which is best for new ideas?

Social media — where comparison culture claws for approval and the reason screen time dominates so much of day-to-day life. However, it’s also where so much inspiration begins, especially with two particular apps.

Both Instagram and Pinterest are home to pages, communities, and posts that exist to teach and inspire, but which one should you choose to help develop that seed of an idea in your head? As a voracious user of both apps, I’ll break down the key difference between both and how I use them to my advantage.

What’s the difference between Instagram and Pinterest?

A whole world, but not if you look closer

Pinterest / Instagram / Pocket-lint

Both platforms were born in 2010, Pinterest coming into the world in January and Instagram in October of that year. Instagram and Pinterest are Irish twins in terms of age, but fraternal in their mannerisms and functions enough that they serve very different purposes. Besides a few different modern additions, they both retained their original purposes quite well.

Instagram is a feed-first, discover-second platform. Pinterest is discover-only. On Instagram, you can choose between browsing your homepage, the Reels page, or going to the ‘Discover’ page to either search for something specific or browse for random posts and Reels. This page is the most similar to Pinterest’s layout, where the moment you open the app, your options are either browsing the homepage of recommended Pins or the search tab that gives you topic recommendations. I think of Pinterest exclusively as a search engine and Instagram as a social media app with search engine capabilities.

If you like a post or pin enough to save it, you can save it to a “Board” on Pinterest, or a “Collection” on Instagram. There are a few more clicks to do this on Instagram, as well as to access them later. Pinterest is much speedier in this regard.

While one of them creates an environment ripe for an aimless doomscroll and the other a scenario not unlike chasing a white rabbit down a hole, it’s safe to say that if you have either of these apps, you’ll never face a lack of ideas in your online life. Instagram is a visual timeline of events, while Pinterest is a timeless bulletin board of visual ideas.

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Instagram is more personal

But it walks a slippery slope along comparison culture ridge

Instagram / Pocket-lint

Instagram has always been a social platform focused on up-to-date timelines of all your friends’ activity, plus any other kinds of celebrity, business, or creative accounts you follow. People are focused not just on other people’s profiles, but curating the look kof their own.

Instagram has more unwritten ‘rules’ than Pinterest. Because of societal expectations for Gen Z, Millennials, and even some Gen X to have an Instagram account as the bare minimum of their online presence, people typically spend a lot more time “keeping up.” That means the majority of posts you’ll see are life updates, general photo dumps, or perfectly lit selfies with a caption curated so hard that it’s been through the wringer in a few group chats. Instagram is about personal image and story-telling — your profile is about you unless you’re a business, meme, or other niche page.