Adbeat
Fifteen years of display ad surveillance, sold by the month
Adbeat is a competitive intelligence platform for display, native, programmatic, and video advertising that crawls more than 145 ad networks, exchanges, and demand-side platforms across 35-plus countries to show which ads a competitor is running, which publishers and networks they are buying, where their traffic is coming from, and what their landing pages look like, with estimated ad spend on the top tier; plans are published at $249 and $399 a month with a free Basic tier and a 30-day satisfaction guarantee.
Overview
Adbeat does one job in this category and does not pretend otherwise: competitive ad research. It touches nothing in your accounts, optimizes nothing, generates nothing, and reports on none of your own performance. What it provides is visibility into somebody else's media buying, assembled by continuously crawling the open web and recording what advertising appears where. That is an infrastructure problem before it is a software problem, and the company runs the crawl across what it describes as more than forty data centers and hundreds of servers.
The output is the useful part. For any advertiser you look up, Adbeat will show you the creatives they are running, which networks and exchanges those creatives came through, which publishers carried them, whether the placement was bought programmatically or as a direct buy, and what the landing page behind the ad was. Reverse the query and you can look up a publisher to see who is advertising there. That combination, ads plus placements plus buying route, is what distinguishes it from an ad library that only shows creative.
The scope is display, native, programmatic, and pre-roll video, and it is important to understand what that excludes. Adbeat is not where you research Google Search text ads, and it is not the tool for Meta and TikTok paid social creative, where the public ad libraries and the tools built on them do a better job. It covers the part of the internet that a Foreplay or an Atria cannot see: banner inventory, native widgets, programmatic exchanges, and the publishers that carry them.
Adbeat was founded in 2010 by Mike Colella, a display advertiser who built it because nothing on the market met his own requirements, and it is based in San Francisco and unfunded. Fifteen-plus years of operation without venture capital is a rare thing in adtech and it shows up in the pricing, which is straightforward: $249 a month for Standard, $399 for Advanced, Enterprise quoted, plus a permanently free Basic tier and a 30-day satisfaction guarantee instead of a trial. Spend estimates, the number most people assume they are buying, are an Enterprise feature.
Best for
Media buyers, affiliate and direct-response advertisers, and agencies working in display, native, and programmatic who need to know where competitors are actually buying inventory, and who can act on a publisher list rather than just admire a competitor's creative.
Not the right fit for
- Meta and TikTok paid social advertisers, who are better served by a creative-focused ad library; Adbeat's coverage is display, native, programmatic, and pre-roll video, not paid social feeds.
- Google Search advertisers looking for competitor keywords, bids, and text ads, which is a different discipline and a different set of tools entirely.
- Anyone expecting the software to act on their own accounts; Adbeat is pure research with no connection to your ad platforms and no optimization of any kind.
- Small advertisers under roughly $15,000 a month in media, for whom $249 a month is a large research line item against a budget too small to redeploy on the findings.
- Buyers who assume competitor spend figures come standard; estimated ad spend is an Enterprise feature, and the published $249 and $399 tiers do not include it.
How it works
- 1
Adbeat continuously crawls display and native inventory across 145-plus networks, exchanges, and DSPs in 35-plus countries, recording the creatives served, the publisher domain, the buying route, and the destination landing page. The scale of the crawl is the moat, and the vendor cites more than forty data centers behind it.
- 2
You search by advertiser to see what a competitor is running, or by publisher to see who is buying on a given site. Results can be filtered by device type, ad network, and date range, with country-level filtering available from the Advanced tier.
- 3
From a competitor's profile you work outward: the creatives themselves, the networks and exchanges those creatives arrived through, the publishers that carried them, whether inventory was bought programmatically or direct, and the landing pages behind the ads. This is where a media buyer builds a target publisher list from someone else's proven buying.
- 4
Findings leave the tool as exports in CSV, PDF, and PowerPoint, or arrive automatically as alerts when a tracked competitor launches new creative or appears on new placements. Advanced adds advertiser comparison views and unlimited search results, and Enterprise adds estimated ad spend, category-level top advertiser rankings, and three years of history.
