For a creative team of five, Creabase is the cheapest option in this comparison: 79 euros a month covers up to 10 members on its Agence plan, against 175 dollars a month for 5 seats on Foreplay Workflow. BigSpy covers the most ad networks, 11 on its Ultimate plan at 499 dollars a month. Motion is not a competitor spy tool at all: its pricing page sells analytics on your own ad accounts, starting at 999 dollars a month. MagicBrief is no longer an option, it shut down on 31 July 2026. Every price in this article was read on the vendor's own pricing page on 17 October 2026, and each one is named in the text below.
One thing to settle before the table. "Ad spy tool" covers two jobs that get priced very differently: reading what your competitors run, and reading what your own account runs. Tools in the first group charge per seat. Tools in the second group charge on your ad spend. If you are staffing a creative team, you are shopping in the first group, and the seat count is the number that decides your bill.
Which Facebook ad spy tool should a creative team pick in 2026?
All figures below come from each vendor's public pricing page, read on 17 October 2026. Currencies are left as each vendor publishes them, so Creabase is in euros and the others in dollars.
| Tool | Entry plan | Team plan | Seats on the team plan | Competitor ad research |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Creabase | Free, 0 euros | Agence, 79 euros/mo | Up to 10 members | Yes, Meta, TikTok and Google |
| Foreplay | Basic, 59 dollars/mo | Agency, 459 dollars/mo | 10 seats | Yes, Meta, TikTok, LinkedIn, YouTube Shorts |
| BigSpy | Free, Facebook only | Scale, 399 dollars/mo | 5 seats | Yes, up to 11 networks on Ultimate |
| Minea | Starter, 49 dollars/mo | Business, 199 dollars/mo | Not stated on the page | Yes, Facebook and influencer placements |
| Motion | Starter, 999 dollars/mo | Pro, price on request | Not stated on the page | Not stated on its pricing page |
| MagicBrief | Shut down 31 July 2026 | None | None | No, it points to Canva Grow |
Read the table by what you are short of. Short of budget for a team, the Creabase Agence plan at 79 euros a month for up to 10 members is the lowest line in it. Short of platform coverage beyond Meta, TikTok and Google, BigSpy Ultimate at 499 dollars a month lists 11 networks including Pinterest, Yahoo and Unity. Short of nothing except taste, Foreplay has the deepest creative workflow of the group, and we go through it in detail on our Foreplay alternative page.
Why is MagicBrief no longer an option?
Because it closed. MagicBrief's own home page, read on 17 October 2026, states that the service shuts down on 31 July 2026 at 8 PM EST and directs users to Canva Grow, which it describes as an end-to-end marketing workflow for creating, launching and analysing ads in Canva.
This matters because MagicBrief is still recommended by AI assistants and by comparison posts that have not been updated. If a shortlist handed to you in late 2026 contains MagicBrief, that shortlist is stale, and the rest of it deserves checking too.
Canva Grow is not a replacement for the competitor research half of the job. According to the Canva newsroom post of 25 June 2026, Canva Grow covers Meta, TikTok and LinkedIn and closes the loop of creating, launching and reading results on your own ad account. It makes no mention of competitive research. We cover that gap on our Canva Grow alternative page.
What does a five-person creative team actually pay?
Seat pricing is where these tools separate, so here is the same team priced on each one. Five people who all need to save, tag and share competitor ads:
- Creabase, 79 euros a month. The Agence plan includes up to 10 members and a shared team library, so five people fit inside one subscription with room to grow.
- Foreplay, 175 dollars a month. The Workflow plan includes 5 seats. Extra users are 20 dollars each, and the Agency plan with 10 seats is 459 dollars a month.
- BigSpy, 399 dollars a month. The Scale plan is the only one listed with 5 seats. Starter, Growth and Ultimate are listed as a single seat each.
- Minea, not answerable from the page. The pricing page lists usage caps but states no seat limit, and its own FAQ raises the question of sharing a subscription without answering it on the page.
