AdSpy vs Ad Radar

AdSpy pricing

AdSpy has one plan: $149 a month with what it calls virtually unlimited usage. Its home page presents that price as an introductory offer that "will not be the same for long", so check it before you buy. There is no team tier, no annual price and no free trial listed. Its info page says users can get a full refund within 24 hours of purchase, with further refunds at AdSpy's discretion.

Ad Radar Membership is $49 every 4 weeks at the launch price (list $99), with the MCP server and the Chrome extension included. Agency is $199 every 4 weeks with 5 seats, 25 client workspaces, a client portal where clients approve ads, and white-label sharing. Daily limits apply to briefs and brand searches, five times higher on Agency.

Text search vs transcript search

AdSpy's edge has always been search depth. You can query the ad text, the advertiser, the URL, the page name and the comments, then filter by affiliate network, offer, landing page technology and demographics. For text-led ads and affiliate offers, that is hard to beat.

The gap is video. Most winning Meta ads are video, and the words that sell sit in the voiceover. On our board of 2,443 Meta ads with $50k or more in estimated spend, 1,752 video ads have a transcript. When we compared the opening of each script with the ad's headline and body copy, 77 ads said "nobody" in the script and only 1 put it in the copy. Story and hook language ("I tried", "mistake", "my wife") lives in the script; offer language ("guarantee" appears in the copy of 114 ads and in only 22 scripts) lives in the text. The full table is in our post on AdSpy alternatives.

So a text search is good at finding offers and weaker at finding hooks. Ad Radar puts headlines, body copy and transcripts in one search box, so a query like "doctors won't tell you" finds every ad that says it, in the caption or out loud. See video ad hook formulas for what those spoken openers look like.

Every ad, or only the winners

AdSpy gives you the whole database: tests, losers and winners, which you sort by reactions, recency and how long an ad ran. That is what you want for a full audit of one advertiser.

Ad Radar gives you only ads it estimates at $50k or more in spend. The median ad on the board sits at $223K in estimated spend (2,443 ads from 749 brands, snapshot of October 9, 2026). The estimate is modeled on engagement tracked over time and labeled as an estimate: use it to rank ads against each other, not to audit a competitor's books. Our guide on estimating a competitor's Meta ad spend explains the trade-offs.

AdSpy review: where it is better

• Affiliate research. Search by affiliate network, affiliate ID and offer ID, built by a team that says it runs affiliate campaigns itself.
• Comment search. Search inside user comments to find objections, questions and praise you can't see in the ad.
• Demographics. Location, gender and age range filters, estimated from its network of contributors.
• Landing page technology. Filter funnels by what they are built on.
• Breadth. 212 million+ ads in 88 languages and 225 countries, against a board focused on US DTC brands.

Is AdSpy worth it?

If you run affiliate campaigns, or you research markets outside the US, AdSpy's search filters are worth $149 a month and few newer tools replace them. If you are a DTC brand or an agency that briefs video ads every week, you will spend most of that budget on search features you don't use, and miss what is said in the video. In that case a tool that searches transcripts and starts from proven ads usually fits better, and costs less.

Is there a free AdSpy alternative?

The Meta Ad Library is free. It searches ad text for any advertiser, shows every active ad on Facebook and Instagram and gives you the start date of each one. It has no transcripts, no comment search, no ranking and no tags, so you do the filtering by hand. Our Meta Ad Library search tips cover the operators that help. Among paid tools, Ad Radar is $49 every 4 weeks; for other options, see the best ad spy tools compared.