Compare · MagicBrief

MagicBrief alternative after the July 2026 shutdown

MagicBrief shut down on July 31, 2026 at 8 PM EST. The team joined Canva, and the ad workflow they built now lives inside Canva Grow, which is aimed at creating, launching and analyzing your own ads. That is a different job from the one most MagicBrief users did every day: pulling up what rival brands are running right now, filtering it by format and angle, and saving the good ones into a client folder. If that was your workflow, Canva Grow is not a like-for-like swap, and the research half of your week needs a new home.

AdEye covers part of that half, and it is fairer to be precise about which part. It reads the Google Ads Transparency Center: enter a competitor brand name or domain and you get their live Google ads in one searchable feed, each showing how long it has been running, so the creatives a brand keeps funding stand out from the tests. Paid plans AI-tag every creative by hook, angle and format, and you save what you like into a swipe file. There is a free plan with 10 searches a month, and paid plans start at $32 per month billed yearly, or $39 month to month, with no sales call.

The limits up front, because you should know them before you migrate: AdEye reads the Google Ads Transparency Center only. It does not cover Meta, TikTok, LinkedIn, native or push networks, it does not estimate spend in dollars, and search works by advertiser, so a brand name or domain rather than a niche keyword.

Ad Intelligence Feed

Live Google data

Enter a brand or a domain

Searching the Google Ads Transparency Center...

Try:

Public Google Ads Transparency data. Nothing behind a login.

Open your swipe file

Google Ads Transparency has no ads on record for that search. Google indexes ads by advertiser, so the brand's exact domain works best — for example nike.com.

Google Ads Transparency has no ads on record for . That is an answer about the brand, not a problem with the search: they are not running Google ads that Google publishes, or they advertise under a different registered name.

We could not reach Google Ads Transparency just now, so this is not a result about that brand, we simply could not look. Please try again in a moment. This search has not been counted against your allowance.

Open your swipe file

free left ·

See the comparison

Live Google Ads Transparency data · Run length · Public data only

MagicBrief was a creative intelligence platform for DTC brands and agencies, combining a competitor ad library with briefing and creative analytics. It shut down on July 31, 2026 after the team joined Canva. AdEye covers the Google slice of that research workflow: a live feed of public Google ads ranked by run length, AI-tagged by hook and angle on paid plans, with a swipe file, self-serve from $32 per month.

Side by side

AdEye vs MagicBrief, honestly

A fair look at what each does well. Both are capable tools. Here is where they differ.

What matters	AdEye	MagicBrief
Available today	Yes, live and self-serve	No, shut down July 31, 2026 at 8 PM EST
Competitor ad library	Google Ads Transparency Center only	Was the core of the product, and broader
Where it went	Not going anywhere	Team joined Canva; workflow folded into Canva Grow
Creative AI tagging by hook and angle	Yes, on every ad, on paid plans	Yes, this was a strength
Briefing and creative production	No, research only	Yes, briefs and creative workflow
Estimated competitor ad spend	No, uses run length instead	No public spend estimates either
Current published pricing	$39/mo, $99/mo, $299/mo (less billed yearly)	None, the site came down with the shutdown
Best suited for	Media buyers, DTC brands and agencies researching Google ads	Was brands and agencies wanting research plus briefing

Comparison reflects general, publicly understood positioning. Capabilities change, so check each product for the latest. MagicBrief is a trademark of its owner, used here for fair comparison.

Why marketers pick AdEye

The ad spy tool that shows you the why

The research half, for one platform

MagicBrief bundled two jobs: researching what competitors run, and briefing your own creative off the back of it. Canva Grow inherits the making-and-measuring side. AdEye takes a slice of the researching side and does nothing else, which is why it is cheaper and faster to work in. Search a brand or a domain, get its live Google ads, sort by run length, filter by hook, angle or format on a paid plan, and save the keepers.

