Likely
Shortlists
Best competitor ad research tools
Every tool here reads the same public ad libraries, and they are still not substitutes. Three of them are built for creative teams at brands, three are built for dropshippers, and the difference is not obvious from their homepages.
Half of this category is built for dropshippers, and their homepages look identical to the rest. This splits the nine tools by the job you are actually doing.
The split nobody tells you about
Half of this category is built for people running someone else's offer — dropshippers and affiliates hunting a product to sell. The other half is built for creative teams at brands. Both search public ad libraries, so both look identical in a listicle.
The tell is what they let you filter on. AdSpy filters by affiliate network, affiliate ID and offer ID, and bypasses cloakers. PipiAds ships a dropshipping profit calculator and a Shopify theme detector, and lists "arbitrage" as one of its verticals. Those are not features a brand's creative strategist has any use for.
They are good tools. They are answering a different question, and buying one for creative strategy is how you end up with a subscription nobody opens.
If you want inspiration you can save and brief from
The job: Capturing competitor creative into a library your team works out of.
Ranked on coverage, evidence trail and workflow (dimensions 2, 6, 7). Not used: gap detection — a swipe file is not trying to do it.
- Swipekit — $26/mo, Chrome extension, permanent media archival, API and MCP on every tier.
- Foreplay — the deepest library and the best briefs, from $59/mo, explicitly never gated on ad spend.
- Atria — if you want the library plus analytics, generation and a DAM in one login.
- 1 · Access model Nothing to connect. It reads public ad libraries through a Chrome extension.
- 2 · Coverage A 1M+ ad library plus brand trackers that watch named brands continuously. Per-brand depth is uneven, so there is no reliable denominator.
- 3 · Structure User-defined tags only. There is no vendor vocabulary for hook, angle or format — hook analysis is a human reading an auto-generated transcript.
- 4 · Gap detection None. Brand Tracker shows what competitors are doing, never what you are not.
- 5 · Prioritisation Sorting by reach and running days. No ranked recommendations, no production-cost concept.
- 6 · Evidence trail Every object is an ad, with source links back to the original library entry. There is no aggregate layer to get lost in.
- 7 · Workflow Extension, boards, folders, permanent asset archival, AI scripts and storyboards, whitelabel share links, REST API and an MCP server — all on every tier.
- 8 · Commercials Public and flat: $26, $46 and $66 a month, gated on seats and brand trackers rather than ad spend. 14-day trial, no card. No permanent free tier.
If you want to know what your category is not doing
The job: Measuring a whole category so that an absence means something.
Ranked on coverage, structure and gap detection (dimensions 2, 3, 4). Not used: workflow and commercials — this is about what is knowable, not what is convenient.
This list has one entry, and we make it. That is a claim to check rather than accept: open any other tool on this page and look for a view showing a combination you have never made.
The reason it is a short list is structural rather than competitive. Every other tool here is selection-based — an ad is in the library because somebody saved it, or because a scraper happened to catch it. Without a complete set of a defined category there is no denominator, and without a denominator an empty cell is indistinguishable from a cell nobody looked in.
- Likely — every live ad from named brands, labelled on a published 39-label vocabulary, with a coverage grid marking the empty cells and openings ranked by what they cost to produce.
And the honest cost of that narrowness: Likely covers Meta only, has no swipe workflow, no asset storage, and no public pricing. On the two Operations dimensions it scores 1 and 0.
- 1 · Access model Nothing to connect. No OAuth, no Business Manager invite, no pixel. You type a brand name.
- 2 · Coverage Every live ad from the brands you name, which is what makes a share or a gap computable rather than estimated.
- 3 · Structure A closed 39-label vocabulary, published in full, frozen so this quarter compares with last.
- 4 · Gap detection An explicit hook × angle matrix with the empty cells marked against the category's real volume.
- 5 · Prioritisation Openings ranked on impact, confidence and production difficulty together. The difficulty scores are published.
- 6 · Evidence trail Every number opens the ads behind it.
- 7 · Workflow Briefs, shareable read-only reports and CSV export. No extension, no boards, no asset storage. You cannot run a creative team's day inside Likely.
- 8 · Commercials Public self-serve pricing: a €0.99 Starter Audit, then €9.99/month plus €0.25 per newly analyzed ad. Card payment is handled by Stripe.
If you are hunting products, not concepts
The job: Finding a product or offer that is already selling, to run yourself.
Ranked on access model, coverage and prioritisation (dimensions 1, 2, 5). Not used: structure and gap detection — neither is relevant to product discovery.
PipiAds is the strongest of the three and the cheapest at $49/mo. BigSpy has the broadest platform coverage and a real free tier. AdSpy is the narrowest and the most dated, but it is the one built specifically for affiliates.
- PipiAds — TikTok-first with daily, weekly and monthly ad and product rankings, top stores and top developers, plus a real API. Free tier of 500 credits.
