The Meta Ad Library is free and complete for live ads. If you are researching one competitor once, it is genuinely all you need. That is not a sales-friendly thing to say, but it is true, and the honest version of this comparison is more useful than the usual one.
Here is what the library gives you and what it does not.
What the free library already does well
- Every currently-live ad from any advertiser, including every creative variant
- Full ad copy, headline and description
- The start date of each ad, which is the only public performance signal there is
- Placements and the destination URL
That is a lot, and it costs nothing.
The four things it does not do
History. Non-political ads vanish when they stop running, and there is no archive for commercial advertisers. A competitor's best ad of the year is unretrievable the week after they pause it.
Monitoring. The library answers "what are they running right now" only when you go and look. It cannot tell you a competitor launched a new campaign on Tuesday, which means you always see their last move rather than their next one.
Cross-platform. Meta only. Google runs a separate Ads Transparency Center and TikTok a separate Creative Center, each with different coverage rules. A brand invisible on Meta is often spending heavily elsewhere.
Analysis. The library hands you ads. Turning fifty ads into "this is the angle they are betting on and here is the gap" is manual work, and it is the part that actually takes time.
What neither can give you
Spend. No tool has competitor spend for commercial advertisers, because Meta does not publish it. We checked 2,108 live records and zero carried a spend value. Any spend figure you see attached to a commercial brand is a model's estimate, not reported data, and a tool that presents one without saying so is worth less trust, not more.
The honest decision rule
Researching one competitor before a launch: use the free library. Tracking a category every week, across platforms, where missing a competitor's move costs you real money: the manual version stops scaling fast. We keep a running comparison of the tools people actually use, including where the free option is the right answer.