The Foreplay Alternative for Tracking Competitor Ads

← All posts · September 29, 2026 · 8 min read · by the Adshelf team

What Foreplay does well

Foreplay earned its reputation, so start with what you would give up. Its core is a save-and-organize workflow that is still the best we have used: a Chrome extension that saves ads from the Meta, TikTok and LinkedIn ad libraries, boards your team can share, and Briefs that turn a board into something an editor can shoot. Around that core:

• Discovery, a searchable pool Foreplay describes as over 100 million ads (its pricing page says 200M+), built from ads its users have saved.
• Spyder, which tracks a brand's Meta ads automatically and keeps every tracked ad from the day you start, with a timeline of each ad's lifespan.
• Lens, creative analytics on your own connected ad account.
• Scale and polish: more than 10,000 teams by Foreplay's count, and a 4.8 rating from 128 reviews on G2.

If most of your week is building swipe files and briefing editors, keep Foreplay. The rest of this page is for people whose question is different.

Why people look for a Foreplay alternative

Three reasons come up again and again in reviews and on the pages that rank for this search.

The tracker sits on the expensive tiers. The $59 Basic plan gets you the swipe file, Discovery and Briefs. Spyder, the part that watches competitors for you, starts on Workflow at $175 a month (5 users, 10+ brands) and Agency at $459 (10 users, 50+ brands). Annual billing takes those to $149 and $389 a month. Extra users are $20 each.

The trial wants a card. Foreplay's trial is 7 days, card up front, billed automatically when it ends, with a 14-day money-back window after the first charge. That is fair, but it is a commitment to evaluate a tool.

Discovery is curated by what people chose to save. That makes it a good inspiration feed and an incomplete record. A brand's quiet failures rarely get saved, and they are half of what you want to know. For the complete record of a brand you need Spyder, which puts you back on the $175 plan.

Foreplay vs. Adshelf, side by side

Foreplay details from foreplay.co, its help center and G2, read 29 September 2026. "~" means partial. Prices change; check both pricing pages before you buy.

What Adshelf does differently

Adshelf is a tracker first. We built it because the question we kept asking about a competitor was never "what does their ad look like?" It was "which ads are they still paying for, and for how long?" Spend and ROAS are private, so the length of time an advertiser keeps funding an ad is the best public read on what works.

Run duration is the headline, on every ad

Every ad on the shelf carries its start date and days running, and every brand sorts longest-first in one click. The longest-running ads are the ones a brand kept choosing to fund, which is as close to a verdict on performance as public data gets.

Stopped ads stay on the record

For most US commercial ads, the Ad Library is a view of what is running today. When a competitor pulls an ad, Adshelf keeps it with its full run dates, so their fast kills and retired champions stay readable. 3,560 stopped ads are on the shelf so far.

The shared shelf is free to read

Brands are tracked once, for everyone. If a brand is already on the shelf, reading it costs nothing on the free Weekly Edition. That covers its full library with run durations, the angle map that classifies every ad by the persuasion play it runs, cross-brand benchmarks and the Monday Shelf Report. Adding a brand the shelf does not track yet is part of the paid plans, and new accounts get 10 free adds in their first 10 days.

Ask your AI assistant

The Adshelf connector works in Claude and ChatGPT on every plan, including free. You can ask "what are this brand's longest-running video ads, and what do their hooks have in common?" and get an answer from the actual records.

Your own account, next

Your Ads, Hook & Hold (retention at 25/50/75/95%, mapped to seconds and benchmarked against your account at the same second) and Campaigns are built and running on our own account. They open to every account once Meta finishes reviewing our app, which we submitted in September 2026.

Where Foreplay is still the better choice

Honest list, so you do not find out during a trial:

• Swipe files and team boards. The Chrome extension, boards and mobile app are more mature than anything Adshelf has.
• Briefs. Foreplay turns saved ads into editor-ready briefs. Adshelf does not write briefs yet.
• TikTok and LinkedIn. Adshelf is Meta only.
• Breadth of inspiration. Discovery covers ads from brands no one on your team has thought to track.
• Track record. Foreplay has a longer history and more than 10,000 teams. Adshelf launched in 2026, and a brand's history on the shelf starts on the day it was first tracked (June 2026 at the earliest).

Switching, or running both

You do not have to rip anything out. A setup that works:

1. Start free on Adshelf, open the competitors you care about, and star them. Many DTC category leaders are already on the shelf.
2. Add any that are missing by name, Facebook page URL or page ID. The pull starts right away.
3. Keep Foreplay boards for inspiration. Before an idea becomes a brief, check it against the competitor's longest-running ads on Adshelf. If they tested that angle and killed it in a week, you just saved a shoot.

For the weekly routine around it, see our five-step competitor analysis framework, or the step-by-step guide to seeing competitors' Facebook ads and telling which ones work.

Other Foreplay alternatives worth a look

Motion is creative analytics built around your own ad account, with an Inspo library for competitor ads. It starts at $750 a month and is priced by ad spend. We compared it in detail in Adshelf vs. Motion.

MagicBrief and Atria pair own-account creative analytics with inspiration libraries and are the closest like-for-like swaps for Foreplay's workflow. Check their pricing pages for current plans.

Meta's Ad Library is free and is the source every tool builds on. It shows mostly what is running now, without longevity sorting or history. Our Ad Library guide covers what it shows and hides. For the wider field, see the ad spy tools comparison.

Straight answers