Feature breakdown
23 features in 5 modulesCompetitive advertiser research
The core lookup, and the reason people buy.- Competitor ad archives
- See the creatives a given advertiser is running, across formats and devices, rather than only the handful you happen to encounter while browsing.
- Network and exchange attribution
- For each creative, which ad network, exchange, or DSP it arrived through, which is the piece a pure creative library cannot give you and the piece a media buyer acts on.
- Publisher placement lists
- Which sites carried a competitor's ads, effectively handing you a target list someone else already paid to validate.
- Direct versus programmatic visibility
- Advanced distinguishes inventory bought directly from publishers from inventory bought programmatically, which changes how you would replicate it.
- Landing page capture
- The destination behind each ad, so the creative can be read alongside the offer and funnel it was pointing at.
- Advertiser comparison
- Side-by-side views of multiple advertisers, available from Advanced, for benchmarking share of voice within a category.
Publisher and network research
The same dataset queried from the other direction.- Publisher lookup
- Search a site to see which advertisers are buying on it, which is how ad networks and publishers use the tool for prospecting.
- Network coverage
- More than 145 display networks, DSPs, and exchanges are tracked, which is the breadth claim the whole product rests on.
- Geographic coverage
- 35-plus countries, with country-level filtering unlocked on the Advanced tier rather than included in Standard.
- Device segmentation
- Desktop and mobile web split, with dedicated mobile-only views, since the same advertiser often runs entirely different creative by device.
Ad formats and inventory types
What the crawl actually sees, which defines the tool's edges.- Standard display banners
- The original coverage and still the deepest, across IAB standard sizes and placements.
- Native advertising
- Content recommendation and native widget placements, which is the same inventory a tool like Brax buys into.
- Video and pre-roll
- Video ad tracking, with pre-roll access specifically reserved for the Enterprise tier.
- Interstitials and page takeovers
- High-impact formats are captured alongside standard units rather than being invisible to the crawler.
Monitoring, reporting, and export
How research becomes a recurring process rather than a one-off search.- Competitor alerts
- Automated notifications when a tracked competitor launches new creative or appears on new placements, available from the Advanced tier.
- Smart alerts
- A more configurable alerting layer reserved for Enterprise, alongside advanced analytics.
- Multi-format export
- CSV, PDF, and PowerPoint export, which matters because agency deliverables in this category are still slide decks.
- Grouped campaign reporting
- Enterprise groups campaign performance for reporting rather than presenting flat result lists.
- Historical data windows
- 90 days on Standard, one year on Advanced, three years on Enterprise. The history window is the single biggest functional difference between tiers and the reason seasonal advertisers outgrow Standard.
Spend estimation and market view
The Enterprise-only layer, and the most misunderstood part of the pricing.- Estimated ad spend
- Modeled spend figures for tracked advertisers. This is an Enterprise feature, not something included at $249 or $399, and buyers routinely assume otherwise.
- Top advertisers by category
- Category-level rankings for understanding who dominates a vertical, also Enterprise only.
- Share of voice comparison
- Relative presence across networks and publishers, used for competitive benchmarking rather than for tactical buying.
- Trend analysis across networks
- Movement over time in where advertisers are concentrating their buying, which is only meaningful with the longer history windows.
Use cases
4 documentedDirect-response media buyer entering a new vertical
A new offer needs display and native distribution and there is no institutional knowledge about which publishers or exchanges convert in that category.
Looking up the three biggest advertisers in the vertical yields their publisher lists, their networks, and their landing page structures, turning a blind media test into a targeted one built on someone else's validated spend.
Agency preparing a competitive pitch
A prospect wants to know what their competitors are doing in paid media and the agency has nothing beyond guesswork and a few screenshots.
PowerPoint and PDF exports of competitor creative, networks, and publisher placements make the pitch deck concrete, and the Advanced tier's comparison view frames share of voice across the category.
Native advertising buyer on Taboola and Outbrain
Campaigns are running but there is no way to tell whether a competitor's superior results come from better creative, better publishers, or a different network entirely.
Adbeat separates the three: it shows the competitor's creative, the exact publishers carrying it, and the network route, so the buyer can copy the placement strategy rather than only the headline.