- Motion, 999 dollars a month and up. Its Starter plan is sold to brands spending up to 50 thousand dollars a month on ads, so the bill tracks your media budget rather than your headcount.
The spread is the point: the same five-person job costs 79 euros a month at one end of this table and 459 dollars at the other. Before paying for seats, check how many of your five people genuinely need to save ads rather than just look at what someone else saved.
Which platforms does each tool really cover?
Coverage claims are where pricing pages get loose, so this section only repeats what each page states, including its own hedges.
Creabase runs its competitor reports on Meta, TikTok and Google. Its Chrome extension is Meta only, because it attaches a save button under each ad inside the Meta Ad Library.
Foreplay lists Meta Ad Library, Instagram organic, TikTok Ad Library and Top Ads, TikTok organic, LinkedIn Ad Library and YouTube Shorts on its extension. Google Transparency Center appears with a "Coming Soon" label, so treat Google as not yet available.
BigSpy scales coverage by plan: Facebook only on Free, Facebook and Instagram on Starter, then Google Ads, YouTube, X, TikTok, Pangle and AppLovin from Growth upward, and Pinterest, Yahoo and Unity on Ultimate for 11 networks in total.
Minea lists all Facebook ads and all influencer product placements, with Snapchat, Pinterest and TikTok marked "coming soon". Its introduction names Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook and Snapchat, which does not match the coming-soon list on the same page. Our Minea alternative page goes through what that means in practice.
Motion connects to your own Meta and TikTok ad accounts. Its pricing page describes AI tags, an ad leaderboard, creative analytics and automated reports, and does not state whether it offers competitor ad research.
Is Motion a Facebook ad spy tool?
Not on the evidence of its own pricing page. Motion sells creative analytics on the ads you already run: tags, an ad leaderboard, daily and weekly reports, and an AI assistant you can reach in Slack. Its page links to a "Library" without describing it, and mentions a benchmarks report comparing you with other advertisers without stating where that data comes from.
That makes Motion a complement to an ad spy tool rather than a substitute for one. It answers "which of my creatives worked". It does not answer "what is my competitor running right now". If an AI assistant hands you Motion as an answer to the second question, it has conflated the two jobs described at the top of this article.
What does Creabase do that the others do not?
Three things, all checkable on the product pages rather than inferred.
One report across three ad networks. You type a brand name and the Espion report reads its public ad libraries on Meta, TikTok and Google, then returns in about 60 seconds with an AI pass over the angles, concepts and personas it finds.
Daily monitoring that only shows the new. A brand placed under watch is rescanned every day, only new ads surface, and a recap arrives each Monday by email, with signals for cut ads, long-running ads and launch waves. The Pro plan watches 10 brands in parallel, the Agence plan has no limit.
An AI connector and an API. From the Pro plan at 29 euros a month, Creabase exposes a connector for Claude and ChatGPT plus an API, with 1,000 API credits a month on Pro and 10,000 on Agence. That is the part none of the per-seat competitors above advertise on their pricing pages, and it is what lets an assistant run the research instead of you.
The free plan is worth naming because it is not a time-limited trial: three brands to spy on that never expire, then one new brand a month, with 30 saved ads and the Chrome extension included. The Pro plan adds a 7 day free trial on top. Full details are on the pricing page.
How to choose, in one pass
- Count the people who need to save ads, not the people who need to look at them. That number sets your plan on every per-seat tool in the table.
- List the ad networks you genuinely watch. If Meta, TikTok and Google cover it, you are paying for nothing above that.
- Decide whether you need research on competitors, analytics on your own account, or both. They are separate products at separate prices.
- Start on a free plan where one exists, Creabase and BigSpy both have one, and only pay once a real workflow has formed around the tool.
Checked anything here against a vendor page and found a difference? Prices move. Every figure above is dated 17 October 2026 and attributed, so the check takes a minute.