Foreplay alternatives: 6 other ad workflow tools that satisfy

Let’s be honest: You’re here because you’ve been looking at Foreplay but you’re not completely sold.

Picking the wrong tool to help you run your creative and media buying process comes with hidden costs and knock-on effects that’ll be tougher to clean up later.

So here’s the rundown:

• Foreplay was here before Atria. But because we’re newer, we’re hungrier and more driven to go deep with features and offer more value.

  
  

• Even happy customers of Foreplay find features and issues that detract from the experience, ranging from price to user experience to intuitiveness (more on that below).

  
  

• Whether you’re weighing up a replacement for Foreplay or need a fallback option for your shortlist, you don’t want to pick a tool that doesn’t meet your most important criteria.

I know what you’re thinking: Why should I listen to the guy who’s trying to take market share off Foreplay?

Because I understand how frustrating it is to rack up a SaaS bill without getting value from it.

I wrote this article so that you don’t go down a road you later wish you’d avoided, whether that’s with us or one of our competitors. My goal isn’t to convince you to pick Atria, but to help you understand which tool is right for you.

So here’s everything you need to know about Foreplay and their alternatives – what they do well, where they come up short, and how to tell whether or not Atria is what you’re looking for.

Foreplay.co rundown: Features & benefits

Thousands of media agencies and brands have used Foreplay. But many of them find that what the product claims and what it offers don’t quite hit the same spots. Here’s a rundown of where expectation and reality match up with Foreplay, as well as where they don’t.

• Foreplay describes itself as “the complete winning ad workflow” and “everything you need to predictably make ads that convert, from the first spark of inspiration saving ads from Facebook Ads Library to the final performance report”.

  
  

• Foreplay is built for agencies and DTC brands whose first priority is building a swipe file for creative inspiration, who track performance using other systems, and for whom price is not a primary consideration.

  
  

• Foreplay’s pricing starts at $59 a month for the basic plan. Basic plans are limited to one user and doesn’t include competitor tracking, creative analytics or API access. And to unlock meaningful value from those features, like analytics on more than one account, users need to subscribe to their Agency tier which begins at $459 per month. And if you manage more than 10 accounts (that means you, growing agencies), you’re immediately forced into enterprise pricing.

Foreplay pricing and tech features that customers love

There’s a reason so many brands and agencies trust Foreplay: They do the basics well, like surfacing relevant creatives from the Meta Ads Library so you don’t have to break your back looking for creative inspiration. And they do it in a way that makes using the platform enjoyable.

• Swipe file: Foreplay has a great system for actually saving creatives that spark ideas and inspiration, making the Swipe File one of their best features. Reviews say that browsing their feed can be “as addictive as scrolling TikTok”.

  
  

• Ad discovery: Essentially a search engine for Meta creatives, ad discovery in Foreplay claims to have a database of more than 100 million creatives that you can search by keyword, brand or category. And with strong mobile functionality, you can allow inspiration to strike anytime.

  
  

• Competitor tracking and research: Foreplay’s Spyder makes it easy to track competitor activity and pull insights from the ads they release. With real-time scraping and years of historical data, the summaries Foreplay delivers help agencies and brands understand what’s winning and why.

  
  

• AI brief creation: From brief to storyboard to script, Foreplay’s AI strategist speeds up iteration across multiple brands, making it a powerful complement to a human creative team or a capable replacement for one.

  
  

• Performance analytics: Foreplay claims their analytics capabilities include automated reporting, goal tracking, industry benchmarks, and creative test analysis. They provide this at a flat cost instead of scaling with ad spend, but you need enterprise pricing to connect more than 10 accounts.

Features and experiences that frustrate Foreplay customers

Foreplay says, “Marketers love foreplay.” But we think that marketers deserve to have their needs met completely.

So we found Foreplay’s reviews and pulled the most common complaints. Here’s what their customers find most frustrating and disappointing about the software.

• Less robust categorization: Foreplay customers frequently call out its inability to let them categorize the ads they save, which means chaos when they go back through their swipe files. The inability to review saved ads by category leaves users feeling like they’re doing the same work twice, delaying them from actually putting that inspiration to work.