Publisher or ad network selling inventory
The sales team is cold-prospecting advertisers with no evidence about who is already spending on comparable sites.
Publisher lookup identifies which advertisers buy on competing properties, producing a prospect list with an implicit qualification already attached.
Pricing
from $249 per month (Standard)Flat monthly subscription by feature tier. The fee does not scale with your ad spend, because Adbeat never touches your accounts.
| Plan | Price | Includes |
|---|---|---|
| Basic | $0 free indefinitely |
|
| Standard | $249 per month |
No country-level filtering and no alerts, which is a real gap for anyone doing this weekly rather than occasionally. |
| Advanced | $399 per month |
For $150 more this is the tier most buyers actually want, mainly for alerts and the twelve-month history. |
| Enterprise | Custom quoted |
The tier that holds spend estimates, which is what most people assume they are buying at $249. |
Billing notes
- The fee is flat and independent of your media budget, because Adbeat has no connection to your ad accounts. At $5,000 of monthly ad spend, Standard is 5 percent of media, which is very hard to justify. At $25,000 it is 1 percent. At $100,000 it is 0.25 percent, which is where a competitive intelligence subscription starts looking like a rounding error against the value of one good publisher discovery.
- There is no free trial on the paid tiers. Instead there is a 30-day satisfaction guarantee with a refund option, which functions as a trial with your money temporarily at risk. The free Basic tier is the risk-free way to check whether the dataset covers your vertical before paying.
- Estimated ad spend, category-level top advertiser lists, and pre-roll video are Enterprise features. Buyers who purchase Standard expecting competitor spend numbers are the most common source of disappointment with this product.
- History window is the real tier ladder: 90 days, one year, three years. Anyone with seasonal competitors will find 90 days on Standard insufficient within a quarter.
- Standard caps search results at 1,000 per query; Advanced removes the cap. In a large vertical that cap silently truncates the answer.
- Cancellation is clean in a way it is not for tools that hold account access: Adbeat never connected to your ad platforms, so nothing breaks when you stop paying. What you lose is access to the dataset and any saved research, so export findings you intend to keep. No retention policy for saved reports is published.
Value assessment: Adbeat is expensive relative to consumer-facing research tools and cheap relative to what a single discovered publisher can be worth to a display buyer spending six figures a month. The value calculation is unusually binary: if you can act on a publisher list, one good find pays for a year; if you are only going to look at competitor creative, you are paying display-intelligence prices for something a paid social ad library does better for a fraction of the cost. Advanced at $399 is the sensible entry point, because alerts and a twelve-month history are what turn this from an occasional lookup into a standing process. The uncomfortable part of the pricing is that spend estimation, the headline capability most buyers imagine, sits behind an unpublished Enterprise quote.
Strengths & limitations
Strengths
- Genuine breadth on the part of the internet that paid social tools cannot see: 145-plus networks, exchanges, and DSPs across 35-plus countries.
- Attribution of creative to buying route, network, exchange, or direct, which is the actionable half of competitive intelligence and the half most tools omit.
- Publisher placement lists are directly usable as a target list, which makes the tool operational rather than merely informational.
- Fifteen years of continuous operation, founder-led and unfunded, which in adtech is a meaningful signal of stability and of a dataset with real historical depth.
- Pricing for the two main tiers is published plainly, and a free Basic tier lets you check vertical coverage before spending anything.
- Export in CSV, PDF, and PowerPoint, which matches how agencies actually deliver competitive research.
- No account connection at all, so there is no OAuth risk, no write access, and nothing that can break when you cancel.
Limitations
- No paid social coverage. Meta and TikTok creative research is better served by tools built on the public ad libraries, and Adbeat is not the answer there.
- No Google Search coverage; competitor keyword and text ad research is a separate discipline this product does not address.
- Estimated ad spend, the feature most buyers assume is included, is Enterprise only and Enterprise is unpublished.
- Standard's 90-day history and 1,000-result cap are tight enough that many buyers effectively have to start at $399.
- No free trial on paid tiers, only a 30-day refund guarantee, which is a weaker evaluation path than a real trial.
- Spend estimates in this category are models, not measurements, from any vendor; they are useful for relative comparison and should not be quoted as fact.
