Top 10 Best Ad Spy Tools in 2027

An ad spy tool shows you the ads your competitors are running, how long they have been live, which page they send people to and what they put forward. Before you pay for anything, Meta's ad library (Meta Ad Library) already displays ads, and the EU Digital Services Act requires very large platforms, including Facebook and Instagram, to keep a public repository of their ads. Several tools in this ranking start from those libraries and add filters, automatic competitor tracking, archives and analysis. Below you will find ten ranked tools, a detailed review of each, a comparison table, other names worth knowing and the points to check before you pay.

The 10 best ad spy tools in 2027

1. Whoscale: course creators, coaches and info-product businesses who want to see the ads, content and funnels of the leaders in their niche.
2. Minea: dropshippers and online retailers looking for their next product in Meta ads, with a French-language site.
3. Foreplay: creative teams and agencies that save ads from the Meta, TikTok and LinkedIn libraries and turn them into briefs.
4. BigSpy: online sellers and game or app publishers who want to cover 11 ad channels.
5. Pipiads: TikTok and Facebook advertisers, including TikTok Shop sellers.
6. PowerAdSpy: agencies and marketers who track up to 11 networks and hand reports to their clients.
7. Dropispy: dropshippers who want to start on a free plan with prices in euros.
8. AdClarity: brands, agencies and website publishers comparing spend and share of voice, all the way to connected TV.
9. Adplexity: affiliates and media buyers in native, push, desktop or mobile advertising.
10. SocialPeta: mobile app and game publishers who connect creatives, downloads and revenue.

Why monitor your competitors' ads in 2027?

Social media accounts for a third of digital ad spending in France. According to the 36th Observatoire de l'e-pub from the SRI (the French trade body for online ad sales houses), social grew 16% in the first half of 2026 to 2.22 billion euros, driven by video. In a market this contested, look at the ads your competitors keep running before you fund your own tests.

These signals are also public by law. Article 39 of Regulation (EU) 2022/2065 on digital services requires very large online platforms to keep a repository of their ads, searchable with a multi-criteria search tool and through an API, for the whole time an ad runs and up to one year after it was last shown. The repository must state at least the content of the ad, the person on whose behalf it is shown, the person who paid for it, the period it ran, where applicable the main targeting parameters, and the total number of people reached. The list kept by the European Commission places Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn and Pinterest among these very large platforms.

For a buyer, the risk therefore lies in what the software adds to these repositories. A subscription that only copies a public library, with no sorting, no automatic tracking and no archive beyond one year, charges you for access you already have. Conversely, a tool picked for the wrong channels shows you TikTok ads while your competitors buy native advertising, or the other way around. The right question is about your networks, your search volume and what you will do with the ads you find.

How did we rank these tools?

For this ranking, we read what each ad intelligence vendor published on its own site in October 2026: homepage, features and pricing. No paid account was opened, no vendor paid to appear here, and the ad volumes vendors claim are quoted as their own statements, without comparing them with each other. Four criteria set the order.

1. Channels covered. Social networks only, or also display advertising (banners on websites), native, push notifications, YouTube video and connected TV. What counts first is whether a tool covers the ad networks where your competitors spend.

2. Tracking competitors over time. Alerts when a tracked advertiser launches a creative, stored archives, browsable history. This is what separates software from a one-off search in a public library.

3. Creative analysis. Breakdown of hooks, formats and call-to-action buttons, access to landing pages and linked stores, export to briefs or reports.

4. How readable the offer is for a French buyer. Published prices, understandable billing (credits, searches per day, tracked brands), a trial option, a French-language site.

The 10 best ad spy tools: the reviews

1. Whoscale

Whoscale is built for course creators, coaches and info-product businesses: it gathers the ads, organic content, funnels and offers of the creators who are growing in a market. Its ad library searches millions of winning Meta ads from top creators, filterable by niche, format or performance. According to the vendor, more than 50,000 course creators and coaches are tracked, the data is updated daily and the tool is used by more than 3,000 course creators and agencies.

Whoscale goes beyond ads. It analyzes the organic content of the creators who lead a niche (filters by views, engagement, format and date, scripts and captions) and keeps a funnel database, filterable by niche, tech stack (Skool, GHL, ClickFunnels) or ad volume, that shows every step from the first ad to the checkout. The vendor presents its spend figures as estimates, directional indicators rather than exact figures. The Pro and Business plans include access through the MCP protocol (which links a piece of software to an AI).

