarely resolves anything. These are the questions where the answers genuinely differ, and what to check rather than take on trust.

01

Is the embed an iframe, or real content in your page?

This is the question with the most downstream consequences and the one least often asked. An iframe is a sealed box: search engines see an empty frame, the content inside is not part of your page, it will not inherit your width, and sizing it is a permanent argument. Content rendered into the page (Vitraz uses an open shadow root) is crawlable, flows with your layout, and keeps its styling separate from yours in both directions. Check by loading a demo and viewing source.

02

How much curation do you actually get?

"Moderation" covers everything from a global on-off switch to per-post approval with pinning, featuring and rules by hashtag or rating. If the wall will ever show anything a stranger can submit, per-post approval is not a nice-to-have. Ask specifically whether hiding a post is one click, and whether approval can be required before anything reaches a live site.

03

What is being metered, and what happens at the limit?

Views, feeds, sources, sites and API calls are all used as meters, and they are not interchangeable. Find out whether a view is a page load or a unique viewer (the difference is often four or five times on a multi-page site) and, more importantly, what happens when you exceed it. A feed that stops serving mid-month on a client's homepage is a different product from one that warns you.

04

How fast does the feed refresh, and does that match the job?

Refresh cadence is usually the variable that decides the plan tier, and it is usually oversold. Nothing in this category is instant, because everything polls a platform API. For a wall people glance at, hourly is invisible. For a screen at a live event, minutes matter. For a countdown or a reveal, none of these tools is the right answer and you should be told so.

05

Which networks work today, as opposed to appearing on the page?

Nearly every vendor lists more networks than are currently connectable, because Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn all require a reviewed app and reviews lapse. This is worth checking on a trial rather than on a feature grid, connect the network you actually need before you pay for anything, ours included.

06

Can you remove the vendor's branding, and at what tier?

Almost all free plans carry a badge, which is a fair trade. What varies is which paid tier removes it and whether white-label extends to serving the embed from your own subdomain. For agency work this is not cosmetic: a client's site carrying an unfamiliar company's name is a conversation you have to have.

07

What happens to the content if you leave?

Posts on a hosted service are a cached copy of content that still lives on the networks, so nothing is destroyed when you stop. But the curation (what you approved, pinned and hid) is the work, and it generally does not travel. Weigh that honestly rather than assuming portability.

Where Vitraz sits, and where it does not

A hosted aggregator, built around the assumption that somebody chose what is on the wall. The design decisions follow from that: per-post approval rather than a global switch, an embed that renders into your page rather than into an iframe, and network pages that say plainly what each platform will refuse to hand over.

  • Good fit: several networks in one curated feed, agencies running feeds for a client list, and any wall a stranger can submit to.
  • Good fit: teams who need the embed to be real content in the page rather than a sealed frame, for search or for layout reasons.
  • Not a fit:one post on one page. Use the network’s own embed and keep your money.
  • Not a fit: anything needing sub-second updates, or access to the underlying data rather than a display of it.
  • Not yet a fit:if Instagram, Facebook or LinkedIn is the network you need today. Those integrations are built and waiting on each platform’s app review, and every network page says so rather than implying otherwise.

Choosing a tool, answered

There is no single answer, and any page that gives you one is selling. The choice turns on how many sites you maintain, whether strangers can submit to the wall, how fast it needs to refresh and whether the embed has to be crawlable. Work through those four and the field narrows quickly.

Not if you want one post on one page, the platform's own embed is free and fine. You need an aggregator when you want more than one network in one place, control over which posts appear, or the same approach across several sites.

The free tiers in this category are usually real plans rather than trials, and for a single feed on a single site they are often sufficient. The trade is almost always a vendor badge on the widget and a slow refresh cadence. Ours is one feed, one site, two free sources, no card and no expiry.

Only if you value engineering time at zero. The build is the small part; the ongoing cost is OAuth and token refresh per network, an app review per network, rate limits, and breaking API changes you did not schedule. For a display on a marketing page it is very rarely the cheaper path.

It depends entirely on whether the embed is an iframe. Content in an iframe is not part of your page as far as a crawler is concerned. Content rendered into the page (as Vitraz does, into an open shadow root with the markup arriving pre-rendered) is real content in your document, and the script is deferred so it does not block your own.

Keep reading

Widgets by network

What each platform demands, and what it refuses

Widgets by network

Features

Collection, moderation, styling and embedding

Features

Pricing

How the meter is drawn, and what happens at the limit

Pricing

Try it before you compare it.

Connect RSS, YouTube or your Google Maps listing on the free plan in a couple of minutes and judge the thing rather than the feature grid.

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