The best ad spy tools in 2026
Six tools for seeing what other brands run on Meta and beyond, what each one costs, and the job each one does best.
How we picked
An ad spy tool shows you the ads other brands are running. The good ones also tell you which of those ads are working, because a feed of ads with no signal shows you what brands try, not what pays.
The clearest signal is time. An advertiser only keeps paying for an ad that brings in more than it costs, so an ad that has run for years tells you more than any like count. These four brands have kept their best ad running for more than two years.
We measure every tool on the same five things: what it uses to show which ads work, how it helps you find ads worth studying, how deep it goes on a single brand, which networks it covers and what it costs to start. We make Reveal Metrics and put it first, because it shows everything about an ad, including what it brings in. If you want to search the most ads, that is AdSpy.
Reveal Metrics
The most detailed database of proven Meta ads
- Best for
- Founders and marketers who want the ads brands keep paying for
- Price
- $79 a month, or $55.30 billed yearly
Reveal Metrics keeps every image and video ad of thousands of brands that advertise on Facebook and Instagram, live or stopped, in one gallery. Each ad opens with its headline, copy and call to action, its dominant colours, how many days it has run, where it was shown and the reach Meta reports for it in Europe.
Filters cut the gallery down by format, by whether an ad is still running and by colour, so the ads you land on already match the brief. Open any brand and its Creatives tab shows its whole library: the ads it keeps paying for, what it launched in the last 30 days and its mix of video and image. Behind every ad sits the brand's report, with an estimate of what it makes from its ads.
Pro is $79 a month, or $55.30 billed yearly, with three seats and an MCP server for Claude and other AI tools. Max adds unlimited seats, a REST API and four times the credits.
AdSpy
The biggest searchable pile of Meta ads
- Best for
- Affiliate marketers hunting offers and angles
- Price
- $149 a month, one plan
AdSpy is the largest searchable archive of Facebook and Instagram ads we know of: more than 212 million ads from over 30 million advertisers, in 88 languages across 225 countries. Its ads come from a network of contributors rather than from the Ad Library alone, so it sees ads shown anywhere in the world, along with the comments people leave under them.
Search is where it pulls ahead. Beyond ad text, URL and page name, you can search inside comments, filter by affiliate network, affiliate ID, offer ID or the technology behind a landing page, and narrow by the age, gender and country of the people an ad reached. Results sort by likes, comments, shares, how recently an ad was seen or how long it has run, and AdSpy follows links past cloaking pages to show the real landing page.
There is one plan, at $149 a month, with close to unlimited searching. The catch is the signal: AdSpy ranks ads by engagement, and an ad with a lot of likes is not always an ad that sells. We compare the two tools in Reveal Metrics vs AdSpy.
Foreplay
Swipe files and creative briefs
- Best for
- Creative teams that brief new ads every week
- Price
- $49 a month, or $39 billed yearly
Foreplay is a workspace for creative teams, and it started as a swipe file. Its free Chrome extension saves ads from the Meta Ad Library, the TikTok and LinkedIn ad libraries, TikTok's Top Ads, Instagram and YouTube Shorts into boards your team can tag, comment on and share, with video ads transcribed for you.
Four more products sit around it. Discovery searches a community library of more than 200 million ads saved by Foreplay users, and can sort them by how long they have run. Spyder follows competitors' Meta ads around the clock and keeps up to three years of their history. Lens reports on your own ad accounts, and Briefs turns saved ads into scripts and storyboards with AI.
Basic is $49 a month for one user and covers saving, Discovery and Briefs. Spyder, Lens and the connection to AI tools start on Workflow, at $149 a month with five users. We compare the two tools in Reveal Metrics vs Foreplay.
BigSpy
Ads from the most networks at once
- Best for
- A wide first look, especially at app and game ads
- Price
- Free, paid from $69 a month
BigSpy casts the widest net on this list. It has catalogued more than a billion ads from close to 10 million advertisers across 11 networks: Facebook, Instagram, Google, YouTube, X, TikTok, Pinterest, Yahoo and the app networks Pangle, AppLovin and Unity. That makes it one of the few tools with real depth on mobile game and app ads, which it splits from e-commerce with its own filters.
Each ad shows its impressions, a popularity score, how many days it has run and when it was last seen. You can download creatives, turn an ad into an AI image prompt and, from the Growth plan up, follow pages and domains. Its product research pulls listings from around 40 marketplaces and store platforms, Shopify, Amazon and AliExpress among them.
The free plan covers Facebook only, with 10 searches a day. Starter at $69 a month adds Instagram, Growth at $159 adds Google, YouTube, X and TikTok, and only Ultimate, at $499, opens all 11 networks.
Minea
Winning products for online stores
- Best for
- Dropshippers looking for products to test
- Price
- $49 a month, or $39 paid quarterly
Minea is built for dropshippers and online stores looking for their next product. It indexes more than 80 million active ads, updates over 120,000 ads and shops a day, and publishes a daily list of ten products that are already selling through ads.
You can start from an ad, a product or a shop. Shop pages show a store's traffic, estimated revenue, best ads and the apps it runs on, and Brand tracker follows the stores you care about. Magic search finds every ad for a product from a single screenshot, and from a product you can look for a supplier or start a Shopify store.
Starter is $49 a month, or $39 paid quarterly, with ten AI ad analyses and ten transcripts a month. Premium, at $99, raises those limits and Business, at $199, removes them.
PowerAdSpy
Budget estimates across networks
- Best for
- Agencies that want many networks in one search
- Price
- $69 a month, or $27 billed yearly
PowerAdSpy indexes more than 500 million ads and labels each one with AI by ad type, intent, hook and offer, so you can search for a kind of ad, such as testimonials that lean on social proof, rather than a keyword. Filters cover country, placement, age, gender, call to action and where an ad sits in the funnel.
Its network list is long. The starting plan covers Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest and the Google Display Network, the next adds YouTube, Google Search and native ads, and the top plan adds LinkedIn, TikTok, Quora and Reddit, which it labels niche coverage. From the Platinum plan up it also estimates each advertiser's ad budget and adds affiliate and e-commerce filters.
Basic is $69 a month, or $27 billed yearly, paid upfront. The budget estimate starts on Platinum, at $279 a month.
Side by side
| Tool | Shows what works | Networks | Price |
|---|---|---|---|
| Reveal Metrics | Reach, run length and estimated revenue | Facebook, Instagram | $79 a month or $55.30 billed yearly |
| AdSpy | Likes, comments and run length | Facebook, Instagram | $149 a month one plan |
| Foreplay | Run length | Meta, TikTok, LinkedIn, YouTube, Google | $49 a month or $39 billed yearly |
| BigSpy | Impressions, popularity and run length | Up to 11 networks | Free paid from $69 a month |
| Minea | Ad spend filters and shop revenue | Meta | $49 a month or $39 paid quarterly |
| PowerAdSpy | Engagement, budget estimates from $279 | Up to 11 networks | $69 a month or $27 billed yearly |
Questions & Answers
Yes. They show ads that advertisers have already published, and Meta makes them public through its own Ad Library.
The Meta Ad Library itself. It is free and shows every active ad on Facebook and Instagram, with reach for ads shown in the EU. TikTok and Google run free libraries of their own.
None sees real spend, because Meta only publishes it for political ads. Reveal Metrics and PowerAdSpy estimate it, and Reveal Metrics goes on to estimate the revenue the ads bring in.
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