Spytrend held 19 of the 20 Meta ads launched on 20 October 2026, BigSpy’s free plan 9 of the 19 we could search, Minea 4, AdSpy 2 and Dropispy 1. We searched each ad the same way in all five tools on 28 October and kept the screenshots.
| What we tested | |
|---|---|
| Ads | 20 Meta ads that started running in the US on 20 October 2026, picked by a rule fixed before we opened any tool |
| Tools | Spytrend Pro ($79), AdSpy ($149, our paid account; no separate review yet), Dropispy Premium, Minea Starter ($49), BigSpy Free |
| Sat out | PiPiADS, TrendTrack and PowerAdSpy, for the reasons in the results table |
| When | first look the day after launch; the full check with screenshots on 28 October, eight days after launch |
| Proof | each ✓ and ✗ in the 20-ad table opens its screenshot, except nine BigSpy results marked ¹ |
Ad spy tools tested: the results
Ranked by one thing: how many of the 20 new ads each tool held on 28 October.
| Tool | Access | Found | Delay, where the tool shows a date |
|---|---|---|---|
| Spytrend | Pro, $79/mo | 19 of 20 | 10 the same day, 6 a day later, 3 after two days |
| BigSpy | Free | 9 of 19 | all 9 on launch day |
| Minea | Starter, $49/mo | 4 of 20 | no date first seen; 8 of the 20 pages are not in Minea |
| AdSpy | $149/mo | 2 of 20 | a day later and two days later |
| Dropispy | Premium | 1 of 20 | two days later |
| PiPiADS | Trial | not tested | the trial hides every ad newer than 90 days |
| TrendTrack | Free | not tested | no ad search on the free plan; ads start at $89 |
| PowerAdSpy | Trial | not tested | our three-day trial from 8 October had ended |
One caveat changes the small numbers. IronPanda, No. 17, has run the same ad text since summer, so a match for it may be another copy with a new date. Without it the counts are 18, 8, 3, 1 and 0 in the same order.
All 20 ads, with the screenshot behind each result
Click a ✓ or ✗ to open the screenshot it comes from; click the number to see the ad in Meta’s Ad Library as we saw it on 21 October; the Library ID opens the ad in Meta’s Ad Library itself. “0d” means the tool shows the ad from its launch day, 20 October, “+1d” a day later; Minea shows no such date, so its ✓ is page and launch date only.
| # | Page · Meta Library ID | Spytrend | AdSpy | Dropispy | Minea | BigSpy Free |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Gymshark 1587496759241706 | ✓ 0d | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ 0d1 |
| 2 | True Classic 1652082022927628 | ✓ 0d | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ 0d1 |
| 3 | The Ridge 2320742418684992 | ✓ +2d | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ 0d1 |
| 4 | Dr. Squatch 1091682333482013 | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗1 |
| 5 | Quince 1856217965804248 | ✓ +1d | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗1 |
| 6 | AG1 by Athletic Greens 1126989003075555 | ✓ +1d | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ 0d1 |
| 7 | SKIMS 1382302973983689 | ✓ 0d | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗1 |
| 8 | UpNifty 1812217209803570 | ✓ +1d | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ 0d1 |
| 9 | Mary Parker, RN 1144879014683134 | ✓ +1d | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ 0d |
| 10 | OPUS Longevity 1110820841904995 | ✓ 0d | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| 11 | Italo Jewelry 28892504853705386 | ✓ +2d | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗1 |
| 12 | Lost Dutchman Leather Goods 4340995209482623 | ✓ +1d | ✓ +1d | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ 0d |
| 13 | Nextnecklace.com 2163508604376223 | ✓ +2d | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| 14 | Chubby Cable 1425835336404662 | ✓ 0d | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| 15 | BeloveGrace 2886054681772987 | ✓ 0d | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| 16 | Healifeco 2.0 3711076672382725 | ✓ 0d | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ | ✗ |
| 17 | IronPanda 1798349694820067 | ✓ 0d | ✓ +2d | ✓ +2d | ✓ | ✓ 0d |
| 18 | Mila & Rose 1137391325894947 | ✓ 0d | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| 19 | Kurt Geiger 2192687088298206 | ✓ 0d | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ 0d |
| 20 | Mountain World 1668783348196745 | ✓ +1d | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | —1 |
| Found | 19/20 | 2/20 | 1/20 | 4/20 | 9/19 |
1 BigSpy, ads 1–8 and 11: checked on 21–22 October, before the daily limit ran out; the screenshots of those searches were not kept. Ad 20 is not yet checked in BigSpy.
What each ad spy tool showed
Spytrend. It missed one ad, Dr. Squatch No. 4, a video that ran only on Instagram; the phrase search returned an older Dr. Squatch ad from 21 September. Of the ads it held, 10 were added on launch day, 6 a day later and 3 after two days. For three pages the phrase search failed and only the page name found the ad: BeloveGrace, whose phrase results stopped loading after 23 cards, Healifeco and IronPanda.