  
  

• Hidden platform support: While Foreplay connects to multiple social media platforms for inspiration boards, its analytics tools only work for Meta. So you’ll need other tools if you want to visualize your TikTok or Google performance.

  
  

• No performance optimization: Foreplay tells you what’s active and running in your account, but you’re on your own to find the “fix-it” factor and decide exactly what to test next.

  
  

• Shallow competitor tracking: While Foreplay can help you see your competitors’ creative tests, hooks and landing pages, they don’t help you identify personas they’re targeting, ad angles they’re using, or what themes they’re focused on.

  
  

• Forced enterprise pricing: Foreplay customers say they find value in the software, just not enough that their monthly charge doesn’t still pinch. And agencies that nail their own growth get punished by Foreplay. With a limit of 10 accounts on their highest standard tier of subscription, most successful agencies will be forced into enterprise deals on five-figure annual contracts.

  
  

• AI ad generation: Notably, Foreplay lacks any capability to turn saved ads or library items into new creatives. Found a creative that strikes your fancy? You still need a designer or design tool to recreate that ad and make it your own, which can be a sore point for growing and fast-moving teams hoping for all-in-one support.

“Atria's image ad generation gets you 90% there. I can hand off a concept to a designer and say, ‘Right, tidy this up to our brand fonts and make it perfect.’ It's giving them a really good template to work from.” Paul Fairbrother, Owner, The Fairbrother Agency

In some ways, Foreplay lives up to its name: meeting some of your needs met but ultimately leaving you feeling unfulfilled and yearning for more.

6 of the best Foreplay alternatives for media buyers and ad agencies

When it comes to ad workflow tools, you’re not short of options. So if you’re disappointed with Foreplay (or just have some lingering doubt), there are plenty of alternatives even if all you really like about Foreplay are one or two specific features.

1. Atria

Atria is a great alternative to Foreplay if feature parity is a critical consideration. In addition to matching Foreplay’s capabilities, Atria also offers several things that Foreplay doesn’t:

• Image ad generation powered by AI so you can generate your next creative asset in seconds.

• Meaningful competitor analysis that covers personas, ad angles and emotion themes.

• A unique take on analytics: Instead of a simple dashboard view, Atria also grades each creative individually based on its hook, click-through rate, thumbstop rate and other key metrics. Then, it gives you precise recommendations about what to test next (e.g. switch up this hook, try this CTA).

• Customers love the value we provide and the price at which we provide it.

• Agencies in particular benefit from our significantly higher account limits (25 to Foreplay’s 10) because they can scale their own business without inflating their bill for mission-critical software.

This makes Atria the missing bridge between your data and an actionable to-do list, showing you exactly how to improve underperforming creatives.

“For the most part Foreplay worked pretty well, but Atria has been more intuitive and more straightforward. We did use Foreplay, but we use Atria a lot more consistently. There's just more meat.” – Cody Lucero, Head of Growth, Alpha Inbound

Want more detail on Atria? Click to skip to the end for the full head-to-head breakdown.

2. Motion

Motion is another complete ad workflow platform that turns the data from your ad account into visual reports that stakeholders can actually understand.

It’s got impressive dashboards and a visually stunning UI. But  thousands of brands and agencies have learned  the hard way, there’s a honeymoon period that ends when it’s time to actually put those insights to work.

• You can create swipe files in Meta’s ad library.

• Competitor insights are limited.

• You can’t generate new creatives.

• See data, but no advice or recommendations on what to do next.

• Approach to AI involves a lot of prompting, which many users don’t enjoy.

Disappointingly, Motion’s pricing reality hits brands hard and agencies even harder. While it fundamentally excels at “here's what happened”, creative teams need to also know what to do next without taking out a second mortgage.

3. Smartly

Where Smartly excels is with AI-powered automation across creative, media and analytics:

• Generate image and video ad templates.

• Launch and optimize multi-platform campaigns.

• Get predictive budget allocation and real-time performance insights.

• Simplified dashboards with live data feed support.

• Dynamic/programmatic creative optimization and localization.

• Great reporting tools.

