Likely
Alternatives
MagicBrief alternatives
The site now serves only a closing notice, and every product page returns a 404. The team was acquired by Canva and is building Canva Grow. If you are here because your swipe file went dark, that is why.
MagicBrief was two products in one login: an inspiration library that needed no ad account, and an analytics dashboard that did. Which replacement you want depends entirely on which half you actually opened — and most teams only ever used one.
Work out which half of MagicBrief you actually used and the replacement is obvious. Seven options, routed by that one question rather than ranked by ours.
First: which half did you use?
MagicBrief's Inspire dashboard held publicly available ads you saved for reference. Its Insights dashboard read your connected ad accounts. They are different products with different replacements, and nothing on this list does both as cheaply as MagicBrief did.
| If you mostly used… | You want | Closest replacement |
|---|---|---|
| Inspire — saving competitor ads, boards, briefs | A swipe file with a browser extension | Foreplay or Swipekit |
| Insights — reporting on your own ads | Creative analytics on a connected account | Motion, or Atria if you want generation too |
| Both, lightly | One tool that does a bit of each | Atria, or Canva Grow if you are already in Canva |
| Storyboards and asset handoff | Creative ops and asset management | Focal |
1 · Canva Grow — the official path
The MagicBrief team now builds Canva Grow, and the shutdown notice points existing users there. Per MagicBrief's own FAQ it supports Meta and TikTok for both publishing and analytics.
If your design work already lives in Canva, this is the least disruptive move and the one with a migration story attached. We have not scored it on our card: it is a different shape of product — a design suite growing an ads capability, rather than an ad tool — and scoring it on eight dimensions built for creative intelligence would flatter or punish it for the wrong reasons.
2 · Foreplay — if you used the swipe file
The most complete swipe-and-brief workflow in the category, and the closest thing to a like-for-like replacement for MagicBrief's Inspire half.
Chrome extension for saving as you browse, a large searchable ad library, competitor monitoring, boards, and brief generation. Its analytics module, Lens, connects to Meta and TikTok if you want the other half back too — though Lens starts at the middle tier, not the entry one.
Their pricing is also the most legible in this market: flat, per seat and per brand, with an explicit refusal to charge on ad spend.
3 · Swipekit — the cheapest straight swap
If you want MagicBrief's Inspire half back for the least money, this is it. Entry is $26 a month, nothing connects to your ad account, and every tier gets the same features — the tiers differ only on capacity.
- 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.
One detail that matters more than it sounds: Swipekit stores the actual video and image files, so an ad stays in your library after the advertiser takes it down. If losing MagicBrief taught you anything, it is that the archive is the asset.
4 · Atria — if you used both halves
The broadest product on this list. Ad library and competitor monitoring on one side, connected-account grading and reporting on the other, plus generation and asset storage. If you want one login again, this is the closest.
It is also the one with the most gates: pricing is public and starts at $129 a month billed annually, but it is bounded simultaneously by seats, monthly ad spend, AI credits and storage. Model your actual spend before comparing headline prices.
5 · Motion — if you used Insights
The specialist for the analytics half. Creative-level reporting on connected accounts, with the creative shown next to the metric rather than a campaign name.
It is the most expensive option here at $750 a month, gated on ad spend, so it only makes sense above a certain volume. Their full profile is here, including the free benchmark report that is worth reading whether or not you buy.
6 · Focal — if you used storyboards
If the part of MagicBrief you miss is the handoff — briefs into production into approvals — Focal is the closest, because it describes itself as a digital asset manager rather than an analytics tool.
Creative boards from brief to delivery, in-app review and approval, colour and scene-level search across your own footage, Drive/Dropbox/Figma sync, and push straight back to Meta, TikTok and YouTube. Entry is €299 a month and every tier is demo-led — there is no self-serve trial we could verify.
7 · Likely — the job none of the above does
Likely is not a MagicBrief replacement and we are not going to pretend otherwise. It replaces neither half. It answers a third question none of the tools above answer: what is my category running that I have never tested?
The distinction is the denominator. A swipe file holds ads you noticed and saved, which means it can never tell you what you missed. Likely labels every live ad from the competitors you name on a published 39-label vocabulary, so the empty cells in the grid are real absences rather than gaps in your own attention.
If your MagicBrief boards had turned into a folder nobody opened, that is usually the symptom of this problem rather than the swipe file's fault.
You keep re-briefing the same three formats and want the category's whole coverage map before the next planning cycle.
You need the swipe file back this week. Likely has no extension, no boards and no asset storage — go to Swipekit or Foreplay.
One lesson worth taking from the shutdown
A swipe file you cannot export is a swipe file you are renting. When you pick the replacement, check the export before you check the features.
Ask three things of whichever tool you choose: does it store the actual media files or just links to them; can you get everything out in one action; and does the export include the metadata — run dates, brand, labels — or only the images. Two of the tools on this list store real media permanently. Not all of them do.
Rebuilding the stack anyway?
Worth twenty minutes while you are at it: name two competitors and see the coverage map a swipe file cannot give you. No ad account connection, no card.
Run my €0.99 audit