Best for: course creators, coaches and info-product businesses, and the agencies working for them, who want to see the ads, content and funnels that work in their niche.

Strengths: ads, organic content and funnels of the same creators in one tool; a free account to explore the core features before choosing a plan, with no credit card; a French-language site.

Limitations: the database focuses on course creators and coaches, so an online store, an app or a game publisher will find little there; for ads, the site only names Meta and does not mention TikTok, YouTube or Google; the Starter plan includes neither ads nor organic content, which start with the Pro plan.

Pricing: the pricing page shows Starter at $40, Pro at $68 and Business at $110 per month, with a "Save 30%" mention that matches the annual billing discount (quarterly billing: -15%); 1 user on Starter and Pro, 5 on Business. VAT treatment not stated, price checked on October 13, 2026.

2. Minea

Minea starts from ads to find products to sell online. The software filters ads by spend, activity and popularity, explores the ad's page and displays the key information about the store running it. A second module follows trending stores: their traffic, their revenue, their best ads and the apps they use.

The site describes itself as a product research tool built for and by dropshippers. Every plan on the pricing page includes the listing of Meta ads, products and stores, a "Brand tracker" to follow brands, notifications, daily niche lists, and quotas for AI ad analysis and AI transcription.

Best for: dropshippers and online retailers who want to find a product from ads that are already running, with a French-language site.

Strengths: store analysis (traffic, revenue, apps) comes on top of ad analysis; prices published in euros on the French pricing page; a free training course of more than 10 hours is offered on the homepage.

Limitations: the Starter plan caps AI analysis and AI transcription at 10 ads per month; on the pricing page, the plans list Meta ads, while another part of the same page presents Snapchat, Pinterest and TikTok ads as upcoming ("coming soon").

Pricing: the pricing page shows Starter at €49, Premium at €99 and Business at €199 per month, or €39, €79 and €158 per month with quarterly billing (VAT treatment not stated, price checked on October 10, 2026). The "winning product" page on the same site shows a different grid, where the Business plan costs €399: confirm with the vendor.

3. Foreplay

Foreplay covers the full life of an ad, from the idea to the performance report. Its free Chrome extension saves ads from the Meta, TikTok and LinkedIn ad libraries and files them in shareable boards. The Spyder module tracks competitors automatically by collecting their ads from those libraries around the clock, and spots their creative tests and their best hooks. Search runs on a database the vendor puts at more than 200 million ads, sortable by run time and by impressions.

Foreplay keeps working after the research phase. The Lens module analyzes your own ads once your Meta and TikTok accounts are connected, and the Briefs module turns a reference into a production brief, with a script and brand profiles. According to the pricing page, the Workflow plan connects to Claude and ChatGPT through the MCP protocol (which links a piece of software to an AI) or through an API.

Best for: teams that bring media buyers, creatives and agencies together around the same ads.

Strengths: saving, competitor research, analysis of your own ads and briefs in one tool; the price does not change with your ad spend; a mobile app to save ads from a phone.

Limitations: English-only site, with no French version; the Basic plan is for saving and organizing inspiration, while analysis of competitors' libraries sits in the Workflow plan; each additional user on the Basic plan is billed on top.

Pricing: prices published in US dollars on the site, 7-day free trial.

4. BigSpy

BigSpy gathers ad creatives from 11 channels, including Facebook, TikTok, Google, YouTube and AppLovin, across more than 80 countries and 26 languages. For a given competitor, the tool shows its creatives, their launch dates, user reactions and the audiences targeted, and lets you set up custom tracking of its best-performing ads. It also links ads to products sold on 40 marketplaces and store platforms, including Shopify, Etsy and Amazon.

The site targets marketers, ad creators and online sellers, with dedicated paths for mobile games (tracking campaigns of similar games, creatives by region) and for utility apps. The paid plans differ by the channels included and by daily caps on downloads and AI searches.

Best for: online sellers and game or app publishers who want to see many channels from a single tool.

Strengths: 11 channels announced, including AppLovin, in one library; a specific path for game and app advertisers; a free plan appears on the homepage.

