BigSpy alternatives: 4 better ways to gather and use competitive intelligence

BigSpy offers one of the largest ad libraries around—over 1 billion creatives across 10 platforms. But if you're hitting usage limits, frustrated by stale inspiration feeds, or finding that broad platform coverage matters less than deep insights on Meta and TikTok, you're not alone.

This guide covers 4 BigSpy alternatives worth considering, whether you're after better ad spying, deeper creative intelligence, or tools that help you actually turn inspiration into winning ads.

This article covers:

• What customers think of BigSpy’s strengths and weaknesses

• How to tell whether BigSpy is right for you

• 4 alternative tools to help with creative inspiration

• A direct comparison between BigSpy and Atria to help you decide the best fit

• Plus answers to other questions you might have about BigSpy (and Atria)

BigSpy rundown: Strengths and weaknesses

• BigSpy describes itself as “the best affordable ad library” that “covers 10 major platforms, helping you comprehensively monitor competitors' ad strategies and gain unlimited creative inspiration”.

• BigSpy is built for agencies and ecommerce brands that need to track competitor activity across a wide variety of ad networks and are okay being restricted to just three industries at a time.

• BigSpy’s pricing starts at $9/month for a single-seat plan with very strict usage limits and goes up to $3,000+ a year for their VIP Enterprise plan with unlimited queries, tracking, downloads and full feature access.

What BigSpy does well

BigSpy shines for brands and agencies that need to track ad activity across many different platforms for a couple of industries. If you’re not particularly keen to find inspiration outside your vertical or run an agency that specializes in a single niche, BigSpy could be a fit for your competitor ad spying needs.

Some of their core strengths include:

• Extensive platform support: BigSpy supports competitor spying across a multitude of ad platforms – mainstays like Meta and TikTok as well as niche ones like Reddit and Yahoo – as well as competitor websites and landing pages.

• Affordable entry-level plan: Their Basic plan costs just $9/month (with very strict usage limits) and they offer a 3-day trial of their Pro plan for $1 (later $99/month). You can also try BigSpy for free online without signing up, which is especially useful to see how their UI is laid out.

• Easy-to-use search function: Plenty of filters and options make it easy to find exactly what you’re looking for whether it’s in a specific industry, ad network, language or site type. There are also filters for dynamic, violation and new ads.

• Large ad database: Supporting ad discovery across 10 platforms adds up – in this case to over 1 billion creatives, according to BigSpy. Even just looking through their Facebook Ads library (pre-duplication filtering) yields over 300 million results.

Where customers feel BigSpy comes up short

When you’re on the hunt for creative inspiration, the last thing you want is to run across the same ideas over and over. Throw in a laggy UI and analytics without real depth, and you have a recipe for frustration. And yet, these are precisely the things that BigSpy customers wish were different.

• Some vital features paywalled: More generous usage limits, creative intelligence, and useful features like TikTok Shop charts and live support are gated behind the enterprise plan which requires a $3,000 up-front payment.

• Inconsistent speed and load times: Issues with BigSpy’s speed and usability are not uncommon. The user interface tends to get laggy and loads slowly under pressure, like applying multiple filters or search parameters. That’s going to be frustrating for savvy advertisers and creative strategists – or anyone with high usage patterns.

• Stale inspiration feeds eat up usage limits: Several reviews say that BigSpy often showcases the same ads over and over, with UGC and TikTok campaigns sometimes failing to show up until long after they go live. On plans with lower usage limits, credits get used up quickly and customers feel like they don’t get real value from their subscription.

• Surface-level insights: Intelligence in BigSpy shows you what’s performing but doesn’t go into the “why” e.g. psychographics and angles that actually help creative teams win. And many of the ad platforms supported aren’t wholly relevant to DTC and ecommerce advertisers.

• Multiple billing complaints: While not as prolific as some other tools, it’s not uncommon for reviews to feature complaints from users who were charged a different rate than they were promised.

4 BigSpy alternatives for creative inspiration and ad spying

There are better ways to keep tabs on what competitors are doing than forcing yourself to cope with artificially low usage limits designed to push you onto the more expensive annual subscription tier. Whether you’re simply after better ad spying functionality or a more complete creative workflow, these four BigSpy alternatives might be worth checking out.

