Adbeat vs Ads Lighthouse in 2026: Display intelligence vs brand-search evidence

Adbeat is the stronger choice when competitive advertising research starts with display or native inventory. It tracks more than 1000 ad networks in more than 140 countries and brings together competitor creative, landing pages, publisher placements, and estimated spend. That makes it useful before a media buyer enters a vertical or tests a direct publisher buy: the researcher can see which publishers and creative formats are active instead of starting from a blank list. It does not attempt to be a Google Search, paid-social, or affiliate-compliance product.

Creative history is the working layer. Adbeat stores variations over time, allowing a team to separate a short experiment from an offer or message that remained active. Its paid tiers also surface publisher intelligence, including estimated spend distribution. Those figures are modeled signals, so they can support a prioritised research hypothesis but cannot establish precise dollars, conversion rate, or return on ad spend. The Professional plan extends creative history to 365 days and the Enterprise plan to full history.

Pricing is geared to a media-buying workflow. The free tier is a limited preview, Intro costs $99 monthly for 1000+ networks and 90 days of creative history, and Professional costs $399 monthly for 140+ countries, white-label reports, and API access. Agencies that repeatedly turn display findings into client deliverables have a reason to move beyond Intro. A brand that only needs to document ads appearing against its own name will get more relevant evidence and a lower entry price from Ads Lighthouse.

Ads Lighthouse is a monitoring system for a narrower but consequential job: documenting who shows paid ads on a defined brand search. Each project contains a brand, its domains, keywords, markets, devices, and schedule. The product checks Google and Bing paid text results, and Growth onward also records Google Shopping product ads. A saved observation can include the advertiser domain, copy, destination URL, search term, engine, location, device, and time, giving a team a record it can inspect later rather than an isolated screenshot.

The product is particularly distinct for affiliate and policy work. Teams can declare affiliate parameters, upload known IDs, trace eligible destinations server-side, create cases for non-compliant activity, and keep evidence packs. Paid Results also supports advertiser, keyword, copy-change, and destination drilldowns. That is not the same as a giant archive of ads across the open web. Ads Lighthouse only reports the search combinations a team sets up, and observed visibility is the portion of those saved searches in which a domain appeared, not impression share, spend, infringement, or proof that a phrase was bought.

Starter costs $49 monthly for one project, 20 keywords, two locations, daily scheduling, 7,500 scheduled checks, and 100 on-demand checks. Growth is $99, adds Shopping, more capacity, and checks every six hours. Scale is $299 and introduces API keys, white-label PDFs, five projects, 150 keywords, and 60,000 scheduled checks. All published plans include team roles, CSV and Excel exports, alerts, and a seven-day trial. Check consumption needs modelling before a high-frequency, multi-market rollout.