Limitations: English-only site, with no French version; the Starter plan covers Facebook, Instagram and AppLovin, the last one with time-limited access, and caps downloads and AI searches per day; a subscription cannot be downgraded directly, you have to cancel it and then take another one once it expires.

Pricing: prices published in US dollars on the site, automatic renewal every month or every year.

5. Pipiads

Pipiads pairs a library of TikTok and Facebook ads with AI-assisted search. The filters also cover Instagram, Audience Network, Messenger and Threads. The AI analysis identifies the products, apps, landing pages, stores, developers, scripts and hooks of campaigns, then sorts creatives by category to bring trends to the surface.

The site breaks the tool down by trade: ecommerce, dropshipping, TikTok Shop (products, stores and influencer campaigns), apps, games, short drama series, AI and arbitrage. Real-time monitoring follows competitors' ads, with a number of tracked accounts that depends on the plan.

Best for: dropshippers, ecommerce brands and app or game publishers who buy advertising on TikTok and Facebook.

Strengths: a complete TikTok Shop section; a French-language site, pricing page included; free trial credits to try the app.

Limitations: billing runs on credits reset to zero each month and not carried over, with 1 credit per item in a list and 20 credits per detailed record viewed; an account can only log in on one device; moving to a lower plan is not refunded.

Pricing: prices shown in US dollars on the French pricing page at the time of the check: Basic at $49 per month (30,000 credits), Advanced at $99 (100,000 credits), Enterprise at $900 (1,000,000 credits) and Flexible from $180, presented as promotional prices next to struck-through prices ($69, $159 and $1,999); a 30% discount is announced for annual billing. VAT treatment not stated, price checked on October 10, 2026.

6. PowerAdSpy

An AI-assisted ad intelligence platform, PowerAdSpy decodes ads running on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and Google in more than 100 countries. Each ad is broken down automatically (hook, copy, visual style, call-to-action button) and classified by ad type, intent, hook, offer type and colors. More than 40 filters combine in a single query: location, placement, engagement, age of the ad and format.

Enter a competitor's website address and you see its ad library. Watchlists group the advertisers you follow and alert you when one of them launches a new creative. Reports show engagement curves, ad lifespan and comparisons between competitors, and export to PDF, CSV or through an API.

Best for: agencies, marketers and ecommerce teams who need to show a client what its competitors are doing.

Strengths: reports designed to be handed to clients; a comparison of up to 5 advertisers; search by ad type, intent or hook.

Limitations: English-only site, with no French version; the Basic plan covers Facebook and Instagram only, and LinkedIn, TikTok, Quora and Reddit only come with the Palladium plan, flagged as niche coverage; the number of tracked brands is capped (1, 5, 10 or 30 depending on the plan); the 3-day trial is paid and then switches to the monthly price unless canceled.

Pricing: prices published in US dollars on the site.

7. Dropispy

Built for dropshipping and ecommerce, Dropispy helps you spot the products selling well for your competitors, starting from their best social media ads. The user guide published on the site, dated January 2021, details the filters: ad creation date, call-to-action button, platform of the store the ad links to, media type, target country and ad language. Results can be sorted by number of likes, comments or shares.

A second tool, the Shop Spy, ranks dropshipping stores and shows the ads that work for each one. Ads you keep go into favorite folders, and a combination of filters can be saved to run again later.

Best for: dropshippers and online retailers who want to start without paying, on a French-language site.

Strengths: a free plan; a site and price grid in French, in euros; saved searches and favorites.

Limitations: the 2021 guide reserves the creation date and country filters for the Premium plan; the site's examples cover Facebook ads, and it does not detail the other networks tracked.

Pricing: the homepage grid (price checked on October 10, 2026) shows Free at €0, Premium at €29.90 per month on monthly billing or €14.90 per month on annual billing, and Business at €249.90 per month in both grids, even though the annual grid carries a "-50%" badge on that plan: confirm the annual Business amount with the vendor. The grid gives 150,000 credits per month on Premium and 1,800,000 on Business (VAT treatment not stated).

8. AdClarity

A BIScience platform according to its site's title, AdClarity measures competitors' advertising activity across several media: social networks, display, video, connected TV and linear TV. The tool reveals their ad spend, their creatives, their audiences and the sites that run their ads. It also calculates your share of voice against competitors, impressions and cost per thousand impressions.