Atria

If your main priorities are Meta and TikTok, Atria will help you find powerful creative concepts and turn them into ads in a matter of days instead of weeks. All without needing to sift through an entire mountain of ads, with our AI-curated inspiration feeds showing proven winners.

• Deeper ad inspiration feeds: Browse and save inspiration from a curated collection of more than 25 million winning Meta and TikTok creatives across a number of niches and verticals. Sort your discovery feed by format (e.g. video or static) or filter by theme to focus on things like unboxing, “us versus them”, promotions and more

• See what’s trending: Want to know what’s in vogue across Facebook, Instagram and TikTok? Atria customers use filters like these to spend no more than 30-60 minutes a day (on average) finding inspiration and getting the creative juices flowing.

• Ad saving: Sometimes, you’re just browsing. Other times, you’re deep into creative research. And sometimes, one leads to the other. With Atria, you can always save the ads that inspire you across different themed boards. We even offer mobile extensions for Chrome and Instagram, making it easy to save any ad you see even while browsing casually.

• Search: Atria’s AI search makes life simple. Just type in a brand name, category or even a keyword to get full access to relevant creatives. Or go into a specific competitor’s creative library and sort their ads using all the same filters you normally have access to.

• Insight to action: Once you find a brand that’s doing work you like, a full creative breakdown details its hooks, headlines, ad copy, landing pages, personas, USPs, emotions, themes and more. Ad metrics and AI-generated insights help you script your next winning concept. Use a Canva template from our top picks to turn a scroll-stopping static into a creative that works for your brand and offer. Then further tweak that winning concept using competitors’ top hooks or angles. Once your ad’s had some time to spend and perform, you can repeat the cycle and iterate increasingly better ads.

Want to see what else Atria offers for creative ideation, generation, direction, reporting and iteration? Jump ahead.

AdSpy

AdSpy helps you see what other brands are doing on both of Meta’s major ad networks. Every feature is built around this singular objective, which makes it easy to see how AdSpy fits into your tech stack. But much of creative success boils down to how you utilize inspiration. AdSpy might have one of the world’s biggest databases of Meta creatives, but it also forces you to look elsewhere to turn inspiration into new creative work.

AdSpy’s top advantages:

• Massive searchable database: AdSpy claims to have the largest searchable database of ads from Facebook and Instagram, affiliate offers, web domains, and more.

• Search filters with depth: Search allows you to browse ads by tracking keywords, comments, demographics, engagement data, activity levels, media type, etc.

• Competitor tracking with targeting insights: See what the competition is up to. AdSpy can analyze an ad’s intended targets (such as demographics or location), what comments say, engagement over time, and even compare affiliate offers.

• Pricing stability: By most accounts, AdSpy has not increased its “introductory” subscription fee from $149/month in years. If that price tag isn’t a problem, there’s a good chance it remains unchanged for the foreseeable future.

• Quick user interface: Despite searching through millions of records each time, AdSpy’s UI is responsive and quick for the most part, with few complaints about laggy software.

Overall, there’s a good use case for affiliate marketers and agencies with a Meta-heavy focus who need deep historical data and don't require TikTok coverage. If you're primarily running Facebook and Instagram ads and want granular search without paying for platforms you won't use, AdSpy delivers.

Where AdSpy comes up short:

• Singular focus means limited scope: Turning discoveries into actual creative intelligence and winning ads requires at least one other tool, many of which also offer competitor tracking and ad discovery on par with AdSpy.

• Granular search can feel laborious: While the search function in AdSpy comes with plenty of options and filters, it’s entirely manual and far less curated than Atria’s ad discovery which only populates winning ads from Facebook, Instagram and TikTok.

• Meta focus ignores newer platforms: AdSpy has no application outside of Meta Ads, which is an oversight given that some of the best creative inspiration is found on other platforms like TikTok and LinkedIn.

• Issues with freshness: Some users cite issues with the depth and freshness of AdSpy’s database, with older ads sometimes dominating discovery and missed creatives hard to resurface. AdSpy also limits you to searching across one industry at a time and only three per month.

• Insights can feel surface-level: While AdSpy provides insights into competitor ads and landing pages, these are often limited to performance and in-platform metrics. They don’t include psychographics, sentiment analysis, and other angles that actually help advanced teams win.