BigSpy Free. Every match was first seen on 20 October, the launch day. It found Mary Parker, Lost Dutchman, IronPanda and Kurt Geiger on 28 October, after Gymshark, True Classic, Ridge, AG1 and UpNifty in the first days. The free plan hides page names behind asterisks, so we matched by the visible part of the name and domain, and its daily searches ran out before ad 20.
Minea. Mary Parker, Lost Dutchman, Healifeco and IronPanda, each with ads published on 20 or 21 October. Minea shows no ad text on its cards and no date it first saw an ad, so these are page-and-date matches and delay cannot be measured. Eight of the 20 pages returned “No results for this search” for the week, so a page missing from Minea says little about whether the advertiser is active.
AdSpy. Lost Dutchman’s ad shows “Created on Oct 21, 2026”, a day after launch, and IronPanda’s Oct 22. For the other 18, Advertiser plus Ad Text returned nothing or only older ads, although several of those pages had newer ads in AdSpy.
Dropispy. Only IronPanda, after two days. Sorted by “Last seen”, its newest ads on 27 October were from 24 October, so its database ran at least three days behind: it suits ads that have been running a while, not this week’s launches.
PiPiADS, TrendTrack and PowerAdSpy sat out. The PiPiADS trial hides recent ads, so it cannot show a day-old ad. TrendTrack’s free plan opens shop search and shop cards but not ad search, which starts on Pro at $89 a month. Our PowerAdSpy trial ran for three days from 8 October and had ended before the ads launched. None of the three is counted as missing.
How we searched each tool
The rule was written down before the first search on 28 October and is the same for every tool:
- Search the ad’s text for a phrase from it, 4–6 words long, and narrow to the advertiser’s page wherever the tool allows it.
- A match is an ad from the same page, containing the phrase, with a date in the tool on or after 20 October.
- Where a tool shows the launch date on Facebook (Spytrend, Minea) we take a launch on 20–21 October; one day is the time-zone gap with New York. Where it shows only when it saw the ad (AdSpy, Dropispy, BigSpy), the delay is that date minus 20 October.
- If the phrase search found nothing, we searched by the page name, newest first, and looked for the phrase among that page’s ads.
- We screenshot the final screen either way: the matching ad with its date, or the empty or older result.
How that looked in each tool:
- Spytrend: search on spytrend.com with the launch-date filter 19–21 October, then the ad card with its “Launched on FB” and “Added” dates.
- AdSpy: two filters at once, Advertiser = the page and Ad Text = the phrase, sorted by Date.
- Dropispy: two filters at once, Page name and Text search, sorted by Last seen.
- Minea: the page name with the publication-date filter 19–22 October. Minea’s cards show no ad text, so a match there is page and date only.
- BigSpy Free: Exact Search for the phrase over the last 90 days. The free plan keeps the eCom category switched on and masks page names, and it ran out after ten searches.
How we picked the 20 ads
We fixed the rule on 21 October 2026 before checking any tool and did not change it mid-round.
- 7 brand ads. From a list of 15 well-known direct-to-consumer brands, in a fixed order, we took the first ad on each brand’s own page in the Meta Ad Library, United States, active, newest first, that started running on 20 October. Only 7 of the 15 brands launched a new ad that day.
- 13 small-shop ads. From Meta’s results for “free shipping”, then “shop now”, in Meta’s order, we opened each new page and took its first visible ad started on 20 October.
- Partner ads were skipped when the page was a creator’s (“Creator with Brand”), because tools file them under the creator.
Big brands run many copies of one ad under different Library IDs, and tools merge them, so a match is the ad’s text on that page from 20 October or later, not necessarily the same Library ID.
What this test does not measure
- One round, US ads, Meta only. TikTok and other countries are not in round 1.
- Active ads only. Ads switched off in their first day never reached our list, the same for every tool.
- Coverage and speed, not database size. A tool’s total ad count says nothing about whether it holds this week’s ads.
- Text search differs by tool. Some tools miss a phrase whose first word is joined to an emoji; that is why step 4, the page name, exists.
The next round starts with ads launched on 1 November 2026; this page will carry both rounds.
FAQ
What are ad spy tools?
Ad spy tools are searchable databases of other companies’ ads from Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and other networks, searched by text, advertiser, domain or date. Most are paid; BigSpy, Dropispy and Spytrend also have free plans. Meta’s own Ad Library is free but shows only what is running now.
Which ad spy tool finds new ads first?
In our test of 20 Meta ads launched on 20 October 2026, searched the same way in every tool on 28 October, Spytrend had 19 of 20, BigSpy’s free plan 9 of the 19 we could search, Minea 4, AdSpy 2 and Dropispy 1.
Are ad spy tools worth paying for?
Only if the plan you pay for opens what you need. In our test PiPiADS’s trial hid every ad newer than 90 days and TrendTrack’s free plan had no ad search, so neither could see a new ad, while BigSpy’s free plan found new ads on their launch day. Check a paid month on your own competitors before a yearly plan.
Can I check these results myself?
Yes. Each of the 20 Library IDs opens the ad in Meta’s Ad Library, and each ✓ or ✗ opens the screenshot it is based on. The exception is nine BigSpy results, ads 1–8 and 11, checked on 21–22 October before the daily limit ran out; those screenshots were not kept.