According to the vendor, the data covers 52 markets, relies on a panel of more than 30 million people and is updated every day. Reports can be exported, API access connects AdClarity to other tools, and custom dashboards follow the metrics you choose.

Best for: brands, agencies and website publishers running a media plan across several channels.

Strengths: monitoring that extends to connected and linear TV; share of voice and cost per thousand compared with competitors; 7-day free trial.

Limitations: English-only site, with no French version; the Basic plan is limited to one market, one channel (display, social or video) and 3 months of history, while all 52 markets and data going back to 2018 belong to the Enterprise plan, on request; subscriptions are non-refundable.

Pricing: prices published in US dollars on the site; Enterprise plan on quote.

9. Adplexity

Adplexity shows competitors' ads in social, native, push notifications, desktop and mobile, with their landing pages, offers and tracking. Native advertising covers the Taboola, Outbrain and MGID networks and more than 30 others. Each traffic source is a separate platform (Social, Native, Push, Desktop, Mobile and Adult) with its own subscription, but a single interface and a single login.

Every feature is included in each platform: a full library with history, search by keyword, URL, placement or image, archiving of landing pages and redirect chains all the way to the offer, grouping of variants of the same creative, shared boards, analysis by domain and by offer, and daily reports exportable to CSV.

Best for: affiliates, media buyers and agencies buying native, push or display traffic.

Strengths: the full path from click to offer is archived; no feature is reserved for a higher plan; you only pay for the traffic sources you buy.

Limitations: English-only site, with no French version; no free trial, the vendor offers a demo instead; several traffic sources mean several subscriptions, and taxes may be added depending on the country.

Pricing: prices published in US dollars on the site, discount of up to 20% on annual billing.

10. SocialPeta

SocialPeta tracks ads for apps and websites. You search by advertiser, app, country, platform, format and duration; tracking shows what competitors launch, where they speed up and which creative angles stay active over time. Each creative is broken down into hook, visual, selling point, emotion, call-to-action button, duration, format and audience angle.

The strategy section matches ad spend against app downloads and revenue. An AI copilot summarizes competitors' strategies, turns a reference creative into a production brief and recovers the AI prompt that may have generated a creative.

Best for: user acquisition managers, creative teams, market research analysts and agencies.

Strengths: a library covering 20 ad platforms; the link between ads, downloads and revenue; dedicated paths for mobile games, apps, short drama series and ecommerce.

Limitations: English-only site, with no French version; the offer puts apps and mobile games first, and access goes through a demo or a sales contact.

Pricing: prices not published, the site offers to book a demo.

Ad spy tools comparison table

Information gathered on October 10 and 13, 2026 from the vendors' sites. Only Minea and Dropispy show a price in euros on their pages, so the table shows what drives the bill up, based on each pricing page.

Software	For whom	Channels highlighted	French-language site	What drives the bill up
Whoscale	Course creators, coaches, agencies	Meta ads, organic content, funnels	Yes	Plan level (ads and organic content from Pro), users and workspaces
Minea	Dropshippers, online retailers	Meta ads, stores	Yes	Monthly quotas for AI analysis, transcription and search; stores tracked through notifications
Foreplay	Creative teams, agencies	Meta, TikTok, LinkedIn libraries	No	Users and brands analyzed; Workflow plan for competitor research
BigSpy	Online sellers, games, apps	11 channels, including Facebook, TikTok, Google, YouTube	No	Channels included, downloads and AI searches per day, seats
Pipiads	Dropshippers, ecommerce, apps	TikTok, Facebook, TikTok Shop	Yes	Monthly credits used on every list and every record, users
PowerAdSpy	Agencies, marketers, ecommerce	Up to 11 networks depending on the plan	No	Number of networks and tracked brands
Dropispy	Dropshippers, online retailers	Social media ads, stores	Yes	Monthly credits depending on the plan (Premium or Business)
AdClarity	Brands, agencies, website publishers	Social, display, video, TV	No	Markets, channels, months of history, exports
Adplexity	Affiliates, media buyers	Social, native, push, desktop, mobile	No	One paid platform per traffic source
SocialPeta	Apps, games, agencies	20 ad platforms	No	Prices not published, on demo

Other tools worth knowing

These tools did not make the top ten, but they may suit you depending on your channels.

