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Type in the followers, the likes, the comments and the fee you were quoted for each creator and the tool works out the engagement rate, the cost per engagement and the cost per 1,000 for all of them on the same formula. It then orders the creators you entered against each other. It compares them against nothing else, because it holds no figures of its own.
| Line | How it is worked out | Amount |
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The reason a side by side is worth doing is that it removes the arguing. Each creator here goes through the same three divisions in the same order, so a difference in the output is a difference in the inputs and nothing else. If one creator looks cheaper per engagement it is because of the fee and the engagements you typed, not because the page treated them differently.
A creator can have the most engaged audience of your three and still be the most expensive way to buy an engagement, because the fee is set by the creator and the engagement rate is set by their audience. The table reports both and says plainly when the leader on one is not the leader on the other, which is the normal case rather than a surprise.
Leave a field blank and it counts as zero, and any line that needs it is skipped and labelled as skipped rather than quietly estimated. The tool never substitutes a figure for one you did not give it. If a cost line says it was not worked out, that is because the input it needed was missing.
Most creator shortlists get settled by whoever argues hardest. One person likes the content, another likes the follower count, somebody mentions a name they recognise and the decision gets made on the loudest preference in the room. The numbers were available the whole time. They just were not lined up.
Lining them up is arithmetic. For each creator you have an audience size, a typical amount of reaction to a post and a price you were quoted. Those three numbers answer two useful questions through nothing more than division. What share of this audience reacts, and what does one reaction cost from this creator. Once both are on the table for every candidate the argument tends to end quickly.
Keeping those separate matters more than it sounds. A creator can lead on the engagement rate and trail on the cost per engagement at the same time, and that is not a contradiction. The engagement rate is set by the audience. The fee is set by the creator or their agent. Nothing forces the two to move together, and in practice they often do not.
That is the single most useful thing a side by side produces. Not a winner, but the knowledge that the most engaged audience on your list and the cheapest engagement on your list are two different creators, so you have to decide which one your campaign is actually buying.
The form asks for five things per creator and three of them are optional. Here is what each one does to the output, so you can decide how much of it is worth filling in.
Required for any creator you want included. It is the denominator of the engagement rate and of the cost per 1,000 followers, so a creator with no follower count cannot be compared and is left out of the table entirely. Enter at least two creators with a follower count or the tool will tell you there is nothing to compare.
Use the same kind of number for every creator. If you take one creator's followers from a media kit and another's from the app on a different day, the comparison still runs but the gap you are reading may be partly a difference in when you looked.
These are added together to give engagements per post. Both are optional individually, though a creator with neither has an engagement rate of zero, which is correct arithmetic for the inputs but not very interesting. Use an average across several recent posts rather than one post, because a single post that travelled further than usual will pull the whole comparison with it.
Likes and comments are kept as separate fields for a reason. When you come back to a comparison a week later, the split tells you something the sum does not. Two creators can land on the same engagement total with very different amounts of actual conversation behind it.
Optional, and this is the field that turns an audience comparison into a buying decision. Enter the price you were actually given, for the deliverable you were actually quoted for. Do not enter a guess, because the whole point of this field is that it carries information the page does not have and cannot supply.
If the quotes you are holding cover different deliverables, the cost per engagement is not yet comparable and you should fix that before you read the number. A single post and a three post package will divide into very different figures, and the table has no way of knowing which is which.
Optional, and only used for the cost per 1,000 views line. It is worth filling in when you are comparing video creators, because views and followers can diverge sharply and a creator whose posts travel past their own following looks quite different on a view basis than a follower basis.
Leave it blank for creators where views are not published or not meaningful and the line is skipped for them and labelled as skipped. The rest of the comparison is unaffected.
The creators are ranked against each other. None of them is called good or bad, because that would need a figure this page does not have.
Each line names the multiplication or division behind it, so the whole table can be checked on paper.
Followers, likes, comments and views mean the same thing arithmetically wherever you collected them.
No creator name, handle or fee is sent anywhere. The maths runs in the browser.
When you want the numbers fetched rather than typed, the Instagram compare tool pulls them from handles instead.
The table gives you a block per creator and then a short set of rows that order the creators against each other. The ordering rows are the ones people misread, so it is worth being precise about what they claim.
When a row says a creator has the lowest cost per engagement, the full claim is this: of the creators you entered, using the fees you typed and the engagement figures you typed, this one divides to the smallest number. That is all. It is not a statement that the fee is fair, that the creator is a good partner or that the figure is low by any outside measure. This page has no outside measure.
Alongside the dollar gap between the cheapest and the dearest engagement, the table prints the same gap as a ratio. The ratio is usually the more useful of the two, because a gap of a few cents sounds small until you see that it is three times the price for the same thing.
It is also the figure that travels best to other people. A ratio does not need the reader to know your budget or your category to follow the point, which makes it easier to put in front of someone who has to approve the spend.
If the creator with the highest engagement rate is not the creator with the lowest cost per engagement, the table says so in as many words. That split is the most common outcome and it is genuinely informative, because it tells you the premium you are being asked to pay for the more engaged audience.
Work out what that premium buys before you dismiss it. A more engaged audience may be worth paying more per engagement for, if the engagements are better quality or the creator is a closer fit. The table cannot judge any of that. It can only tell you precisely how much more you are paying, which is the part people usually guess at.
Every figure in this example is invented to show the arithmetic. None of it is a rate, a quote or a reference for anything. These are also the grey hints in the form above, so you can run the example yourself and then type over it.
