Instagram vs Pinterest: 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.

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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.

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However, Instagram has become much more popular for creative pages in recent years, especially with the rise of influencers and social media making a massive dent in the economy. Some people and businesses are thriving solely based on social media, especially Instagram. People with niche interests have found a community there, and have started various pages dedicated to those interests. There are thousands of accounts dedicated to things like cooking and baking, writing, fashion, film and media — the list goes on forever.

In short, if you search for something on Instagram, you’re likely to find thousands of individual posts, Reels, influencers, and accounts dedicated to that particular subject. And, in turn, connect with other people who share that interest.

Pinterest is where your interests go to breathe

And where you go to spend time with them

Pinterest / Pocket-lint

Pinterest, on the other hand, isn’t all about you — sorry not sorry. It’s not somewhere you follow your friends (typically, unless you’re building a shared board together), which means it’s not a place you’re worried about curating the perfect profile or aesthetic.

That’s not to say Pinterest isn’t an aesthetic place. Quite the opposite, in fact — I’d argue that Pinterest is a far better place to find aesthetically pleasing and inspiring content, though with a catch.

Rather than getting on Pinterest to scroll through a linear feed, users most often head straight for the search bar at the top to head down a rabbit hole of their choice. Pinterest is known for spurring ideas or building upon the ones you already have.

Say you’re just getting into your cooking era, and you want to start with a hearty soup for dinner tonight. A few pins later, you decided that stew wasn’t the direction you wanted to go in but rather stroganoff, and a creamy mushroom stroganoff at that. Suddenly, you have a few dozen vegan, paleo, or even extra decadent versions of said stroganoff to choose from. You save them all to the board named “Stroganoffs to try.” That exact scenario may or may not have happened to me last weekend.

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More often than not, this is how Pinterest does its thing — users open the app for a specific purpose and find themselves a few dozen pages later on a somewhat related subject, just very far away from where they originally began. It’s very much like walking into Target with a vague plan to buy a new planner and walking out with not only that, but ten other things in the name of organization.

If you’re a Pinterest enthusiast like me, maybe you go to the feed after a while of use and let Pinterest’s algorithm do the inspiring. As a writer, I find that the best character inspirations spur from art that spontaneously pops up on my feed.

Which app is better to find ideas and inspiration?

To each their own, but use them both with this strategy in mind

Instagram / Pinterest / Pocket-lint

Both apps are fantastic inspiration hubs, serving as platforms for people to share and save information on an almost unlimited range of topics. However, they do guide users in a specific direction.

Instagram emphasizes the user and their identity, while Pinterest emphasizes the idea and the topic rather than the poster themselves. On Instagram, you’re likely to remember a specific account’s name and even return to it, while Pinterest relies more on visual memory. Take my Stroganoff example: I remember Pinning a few dozen Stroganoff recipes to my board but couldn’t name a single author from memory. However, I know that @elavegan on Instagram makes an incredible vegan mushroom Stroganoff because I remember watching her video and recognizing her distinct style.

Pinterest is a dragnet, scooping up anything that might catch your interest, while Instagram is more like a single fishing pole with bait designed for a particular fish. Each has its own time and place — if you’re unsure what you want for dinner, Pinterest will offer options you didn’t even know you were looking for. But if you’re after a specific vegan mushroom Stroganoff recipe from a British-German chef, you’re better off heading straight to her profile on the ‘gram.

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