- Nothing in the product touches your own performance, so it must always be paired with an analytics or management tool, and it never tells you whether your response to a competitor worked.
Head-to-head comparisons
4 alternativesAdbeat vs Foreplay
from $59 per month (Basic, monthly billing) or $49 per month billed annuallyDifferent halves of the advertising internet. Foreplay is a paid social ad library built for creative research, swipe files, and briefing, and it is far cheaper. Adbeat covers display, native, programmatic, and video, and adds the networks and publishers behind each ad. If your media is Meta and TikTok, Foreplay; if your media is display and native, Adbeat. Buying the wrong one is the most common mistake in this comparison.
Full Adbeat vs Foreplay comparisonAdbeat vs Motion
from $250 per month (Starter, up to $50,000 monthly ad spend)Motion's Inspo module is competitive research on paid social bundled inside a creative analytics product, and Motion also reports on your own performance across four networks. Adbeat does neither: it never sees your accounts and never touches social feeds. They are not substitutes. A brand running both display and paid social might legitimately own one of each.
Full Adbeat vs Motion comparisonAdbeat vs Atria
from $129 per month billed annually (Core), $159 billed monthlyAtria researches Meta and TikTok creative and connects it to your own account performance, then generates and uploads new creative. Adbeat researches display and native placements and stops there. Atria answers what should we say; Adbeat answers where should we buy. At $129 versus $249 the price gap also reflects the difference between a paid social dataset built on public libraries and a proprietary crawl of 145-plus networks.
Full Adbeat vs Atria comparisonAdbeat vs AdRoll
from $0 platform fee on the self-service Ads package, with cost incurred as dynamic CPM on mediaAdRoll buys display and retargeting inventory on your behalf; Adbeat tells you where your competitors bought theirs. They pair naturally, and Adbeat's publisher lists are directly usable as targeting input for a display campaign run through AdRoll or any DSP. Neither replaces the other, and only one of them touches your money.
Full Adbeat vs AdRoll comparisonImplementation & onboarding
- Setup time
- Immediate. There is no account connection, no OAuth, and no data ingestion; you sign in and search. Getting useful answers depends on knowing which competitors to look up, not on configuration.
- Learning curve
- Low for creative browsing, moderate for the part that matters. Reading network attribution and distinguishing programmatic from direct buys requires media buying knowledge, and a marketer without display experience will get less out of the tool than the price implies.
- Onboarding
- Self-serve signup on Standard and Advanced. Enterprise requires a sales conversation for a quote.
- Migration notes
- Nothing to migrate in or out in the usual sense, since the tool holds no account data of yours. Research you want to keep should be exported to CSV, PDF, or PowerPoint before cancelling; no retention policy for saved reports is published.
Platform, API & security
- Platforms
- Web application
- API
- An API is referenced for developers, with details not published on the public pricing tiers; most access is through the web interface and exports.
- Compliance
- Operates on publicly observable advertising data rather than customer personal data
- Data residency
- Not published.
- SSO
- Not published on the self-serve tiers.
- Security notes
- Adbeat requires no connection to your ad accounts at all, which removes an entire class of risk present in every other tool in this category. The infrastructure is described as more than forty data centers running the crawl.
Support & resources
- Channels
- Email supportSales-assisted onboarding on Enterprise
- Documentation
- Product documentation and educational material on competitive display research on the vendor site.
- Community
- No formal user community; the company's audience is concentrated in affiliate, direct-response, and media buying circles where it has long-standing recognition.
Company
- Founded
- 2010
- Headquarters
- San Francisco, California, United States
- Ownership
- Founder-owned, unfunded
- Founders
- Mike Colella
- Employees
- Not disclosed
- Funding
- No external funding on record; the company has operated independently since 2010.
Timeline
- 2010Founded by Mike Colella, a display advertiser who built the crawler because no existing competitive intelligence tool met his own requirements.
- 2011Early team including data scientists builds the infrastructure to collect and process display advertising data at scale.
- 2015Coverage expands past standard display banners into native advertising as content recommendation networks become a major channel.
- 2020Mobile-specific views and dedicated mobile web coverage reflect the shift of display inventory to mobile.