Three things fall out of that and all three are the kind of thing a side by side is for. Creator A leads on the engagement rate at 6.7% against 3.1% for Creator C, a spread of 3.6 points across the three. Creator A also has the lowest cost per engagement at $0.319, but only just, because Creator B comes in at $0.336 and the gap between them is under two cents.
The third thing is the one that changes a decision. On cost per 1,000 views the order reverses completely: Creator C is the cheapest at $9.23 and Creator A is the dearest at $16.36, which is 1.77 times Creator C. So the same three creators and the same three fees produce one ranking if you are buying engagements and the opposite ranking if you are buying views. Which number you should read depends entirely on what the campaign is for, and that is a decision the arithmetic cannot make for you.
Notice also that Creator C has the largest audience, the most engagements per post and the highest fee, yet finishes last on two of the three cost measures and first on the other. Size told you almost nothing on its own. The divisions told you everything.
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This is the error that spoils more comparisons than any other. If one quote is for a single post and another is for a post plus two stories plus usage rights, the cost per engagement is comparing two different purchases and the cheaper one may simply be the smaller one. Normalise the quotes to the same deliverable before you type them in, or accept that the cost rows are not yet meaningful.
One post is a sample of one. Creators have posts that travel much further than their usual and posts that fall flat, and either will distort a comparison badly. Take an average across several recent posts for every creator, and take it over the same number of posts for each of them so you are not averaging one creator harder than another.
Short video, static images and stories do not attract reaction at the same scale, so an average that blends formats produces a number that does not describe any of them. If you are buying one format, average that format. If you are buying a mix, compare the mix you are actually buying rather than whatever happened to be on the profile.
The ordering rows name whichever of your creators divides to the smallest or largest number. They say nothing about audience fit, whether the followers are real, whether the creator has posted anything you would want next to your brand or whether they will reply to an email. A comparison on three numbers settles three questions and leaves the rest open. Treating the top row as a decision rather than an input is how shortlists end up with the wrong name on them.
It is worth being explicit about the gaps, because a tool that looks like it is scoring creators invites people to read a score into it.
This page holds no rates. It does not know what a creator of any size usually charges, it will not tell you whether the fee you were quoted is high and it has nothing to measure your numbers against. Everything in the output is your own input or a division of your own inputs. If you want to know whether a quote is reasonable, that question needs data this page does not carry.
Those three are exactly where a side by side on typed numbers stops and creator vetting starts. The tool is deliberately narrow so that the part it does do is reliable. Use it to settle the arithmetic quickly, then spend your time on the questions arithmetic cannot answer.
"We tested three platforms before landing on Flinque. The creator data is more reliable. The filters actually work. Our team spends half the time finding the right influencers now."
"Flinque replaced two tools we were paying for separately. Creator discovery and performance tracking in one place. And the data is actually accurate."
"Our campaign turnaround time dropped significantly after switching to Flinque. What used to take a full day of research now takes under an hour."
There is a live version of this idea on the site already and it works differently. The Instagram compare tool takes a handle, looks the account up and fills the numbers in for you, which is faster when the creators are on Instagram and their profiles are public. This page asks you to type the numbers, which is slower but works for any platform, for private or unlisted accounts and for numbers that came out of a media kit or an email rather than a public profile.
It also takes a fee, which the live tool does not. That is the difference that matters most. A comparison on engagement alone tells you about audiences. A comparison that includes the price tells you about deals, and deals are what you are actually choosing between.
The tool is free and needs no signup. When the shortlist is longer than a handful and you want audience data and authenticity scoring behind every name, the full platform does the fetching for you.
Two or three. Creator A and Creator B both need a follower count above zero, and Creator C is optional, so leaving its row blank gives you a clean two way comparison. Three is the limit because the ordering rows stay readable at three and start to need a different layout beyond that. If your shortlist is longer, run it in pairs or threes against whichever candidate you are using as the reference, or use the full platform where the comparison is built for longer lists.
Yes, because the arithmetic does not know or care which platform the numbers came from. Followers, likes, comments and views divide the same way everywhere. The one thing to watch is that you collect the same kind of number for every creator in a run. Comparing a YouTube creator's views against an Instagram creator's followers is a real mistake, but it is a mistake in what you typed rather than in what the tool did with it.
Because an estimate would be a figure this page invented, and every number here is meant to be yours or a division of yours. The fee is also the input that carries the most information and the least guesswork: you were quoted a specific price for a specific deliverable, and that is a fact about your situation that no general figure could replace. If you have not been quoted yet, leave the fee blank and the tool compares the audiences on engagement alone.
This page cannot answer that and does not try. It holds no rates, no bands and nothing to measure your figures against, so it has no basis for calling any number good. What it can tell you is how your own candidates compare with each other: which of them divides to the smallest cost per engagement, by how much in cents and by how many times over. Whether that figure is acceptable is a judgement about your campaign, your margins and your alternatives.
Because the measures have different denominators. Cost per engagement divides the fee by reactions, cost per 1,000 views divides it by views and cost per 1,000 followers divides it by audience size. A creator whose posts travel well past their own following will look expensive per engagement and cheap per view, and a creator with a small devoted audience will look the other way round. A reversal is information rather than an error. It tells you the ranking depends on what you are buying, so the first question is which of those three things your campaign needs.
It is free with no signup and no card, and nothing you type leaves your browser. The arithmetic runs on your own device, so no creator name, handle, follower count or fee is sent to Flinque or anywhere else. Run as many comparisons as you like. When you want the numbers fetched rather than typed, with audience data and a fake-follower score behind every profile, the full platform has a free plan that needs no card.
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