Foreplay

Ad discovery and competitor tracking are two pieces of what Foreplay offers, allowing you to search by keyword, brand or category. Their Spyder makes it easy to track competitor activity and pull insights from the ads those brands produce, with real-time scraping and years of historical data to help you understand what’s winning and why.

Foreplay’s top advantages:

• Pinterest for ads approach that makes creative discovery genuinely enjoyable

• Mobile app functionality for saving ads on-the-go without the frustration

• Clean, intuitive interface that focuses on inspiration over intimidation

• Flat pricing structure starting at $49/month Basic, $149/month Workflow, $389/month Agency

• Quick competitor tracking for seeing what brands are testing

• AI brief generation to help translate inspiration into actionable creative direction

Where Foreplay comes up short:

• 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. This leaves you feeling like you need to do the same work twice, delaying your ability to actually put inspiration to work.

• While Foreplay helps you see your competitors’ creative tests, hooks and landing pages, it doesn’t help you identify which personas they’re targeting, the ad angles they’re using, or what themes they’re focused on.

• Foreplay lacks any capability to turn saved ads or library items into new creatives. Once you find something worth testing, you still need a designer or design tool to recreate that ad and make it your own – a sore point for growing and fast-moving teams hoping for all-in-one support.

Overall, Foreplay is probably a good choice for creative strategists and small teams who prioritize the discovery and briefing phase. Foreplay works well if your bottleneck is getting from "I saw something cool" to "here's a brief for the designer"—though you'll still need separate tools for asset creation and performance tracking.

AdSpyder

Adspyder is another AdSpy alternative that supports a variety of ad networks, and their selection is more relevant to most DTC/ecommerce brands and agencies: Google Search, Google Shopping, Google Display, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Amazon, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Twitter/X. Their product roadmap is also publicly available on their website.

AdSpyder’s top advantages:

• Adspyder is another AdSpy alternative that supports a variety of ad networks, and their selection is more relevant to most DTC/ecommerce brands and agencies: Google Search, Google Shopping, Google Display, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Amazon, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Twitter/X. Their product roadmap is also publicly available on their website.

Where AdSpyder comes up short:

• While there’s strong support for ad networks and even ad generation capabilities, creative intelligence is isolated rather than a compounding improvement loop like in Atria. Some users also raise questions about the quality of their generative tools, especially with images and static ads.

• Usage, feature availability and account limits are tied closely to subscription tiers, often requiring teams to opt for higher plans to get full value from Adspyder.

• Several critical capabilities like reporting and improved image generation are still under development and won’t be released until mid-2026.

If your teams are running paid search alongside social and want one tool for both, Adspyder makes sense. The Google Ads coverage (Search, Shopping, Display) sets AdSpyder apart if you're not Meta/TikTok-only.

Head to head: Bigspy vs. Atria

BigSpy goes broad to show you creative ideas from a number of ad platforms, with plenty of filters to help you find exactly what you’re looking for. But you’re on your own turning inspiration into actual ads.

You’ll understand what competitors and other brands in the market are doing, but piecing together positioning and sentiment is on you. And with sharp usage limits and the ability to only browse three industries at a time, you’ll need the Enterprise plan to actually get full value from BigSpy.

Atria helps you get directly to winning ads faster by providing creative intelligence and supporting ideation, creation, reporting and iteration.

Atria doesn’t just surface ads – our creative discovery feed pre-selects high performing ads so that you only see winners from Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. Once you find an ad you like, Atria’s fluid workflows let you clone it, tweak it, test it, improve it, iterate on it, and test it again until you find the best version of an ad.

“Atria is currently the most complete platform on the market for paid media buyers or performance marketers. It's as close to full-funnel as you can get - from ideation stage with exploration of ads, through the AI reviews feature that gives you different ad angles and messaging from customer pain points, right into reporting and analytics. Having everything in one platform means I can just tell the team to go to Atria for 99% of what they need.” – Simon Freeman, Founder, Welcome to Digital

BigSpy vs. Atria: Quick feature comparison

Here’s how BigSpy compares to Atria when we break down each player’s approach to competitor tracking and creative discovery/inspiration:

What Atria customers love that they don’t get with BigSpy

When you’re managing $50k-$10M per month in ad spend, there’s no point looking for inspiration if you can’t quickly go from concept to creative. That’s a limitation BigSpy can’t overcome, but it’s also one of Atria’s biggest advantages.