Again, the pricing model based on ad spend percentage makes Smartly more suitable for enterprise brands and larger-scale agencies. Many teams that are initially willing to pay Smartly’s subscription fees find it hard to justify costs as they scale or when they experience lean periods.

4. MagicBrief

If what you’re primarily after in Foreplay is their AI briefing and storyboarding tool, MagicBrief could be a viable alternative.

• Creative direction software puts more emphasis on helping you get more value from your ad spend, with robust capabilities for brief creation and storyboarding backed by analytics.

• Creative discovery and inspiration tools are average rather than outstanding, and they offer nothing by way of creative generation or campaign optimization.

5. AdSpy

Focusing exclusively on competitor and brand tracking, AdSpy claims to have the world’s “largest searchable database of Facebook and Instagram ads”.

If Foreplay’s Spyder constitutes the bulk of your usage and you wish you could track more brands without having to pay a significantly higher monthly fee, switching to AdSpy might be all that you need.

6. Meta Ads Library

The default option is Meta’s own Ads Library, a collection of past and present creatives that have served on Facebook and Instagram. It’s free and can be accessed by anyone, so it’s a good starter tool.

But it lacks capabilities that media buyers and creative teams need after their first few months on the job: Everything from being able to save creatives to analytics that help you take advantage of the inspiration you find.

Head-to-head comparison: What makes Atria the leading alternative to Foreplay.co

Atria customers who pick us over Foreplay (ad agencies, media buyers and creative teams) love how easily our all-in-one software lets them turn their advertising and creative workflow into a looped, repeatable process:

• Find inspiration from competitors and other brands in any niche.

• Generate your own branded creative based on those ads.

• Put those ads into testing.

• After sufficient spend, get graded performance data with specific steps for improvement.

• Apply those changes in one click.

• Test your updated ads.

“The pro of moving from Foreplay to Atria was it came with a lot of other add-ons. Foreplay was… just a saving tool. Atria was less expensive with better features. Being able to save and also categorize ads (that inspire us) is really useful.” – Amie Richards, Creative Director, Qure Skincare

Meanwhile, Foreplay’s capabilities in many of these areas are relatively limited and require additional software to execute at a similar level. So while you might eventually get the same end result, you’ll be making sacrifices with speed, efficiency and cost.

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Atria vs. Foreplay: A simple breakdown

Core Features

Analytics & Reporting

Inspiration

Research

Ad Creation

Platform Support for Analytics

Pricing, Plans & Terms

Atria features that teams love after switching from Foreplay

Teams that want software that lets them actually make winning ads using performance data tend to find their way to Atria sooner or later. At the time of writing, more than 3,000 agency and in-house teams are taking advantage of all that we offer across creative inspiration, ideation, creation and analytics.

Here are some of the features we’ve built to help media buyers and creative teams get better ads out the door faster, without complicating their already-demanding jobs.

Visual analytics with recommendations you can apply in a click: Atria reporting tools include easy-to-read dashboards, stakeholder-friendly data visualization, and “aha moments” where metrics become new winning ads. Unlike Foreplay, Atria gives your ads a letter grade and tells you exactly how to improve them. It’s the difference between knowing that an ad is underperforming versus getting specific changes to turn a C+ into an A. And because action is everything, an “Iterate” button lets you generate a new version with those recommendations applied.

Ad libraries curated to show only winners: Other platforms like Foreplay let you browse ad libraries and save creatives that interest you, but search is still manual and across the entire database. Atria’s AI intelligently browses and curates the top ads for you, so everything you see is already a proven performer. All you need to do is apply the search terms or filters you need.

“With Atria, we're pulling (inspiration) from ads that are higher quality. So we can be pretty sure there's something that works.” – Cody Lucero, Head of Growth, Alpha Inbound

The inside scoop on what competitors are doing: Tools like Foreplay show you the ads, hooks and landing pages that competing brands are running. Atria goes a step further with data on targeted personas, creative angles and themes, and AI ad generation to instantly recreate anything you see for your own brands. No pile of screenshots, no briefs that take up the whole day, and more context for designers.