Software	What it does
Adligator	Search of Meta ads (Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, Threads, Audience Network) with automatic trackers and launch analytics.
AdSpy	Searchable database of Facebook and Instagram ads, with search inside ad comments and by affiliate network or offer ID.
Kalodata	TikTok Shop data analysis: trending products, creators, videos, live streams, ad optimization and competitors.
Adbeat	Monitoring of competitors' display advertising: creatives, landing pages, placements and the sites that run the ads.
Swipekit	Saves ads from Meta Ad Library, Instagram, TikTok and LinkedIn Ad Library, tracks competitors' ads and turns inspiration into concepts.
Anstrex	Monitoring of native advertising and push notification campaigns, with separate products by traffic type.
VidTao	YouTube ad monitoring, including unlisted videos, filterable by run time and estimated spend.
OpenAdLibrary	A single library for Meta, TikTok, Google and native ads, with native ads followed through to their landing pages.
Rival Ads	Tracking of competing ads on Meta, Google, TikTok and LinkedIn, with a creative archive, exact copy and AI strategic reading, without connecting an ad account.
Adheart	Analysis of competitors' ad creatives on Facebook and Instagram.

What should you check before choosing?

1. The ad networks where your competitors buy. Open Meta's ad library first and note which networks your competitors are on. A TikTok Shop seller, a native advertising affiliate and a brand buying connected TV do not need the same tool: compare the channel list of each plan, in addition to the one on the homepage.

2. The billing unit. Depending on the vendor, you pay for credits used on each search, a number of searches per day, tracked brands, users, markets or one platform per traffic source. Estimate your search volume over a typical month before comparing plans.

3. How far back the history goes. A very large platform's public repository stays searchable for up to one year after an ad last ran. If you want to review a seasonal campaign year over year, ask how many months of history the plan gives and whether saved ads stay in your account.

4. Where the spend figures come from. Several tools present their budgets as estimates, such as PowerAdSpy's "Estimated Ad Budget". Kalodata, mentioned above, warns for example that some amounts, such as ad spend, may differ from actual figures. Ask the vendor how it calculates these values before you base a budget on them.

5. Trial and cancellation terms. A 7-day free trial, a paid trial that switches to the monthly price on its own, a demo with no trial, a non-refundable subscription: read the pricing page down to the FAQ, and put the trial end date in your calendar.

Where does this ranking stop?

None of these tools was used on a real campaign for this ranking. So we do not know which database actually holds the most ads, or which one detects a new creative fastest: the volumes quoted are the ones vendors publish. For several of them, some pages (detailed features or pricing) could not be read automatically, and the reviews then stick to the pages read in October 2026.

Your market matters more than the rank. A French-speaking dropshipper and an agency tracking brands on four continents will read this table in opposite directions. Vendors in this category often change their billing model: Pipiads, for example, applies a credit system to subscribers who signed up after August 1, 2025. We will reread their pricing pages at each revision of this ranking, planned several times a year.

How do future customers find you when they do not see your ads?

An ad spy tool helps you prepare better ads: it shows what your competitors are testing, what lasts and which pages they send their traffic to. That leaves the buyer who clicks on no ad at all: the one who types a question into Google or asks an AI like ChatGPT for advice.

Sorank works on your presence with that buyer. The software generates optimized SEO articles and earns backlinks, the links that come from other sites, to rank your site on Google and in AI assistants, on autopilot. If competitor research also interests you on the content side, Sorank's SEO spy feature monitors up to five competitors and adds the keywords of their new pages to your editorial calendar every week. For the paid side, our ranking of Meta Ads agencies lists the providers who run those campaigns.

To see which of your buyers' questions your site could own on Google and in ChatGPT, alongside your campaigns, book a call with Sorank.

Conclusion

Pick an ad spy tool by channel first, and by rank second. The public repositories imposed on very large platforms already show Facebook, Instagram or TikTok ads; a subscription earns its price when it sorts those ads, tracks your competitors for you and keeps a record of their campaigns.

If you sell courses or coaching, start with Whoscale, which puts the ads, organic content and funnels of the leaders in your niche side by side. If you sell online and are hunting for your next product, look at Minea, with its French-language site and prices in euros. If you lead a creative team or an agency working on social media, Foreplay links research, analysis of your own ads and briefs. If you run a media plan across several channels, all the way to connected TV, AdClarity measures spend and share of voice against your competitors.