The Google tab, turned into a search

Google publishes its Ads Transparency Center, which is browsable but slow to work in: you page through an advertiser's ads with no sorting by how long each has run and no way to file the good ones. AdEye queries the same source and returns it as a sortable feed with run length on every result and a swipe file behind it. That is the tab it replaces. It does not replace the Meta or TikTok tabs, because AdEye does not read those libraries.

An honest signal instead of a fake spend number

No public ad library publishes what a US commercial advertiser actually spent, so any tool showing you a dollar figure is modeling it. AdEye does not. It reads the one thing you can verify directly in Google's own record: how long a creative has been running. A creative in its ninth week is being funded. One that ran four days and vanished was a test that failed. That signal is what tells you which competitor ads are worth studying.

Migrate this week, not next quarter

MagicBrief users lost access on a fixed date, which is a bad position to be in with client work booked. AdEye is self-serve: you sign up, search your first competitor and have a swipe file started inside ten minutes, with no demo call, no annual commitment and no onboarding period. Plans run $39, $99 and $299 per month, or $32, $79 and $239 when billed yearly, so an agency can put a team on it without a procurement conversation.

Good questions

MagicBrief vs AdEye, answered

It already has. MagicBrief shut down on July 31, 2026 at 8 PM EST, and its own site confirms billing was cancelled so users would not be charged again. The team joined Canva. If you are searching for this now, you are looking for a replacement rather than a workaround, because the platform is no longer accessible.

MagicBrief was acquired by Canva, and the team rebuilt their ad workflow inside Canva as an end-to-end flow for creating, launching and measuring ads. The standalone MagicBrief product was then retired on July 31, 2026. So the people and the creative-workflow ideas continued at Canva; the standalone tool you logged into did not.

Only partly, and not for competitor research. Canva describes the new workflow as creating, launching and analyzing your own ads, which covers the briefing and performance side of what MagicBrief did. Searching rival brands, filtering their live creatives and building a competitor swipe file is a different job, and that is the piece AdEye covers for Google.

It depends which half you used, and you will probably need more than one tool. For seeing what a rival advertises on Google, with a swipe file, AdEye starts at $32 per month. For Meta and TikTok research with heavy team collaboration, Foreplay is the closest paid rival. For creative briefing and production workflow, Canva Grow is the direct continuation. There is no single tool that rebuilds all of MagicBrief.

MagicBrief no longer publishes pricing, because its pricing page came down with the shutdown, so treat any figure quoted elsewhere as unverified. AdEye publishes its prices openly: $39 per month for Starter, $99 for Pro and $299 for Agency, or $32, $79 and $239 respectively when billed yearly. There is a free plan with 10 searches a month, and no sales call.

Not after the shutdown date. Access ended on July 31, 2026, so anything not exported beforehand is gone. If you are rebuilding a swipe file from scratch, the practical shortcut is to list the brands you were tracking, search each one in AdEye, and re-save their current live Google ads. That gets you a working library for that platform again in an afternoon.

No, and this is the main thing to check before you migrate. AdEye reads the Google Ads Transparency Center only. It does not cover Meta, TikTok or LinkedIn, and it does not cover native or push networks such as Taboola and Outbrain. If Meta creative research was central to your MagicBrief use, you need a Meta-focused tool alongside it.

No, and no honest tool can for ordinary US commercial ads. Google publishes spend ranges only for political and social-issue advertising. AdEye reports what is verifiable instead: how long each creative has been running, which is the signal that actually tells you whether a competitor is scaling something.

No. AdEye is a web app you log into, not a browser extension, so there is nothing to install and it works the same on any machine your team uses. Queries run server side against the Google Ads Transparency Center, so no browser permissions and no page scraping are involved.

Most teams are productive the same day for the Google half. Sign up, enter the competitor brands or domains you were already tracking, and AdEye pulls their live Google ads into one feed. The part that takes longest is deciding which creatives you want to save, since MagicBrief boards could not be carried across.

Yes. Everything in the feed comes from the Google Ads Transparency Center, the official public record Google publishes of the ads it serves. Nothing is scraped from behind a login and no private account data is touched. Looking at competitor advertising in that library is exactly what it was built for.

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