“I’ll be on a call with a brand and they'll ask about competitors—while I'm on that call, I can pull in any competitor, sync it up, and in 5-10 minutes still on that call, I can say, ‘Right, let's have a look.’ We can see if they're actually active, what they're spending, what creative they're testing.” – Simon Freeman, Founder, Welcome to Digital

Billion-dollar creative intelligence: Radar is Atria’s AI performance marketer that helps you move ahead while your Foreplay counterparts are still analyzing data. Radar’s suggestions come from a performance database of ads that have collectively spent over $1 billion. This intel is then contextualized to your creatives, so you get iterative suggestions backed by what’s actually working on Meta and TikTok.

“I love Radar. Particularly with our in-house team, we can quickly see where we're at and identify quick wins. We can show clients: ‘We know we've got good content, the visuals are great. We just got to change up that hook and this becomes a great winning ad’.” – Simon Freeman, Founder, Welcome to Digital

Support for the entire business: Atria isn’t built just for media buyers or creative strategists. It’s for everyone, including non-ads stakeholders who need to be involved or informed.

• Media buyers get support with managing ad assets, useful performance insights and detailed analytics without having to navigate through Meta’s complicated UI.

• Creative strategists and designers easily find inspiration with competitor spying tools, ad libraries and review mining, AI image ad creation (video coming soon), visual dashboards to view performance, actionable insights to improve ads with potential, and simplified brief creation.

• Clients, founders and C-suite executives can view high-level dashboards showcasing performance wins and opportunities, allowing them to provide necessary business context and input.

“The most complete platform for performance marketing”, say Atria customers

When you’re picking software that’s involved so deeply in every part of your creative and media buying strategy, the wrong choice is often loaded with latent costs that stretch beyond fees that feel short on value.

Asking yourself or your team to go through another round of discovery and evaluation, disentanglement from your old provider, and then a second adoption period is a heavy tax. And it stops them from actually doing things that are good for the business.

If you already find yourself in this position, you want to be doubly sure that you make the right choice this time… preferably a partner that can support you while you make the switch as well as afterwards.

So here are my two offers:

1. Try Atria free for seven days and see for yourself why the world’s fastest growing DTC brands and media agencies think that we’re “easily the most complete platform for performance marketers”.

2. If you still have questions after that, we’ll personally help you figure out whether Atria really is the best fit for what you want to achieve.

Foreplay alternative FAQs

What are some popular alternatives to Foreplay?

Most media buyers and creative strategists look at Foreplay alternatives like Atria, Motion, Smartly, and MagicBrief. Each one of these has their pros and cons, but users say Atria is “easily the most complete platform for performance marketers”.

What is the difference between Foreplay and MagicBrief?

Foreplay’s main focus is on the first feature they came out with: creative boards that let you save ads just like you would save images on Pinterest. MagicBrief’s product emphasizes creative strategy, especially focusing on AI brief creation. They offer creative discovery and analytics as secondary features.

What is the difference between Motion and Foreplay?

While Motion is mainly focused on analytics, Foreplay is more focused on curating ad inspiration in Pinterest-like boards. Customers frequently express strong negative sentiment about Motion’s pricing.

Can I try out all of Atria’s features in the free trial?

Yes. During the seven-day free trial of Atria, you’re able to try out Atria’s Core plan features. This includes creative discovery and inspiration, creative grading with actionable analytics, campaign management, and more. 

However, usage-based features such as creative generation are limited during a free trial, so you get fewer credits than paying users, but enough to explore these features.

How does Atria’s AI credit system work?

Each plan includes an AI credit allocation that resets every month. You’ll use up Atria’s AI credits when you use features that rely on AI, like competitor insights, AI ad generation, script generation, creative brief generation, Radar iteration recommendations, and some of the analytics. To see how many credits an action will require, you can hover over the button to get an estimate.

Is it possible to cancel my subscription?

You can cancel your Atria subscription any time.

Are there any additional fees apart from the subscription cost?

If you’d like to add more AI credits to your account or add user seats, you can choose to top off your account. Enterprise pricing is based on individual circumstances such as usage needs and team size.

What if I use up all the feature limits?

Usage-based limits (AI credits) reset monthly based on your billing cycle. If you use up your AI credits before your billing cycle ends, you can always choose to purchase additional AI credits to keep your account running smoothly.