- 2026Operating independently and unfunded after more than fifteen years, tracking 145-plus networks and exchanges across 35-plus countries with three years of history on the top tier.
Integrations
- CSV export
- PDF export
- PowerPoint export
- Email alerts for competitor activity
- API access referenced for developers
Frequently asked questions
10 questionsWhat is Adbeat?
Adbeat is a competitive intelligence platform for display, native, programmatic, and video advertising. It crawls more than 145 ad networks, exchanges, and DSPs across 35-plus countries and shows which ads a competitor is running, which networks and publishers they are buying through, and what their landing pages look like. It does not connect to your own ad accounts.
How much does Adbeat cost?
Standard is $249 a month with 90 days of history and 1,000 results per search. Advanced is $399 a month and adds country filtering, competitor alerts, advertiser comparison, unlimited results, and one year of history. Enterprise is quoted and adds estimated ad spend, category rankings, pre-roll video, and three years of history. A free Basic tier exists indefinitely.
Does Adbeat show competitor ad spend?
Only on the Enterprise tier, which is unpublished. This is the single most common misunderstanding about the product: the $249 and $399 plans show creative, networks, publishers, and landing pages, but not estimated spend. It is also worth remembering that spend figures from any competitive intelligence vendor are models rather than measurements, useful for relative comparison and not quotable as fact.
Does Adbeat cover Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok ads?
No, and this is the boundary that matters most when choosing a tool. Adbeat covers display banners, native placements, programmatic inventory, interstitials, page takeovers, and pre-roll video across the open web. Paid social creative research is a different dataset and is better served by tools built on the platforms' own public ad libraries.
Does Adbeat cover Google Search ads?
No. Competitor keyword, bid, and text ad research on search is a separate discipline with its own tools. Adbeat's crawl looks at display and native inventory across publisher sites, not at search results pages.
Does the price change as my ad spend grows?
No. The subscription is flat because Adbeat never connects to your accounts and has no visibility into what you spend. At $5,000 of monthly media the $249 plan is 5 percent of spend and hard to justify; at $25,000 it is 1 percent; at $100,000 it is 0.25 percent. Unlike a percentage-of-spend platform, it gets proportionally cheaper as you scale.
Is there a free trial?
Not on the paid plans. There is a permanently free Basic tier that lets you check whether the dataset covers your vertical, and a 30-day satisfaction guarantee with a refund option on paid plans. That is a weaker evaluation path than a proper trial, so use Basic first to confirm your competitors are actually tracked.
Which tier should I actually buy?
Advanced at $399, for most buyers. Standard's 90-day history and 1,000-result cap are tight, and it lacks both country-level filtering and competitor alerts. Alerts are what turn competitive research from an occasional lookup into a standing process, and a twelve-month window is the minimum for spotting seasonal patterns.
Does Adbeat optimize or manage my campaigns?
Not in any way. It has no connection to your ad accounts, cannot change a bid or a budget, and does not report on your own performance. It is purely competitive research, which means it always sits alongside whatever platform you use to manage and measure your own media.
Who owns Adbeat and how stable is it?
Adbeat was founded in 2010 by Mike Colella and is based in San Francisco. It has taken no external funding and has operated independently for more than fifteen years, which is unusual longevity in adtech and means the underlying historical dataset has real depth. It is a founder-owned business rather than a venture-backed one, so it is not chasing an exit-driven roadmap.
Editorial verdict
Adbeat is the tool you buy when you need to know where competitors are buying, not just what their ads say. Fifteen years of continuous crawling across 145-plus networks produces something a newer, cheaper ad library cannot fake: creative attributed to the network, exchange, or direct deal it came through, and the publisher list that carried it. For a display or native buyer at real scale, one validated publisher discovery pays for the year. Start on the free Basic tier to confirm your vertical is covered, then buy Advanced at $399 rather than Standard, because alerts and twelve months of history are what make it a process rather than a curiosity. Do not buy it for Meta or Google research, and do not buy Standard expecting competitor spend numbers, because those live behind an Enterprise quote.
Written by the SaaSTracker editorial team. Awards, when shown, are judged against the published criteria in our methodology.