Editorial standards
How we rank ad spy tools
Every number on this site comes from the vendor's own public page, recorded with the date it was read. Nothing is estimated, nothing is carried over from another comparison site, and where a vendor does not publish a figure we print “not published” rather than filling the gap.
This page exists so that any figure on the site can be traced, challenged and re-checked by a reader without taking our word for it. If something here is wrong, the fix is the same as for any figure: re-read the vendor's page and update it with a new date.
Where the figures come from
Each vendor's public pages are read directly — pricing pages, feature pages and the claims on their home pages. A figure is recorded only if the vendor states it themselves, and the date of reading is printed next to the comparison so a reader can check whether the number has since moved. Figures are re-read once a quarter.
Roughly half of the vendors in this category serve their pricing pages as plain HTML. The rest return either an access error or an empty shell that only fills in once scripts run. BigSpy's pricing page is the clearest example: it does not render without JavaScript, so we do not quote BigSpy's paid tiers anywhere on this site. PowerAdSpy publishes four price levels but does not bind them to tier names in a way we could read reliably, so we quote the lowest and say so.
What “not published” means
A cell reading “not published” means the vendor does not state that figure anywhere on its public pages — it does not mean the capability is absent. Ad volume and advertiser counts in particular are published by only three vendors in this category, which is why the comparison table has so many blanks in those columns. Filling them with estimates would make the table look complete and make it wrong.
How positions are decided
There is no composite score. Each tool is placed on the single measure where its own published figures lead, because a weighted overall score would hide the trade-off that actually decides a purchase — AdSpy's 30.1 million advertisers against Spytrend's five-year archive of 1.1 billion ads are not the same kind of thing, and averaging them into one number would help nobody.
Where two tools are close on a measure, we say so rather than inventing a separator. BigSpy's claimed billion-plus creatives sit at rough parity with Spytrend's 1.1 billion Meta ads, so volume is not used to separate those two anywhere on this site.
What we will not claim
No tool in this category publishes ad performance data — click-through rates, conversions or engagement — because Meta does not release it to anyone. Any comparison that claims otherwise for any vendor is wrong. The same applies to targeting detail: interests, lookalikes and retargeting setups are not visible to any ad spy tool.
Affiliate links
Some links to the tools reviewed here are affiliate links, which means a click can earn this desk a commission. Which tools appear, in what order, and what the verdicts say is decided by the published figures described above, and is not affected by whether a link pays. Tools that pay nothing are ranked on exactly the same basis as tools that do.
Corrections
If a figure here is out of date or wrong, it is because the vendor changed it after our reading date or because we misread the page. Either way the fix is the same: we re-read the vendor's page and update the figure with a new date. Vendors do not review these pages before publication and do not pay for placement.