Choosing the Best WordPress Instagram Feed Plugin: Grace vs InstaShow vs SmashBalloon

Instagram is one of the most popular social networks of our time. The success of Instagram is based on the simplicity and convenience of using all the features of a social network within mobile devices. As the internet is spreading more and more precisely in the segment of mobile devices and applications for them, Instagram has become a leader among social networks of the new generation. In addition, multimedia content appears to have steadily greater popularity than any other.

WordPress platform never lags behind modern trends, so integration with Instagram is now perceived by plugin developers as one of the most promising areas of activity. The creation of social streams based on Instagram content formed the basis of an entire galaxy of WordPress plugins that provide comfortable work even for beginners in the area of WordPress administration without experience in web development and design.

Features of Instagram social streaming were often used as part of the functionality of more versatile plugins, such as Flow-Flow Social Streams and its analogs. These versatile plugins gave the ability to stream content from all sorts of social networks, integrating it into one social wall. However, universal tools always have one drawback — they can give due attention to each source of content, because they have to standardize the approach from different social networks. Therefore, the appearance of plugins that provide the ideal work of Instagram social stream alone is fully justified for WordPress administrators and users of their sites.

Now it’s time to compare the best WordPress Instagram feed plugins, so that each of you can make an informed choice in favor of this or that option. In our today’s comparison, there are 3 plugins with the most complete set of possibilities and features: Grace Instagram Feed Gallery, InstaShow WordPress Gallery and The Instagram Feed Pro by SmashBalloon. We will examine the capabilities of each of these tools and compare their basic parameters in a summary table for the convenience of your choice.

Instagram Feed Gallery — Grace for WordPress

Grace Instagram Feed Gallery is a new plugin, but its developers have huge experience in the field of social streaming plugins, as they are authors of one of the best versatile tool in this area — Flow-Flow. Grace inherits the best features from Flow-Flow and significantly expands the functionality of social streaming specifically for Instagram content. The improvement concerns both the possibilities of customizing the design, and the functional features of the plugin.

Grace Instagram Feed Gallery offers WordPress administrators 4 types of layouts, each of which can be an ideal solution for a certain style in the design of the site. These layouts are presented by classic masonry, justified galleries, fixed-height grid, and brand new image slider. We advise you to pay special attention to the last kind of layout, as it focuses its attention on Instagram images, giving the additional content a secondary role in the design.

Grace uses the 5 most popular types of content sources from Instagram: public account by name, hashtags and like feeds, location ID and geotags. Users of your site can easily sort content from Instagram social wall on any of the content sources used in the stream. It should also be noted that you will be able to stream any public content thanks to the support of Instagram API changes from June 2016. To access the public content, you just need to press one special button in the plugin authorization menu — truly seamless API connection has been granted!

Grace also offers a unique feature for streaming your personal Instagram account — custom profile headings. These headings can include your avatar and information about followers and following accounts. This feature is indispensable for quality branding of your Instagram social wall.

Manual and automatic pre-moderation are included in the features of the Grace Instagram Gallery plugin. Manual moderation allows you to get full control over the content of your social wall, and automatic filters with the ability of including and excluding certain content on various parameters will save time and effort for moderation.

Advanced lightbox galleries include the ability to view enlarged images, comments and other data from the social network for each post. The connection of social sharing buttons allows you to reduce the bounce rate of the site and increase the time users stay on its pages.

Instagram Feed — WordPress Gallery for Instagram

InstaShow WordPress Gallery is a plugin of earlier development, which is still supported by developers as a promising product. This plugin also supports the Instagram API changes from June 2016, which allows the WordPress administrator to use public content for streaming in his social wall.

InstaShow WordPress Gallery pays great attention to the design of Instagram social streams and customization options that are available to WordPress administrators for fine-tuning of the social wall under the design features of a particular site or blog. For example, InstaShow WordPress Gallery allows you to define any number of rows and columns for your social wall, depending on the height and width of the site. Also you can manually define responsive breakpoints and browsing direction for perfect displays of Instagram content.

InstaShow WordPress Gallery allows you to choose one of two types of content animation in the process of the user browsing. Another interesting feature is non-square images support, which allows you to optimize the display of thumbnalis in your social wall. In this case, the original images in the lightbox will be displayed unchanged.

InstaShow uses the three most popular sources of Instagram content — by username (any public account), hashtags and locations. You can also connect automatic filters for moderation of your Instagram social stream and content filtering on certain connected sources.

Interesting technical features of InstaShow WordPress Gallery are also the ability to limit the number of images in social stream and custom cache time for local storage. These features will help optimize the performance of your Instagram social wall for administrators and ordinary users of the site.

The Instagram Feed Pro by SmashBalloon

The Instagram Feed Pro by SmashBalloon focuses on the ease of customization and the variety of features for customization. SmashBalloon`s Instagram Feed prefers the most pure and responsive design for your social stream. The plugin also supports Instagram API changes from June 2016 for streaming any public accounts.

The Instagram Feed Pro by SmashBalloon allows you to stream content by public user ID, hashtags, location ID, geotags, liked posts. Also this plugin allows you to create your own unique feed from specially selected posts by the administrator of WordPress. The possibility of automatic filtering based on include and exclude filters is included in the plugin’s features. Manual post moderation in your Instagram social wall is also available.

SmashBalloon`s Instagram Feed has impressive technical capabilities that support HTML5 videos and Instagram slideshow and carousel type posts. Infinite load more feature allows you to create a social wall, which is as close to the functionality as possible to Instagram itself.

Lightboxes in SmashBalloon`s Instagram Feed contain not only images in full size, but also comments from the social network. The ability to share photos in other social networks is also available right in your social stream thanks to the easy connection of social share buttons to each post.

SmashBalloon`s Instagram Feed allows you to display image caption, number of likes and comments directly in your social stream. Detailed information about each post will keep users on the pages of your site — for any actions with Instagram posts interactive elements of the interface are provided so that visitors of your site do not have to go directly to Instagram.

Comparison Table