- BigSpy — ten platforms including Google, YouTube, Unity and AdMob, a genuine free plan, and a Chrome extension.
- AdSpy — 208M+ ads, Facebook and Instagram only, filterable by affiliate network, affiliate ID and offer ID. One plan at $149/mo, no free tier.
- 1 · Access model Nothing to connect. A free account with trial credits is required to browse.
- 2 · Coverage A searchable library heavy on curation and rankings. Their own pages give 50M, 10M historical, 100K daily and 500K daily on the same page — treat the size as unverified.
- 3 · Structure Published filter groups covering platform, format, CTA, audience and engagement, plus claimed AI tagging of categories and hooks. The tag values themselves are never published.
- 4 · Gap detection None against your own output. Their market-gap language is about finding an unclaimed product, not an unclaimed creative territory.
- 5 · Prioritisation The most explicit ranking here — daily, weekly and monthly ad and product rankings, top stores, top developers — all on volume and engagement. No production cost.
- 6 · Evidence trail Ad cards carry impressions, duration and engagement per ad, and source posts are reachable. Whether ranking dashboards drill through is not verified.
- 7 · Workflow A real API and an agent integration, plus transcript, translation and text-removal tooling. The Chrome extension they ship is a Shopify inspector; ad-saving is a referral to another product.
- 8 · Commercials Public and cheapest here at $49/mo, gated on credits and seats rather than ad spend, with a free 500-credit tier.
- 1 · Access model Nothing to connect, and never offered. It is a scraped third-party database; an email registration unlocks the full feature set.
- 2 · Coverage A very large searchable library — they claim a billion creatives across ten platforms — but no denominator, so no share-of-category is obtainable.
- 3 · Structure Rich published filters, all of them platform metadata: impressions, popularity, duration, network, country, language, creative size. There is no creative taxonomy — no hook, angle or format vocabulary.
- 4 · Gap detection None, and structurally impossible: the tool has no knowledge of what you run.
- 5 · Prioritisation Top Charts and New Trending rank on engagement and recency, with a re-delivery flag as a crude longevity proxy. No production-cost concept.
- 6 · Evidence trail You can click a copy pattern or an advertiser through to the creatives behind it. Whether chart ranks drill through is not verified.
- 7 · Workflow Chrome extension with bookmarking, a favourites tracker and one-click creative download. No boards, briefs, DAM or API we could verify.
- 8 · Commercials A genuine free plan plus $149/mo Pro, gated on seats rather than spend. Their full pricing table is client-rendered and their FAQ names five plans where the page shows three.
- 1 · Access model Nothing to connect. There is also no free view — the only route in is a subscription.
- 2 · Coverage 208M+ ads across 225 countries, but Facebook and Instagram only, and no denominator.
- 3 · Structure The most explicit filter set here and entirely metadata plus affiliate plumbing: affiliate network, affiliate ID, offer ID, landing-page technologies, demographics. No creative taxonomy of any kind.
- 4 · Gap detection None. The nearest thing is geographic discovery of competitors.
- 5 · Prioritisation Sorting only — by likes, by reaction, by longest running, by last seen. No composite ranking, nothing on production cost.
- 6 · Evidence trail The public site shows no drillable aggregates and everything else sits behind a login.
- 7 · Workflow No Chrome extension, boards, briefs, DAM, API or integrations are mentioned anywhere on their site.
- 8 · Commercials One plan, one price: $149 per month, described as introductory. Seat-gated by their terms. No free tier and no trial we could verify.
Notice the shape across all three: strong on access and ranking, zero on gap detection, and little or no creative vocabulary. Their filters are platform metadata — impressions, likes, duration, country. That is the right toolkit for finding a product and the wrong one for planning a creative portfolio.
Treat every published ad count as marketing
Six of the tools here publish ad counts that contradict themselves on their own websites. We have reported the numbers as given and scored none of them on size.
| Tool | Counts published on their own site |
|---|---|
| Foreplay | 54.7M, 100M and 200M+ — three figures across three pages |
| Atria | 25M+ on the API page, 100M+ on a landing page |
| PipiAds | 50M, "over 10 million historical", 100K/day and 500K/day, all on one page |
| BigSpy | 1 billion on the homepage, 10 billion in the tutorial |
| AdSpy | 208,794,000+ — the most specific, and unverifiable |
| Swipekit | 1M+, with per-brand depth visibly uneven |
The number that would actually matter — what fraction of a named category a tool holds — is published by nobody, because for a selection-based library it is unknowable. That is why coverage on our card measures completeness of a defined set rather than raw size.
Coverage, not a bigger library.
Every live ad from the brands you actually lose to, labelled the same way, with the gaps marked. Twenty minutes, nothing to connect.
Run my €0.99 audit