Creative workflows in Atria treat everything as one complete process – from ideation and creation to reporting and iteration. Because we fit naturally into the way agencies and creative + media teams already work, adoption and onboarding carry less friction than others creative software.

In Atria, inspiration leads to AI-supported ad generation (hooks, scripts, statics). This in turn feeds creative testing and iteration as Atria grades your ads and provides clear steps on how to improve performance – not to mention letting you apply those changes with an “iterate” button to generate a new ad that you can test once again.

It’s a compounding improvement loop that helps our customers get better output and results with every new ad and iteration.

“Atria helps you stop reinventing the wheel. We can instantly spin up new ads that mirror the structure, flow, and psychology of top performers, without copy-paste chaos or starting from scratch. It's like having a high-performing creative strategist 24/7. The interface is fast, the output is solid out of the gate, and it integrates well into existing workflows.” – Gaurav V, Founder

Other features that customers tell us they love include:

• No limits on crucial workflows: Browse as many ad categories as you like. Save as many ads catch your eye. Learn from as many industries as you desire. Atria places no restrictions on the freedom of discovery and inspiration.

• Instant ad cloning and generation: Not all briefs lead to video. For static ads, Atria offers creative generation using either briefs you’ve created or by cloning a competitor ad for your brand. With hundreds of ready-to-use Canva templates, you can even skip the AI and build your own assets.

• Performance-based grading and iteration: Our AI performance marketer Radar gives you in-depth scores for each creative. These letter grades are accompanied by reasons for the score, specific steps to move up a grade or two, and an iteration button so you can create a new asset or script for that ad concept. Once your ad’s had some time to spend and perform, you can repeat the cycle and iterate increasingly better ads.

Get more focused inspiration + full creative workflow with Atria

If you really want to win the advertising game, spying on competitors won’t help much if you don’t know what to do with your discoveries. AI might be changing the way we advertise but creative intuition still matters.

With Atria, you won’t just find inspiration – you get a full suite of tools to quantify that intuition. An engineered system designed to iterate hooks and ideas into data-powered winners, over and over in a repeatable process that generates compounding growth instead of one-off wins.

Most importantly, you’ll be first to market by going from concept to ad creative in hours instead of days. That used to be impossible but today, it’s just a normal day for anyone using Atria.

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”.

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.

BigSpy alternative FAQs

How much does BigSpy cost?

BigSpy starts at $9/month for the Basic plan with heavy usage restrictions, $99/month for the Pro plan with less restrictive limits, and $249/month for the multi-seat Group plan. For unlimited searches and complete functionality, you will need the $3000/year VIP Enterprise plan.

How much is Atria’s pricing?

Atria offers a range of pricing options and plans that start from $159/month for the Core plan, $329/month for the Plus plan, and $599/month for the Business plan. Each plan includes AI credits as well as limits on how many ad accounts can be connected, how many brands can be followed, how much ad spend can be analyzed, how much cloud storage is available, and how many brand profiles can be stored. Paying annually for any plan includes a 20% discount on what you would pay over 12 months. Custom pricing is also available for larger teams whose needs outpace what we offer in our standard pricing tiers.

Does BigSpy have a free trial?

Yes, with limits. BigSpy allows you to use the tool and interact with its UI without signing up, as well as a $1 trial for three-day access to the Pro plan (one seat).

What do customer reviews say about BigSpy?

BigSpy customer reviews are balanced. While customers praise its wide platform support and deep ads libraries, there are complaints about the freshness of inspiration feeds, the speed and usability of the software under heavy load, and some billing practices.

What ad workflows does BigSpy not support?

BigSpy’s core workflow revolves around showing you the ads that competitors and other brands are running on a variety of ad platforms. While you can save ads you find interesting, there is a limit to the number you can save per month. There’s also no support for creative generation, so turning any inspiration into ads of your own must happen either manually or with other software.

What are the main differences between BigSpy and Atria?

BigSpy is focused on creative inspiration and competitor ad spying, with limited performance analytics to help you identify certain traits and track specific metrics. Atria is a more complete creative platform, allowing you to turn the inspiration you find into ads, hooks, scripts and storyboards.