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Black Magic alternative

Black Magic shut down on 1 July 2026, with prorated refunds to subscribers. It was a genuinely good product and the closest thing X had to a native analytics layer, so if you are reading this you probably lost a daily habit rather than just a subscription. Argus is the nearest structural successor: the same idea of numbers living inside the feed, plus the one thing Black Magic never did, which is telling you which reply to make next. See how it works or the comparison hub.

What Black Magic was, and why the gap hurts

Black Magic did two things at once. It put your X analytics where you were already looking, in the timeline itself, so you never had to open a separate dashboard. And it kept a lightweight CRM on the people you talked to: notes, reminders, pins on the accounts that mattered. That combination is why it sat in a category of one. Most tools are a composer or a scheduler bolted onto an API. Black Magic was an overlay on the product you actually use.

Argus is built on the same premise - read your real session, show the numbers where the work happens - and then takes it somewhere Black Magic did not go.

What you lose, what you gain

Black Magic details reflect the product as it stood before its shutdown on 1 July 2026.

Be clear about what does not carry over

Two things you had are simply gone if you move to Argus. The first is the CRM. Argus keeps no notes, no reminders, and no per-person pipeline, and there is no plan to bolt one on, because a half-built CRM is worse than none. The second is scheduling. Argus does not queue posts and does not touch your account's output.

If those were the parts you used every day, the honest answer is that Argus is not your replacement for them. Use a normal CRM or a notes file keyed to handles, and a dedicated scheduler like Typefully or Buffer - and see the Typefully comparison for how that pairing works in practice.

What Argus does better than the thing you lost

Black Magic answered "how did that go?". Argus answers "what should I do in the next ten minutes?". It reads your own analytics and your live timeline in your own authenticated session, then ranks the posts in front of you by reply opportunity: rising, relevant, and not yet crowded, so an early reply borrows real out-of-network reach instead of landing at comment number four hundred. Then it drafts the reply in your voice so making twenty-five of them a day is actually survivable.

The funnel view is the other upgrade. Instead of a wall of dashboards, Argus says which stage is leaking: not enough reach, or plenty of reach that never becomes a profile visit, or visits that never become follows. Different leaks need completely different work, and a dashboard will not tell you which one you have. More on that in the reply-first playbook.

Migrating from Black Magic

1. Check your refund. Black Magic said it would prorate refunds at shutdown. Confirm yours landed before you write the subscription off.
2. Export or screenshot anything you cared about. If you still have access to any historical view, save it. Argus reads your live X analytics going forward and cannot import someone else's historical database.
3. Rehome the CRM first. This is the part with no drop-in replacement, so decide where the notes go before you worry about analytics.
4. Install Argus and let it read a week. The funnel view needs a few days of your own data before the diagnosis means anything.
5. Replace the habit, not just the tool. Black Magic was a checking habit. Argus is a doing habit: open the feed, take the ranked list, make the replies. Same slot in the day, different verb.