.png)
.png)
For years, Smartly was positioned as an all-in-one solution for paid automation. It’s polished, it’s enterprise-ready, and it often comes up in conversations when marketing leaders are looking for a way to simplify campaign management.
However, brands are actively looking for Smartly alternatives because the needs of ecommerce teams have evolved. The tool that was once sufficient for managing paid automation no longer addresses the most important challenge: how to turn product feeds into creative that performs across channels like Meta, TikTok, Google Shopping, and the growing number of AI-driven discovery surfaces.
This is where Marpipe has carved out a clear identity as the leading Smartly alternative. While Smartly continues to focus on campaign management, Marpipe has built its platform on two core pillars: free product feed management and creative automation for catalog ads. Together, these give brands control over the two levers that now matter most: data and design.
Smartly still has recognition and reputation. It’s well funded, widely used, and often the first name that comes up when large marketing teams evaluate automation tools. Yet, in conversations with performance marketers, certain frustrations come up again and again.
The first is cost. Smartly’s pricing scales with ad spend, which means that for brands aggressively investing in acquisition, fees can balloon quickly. The second is creative limitations. While Smartly handles campaign distribution, it doesn’t specialize in creative production or testing, particularly in the catalog ad space, where personalization and scale are critical. The third is reliance on other tools. Teams that use Smartly often still need to pay for separate product feed management solutions, adding complexity to the tech stack. And finally, in order to even see Smartly’s product, you need to schedule meetings with enterprise sales reps. If you want to use it, you’ll be asked to sign a long-term contract. And if you want to learn how it actually works, you’re told to book a separate meeting with an engineer.
When budgets are under pressure and efficiency matters more than ever, these challenges leave brands wondering whether Smartly is the right long-term fit. Alternatives like Marpipe stand out precisely because they address the creative and feed gaps that Smartly leaves open.
Ecommerce advertising has entered a new era. The battleground is no longer media buying, budget allocation, or bid strategies. Those are table stakes. The question that determines whether a brand grows or stalls is simple: Do your products surface in the right moments of discovery?
Consumers are no longer scrolling through ads passively. They’re searching actively, but through new interfaces. With conversational AI and large language model (LLM) search now woven into shopping platforms, people don’t look for “brand X moisturizer.” They ask natural questions:
Behind the scenes, algorithms don’t improvise answers. They query structured product feeds. A clean, validated, and enriched feed acts as the connective tissue between your catalog and the AI’s response. If your data is incomplete, misaligned, or poorly maintained, you disappear from consideration.
That makes feed management not just an advertising workflow, but the foundation of discoverability, and whether or not your brand shows up when buying intent is highest.
At the same time, creative execution has taken on equal importance. Catalog ads, once seen as a retargeting utility, have become the default performance format across Meta, TikTok, Google Shopping, and increasingly even retail media networks. Creative automation now determines whether those surfaced products earn the click. A sharp feed without compelling creative is wasted potential. Conversely, beautiful creative layered on a broken feed never gets seen. The two are interwoven into each other, and inseparable.
The winning formula isn’t buying smarter, it’s feeding cleaner and creating faster.
And this is exactly the gap that Smartly hasn’t been able to close. Smartly’s roots are in campaign management and media buying efficiency. It was built for an era when optimization meant shaving points off CPMs or setting rules-based bidding. That mattered when ad delivery was the bottleneck. But today, delivery is automated and commoditized. What’s scarce, as we mentioned, is the quality of your feed and the adaptability of your creative.
The divide between Smartly and Marpipe is more than a feature checklist, it’s a reflection of how ecommerce advertising itself has evolved. Smartly grew up in the era when media buying was the biggest bottleneck. Managing spend across Facebook, Instagram, and other platforms was complex, and automation around campaign setup, pacing, and budget allocation was a breakthrough. For large media teams juggling millions in spend, Smartly’s automation offered efficiency.
We’ve established that Smartly’s foundation is in distribution. Its tools revolve around helping media teams set up campaigns more efficiently, automate rules around spend, and push creative assets into multiple platforms at once. For a period of time, this was groundbreaking. Especially for large performance teams managing millions in monthly budgets. Marpipe, on the other hand, begins not with distribution, but with discovery. Marpipe prioritizes questions like “how do we launch campaigns faster?” and “will our products surface in the right moments of intent?” By prioritizing feed hygiene and catalog ad optimization, Marpipe ensures brands are discoverable when AI-driven search and algorithmic placements surface products to shoppers.
The second major difference is in how each platform treats the product feed. Smartly operates under the assumption that your catalog is already in good shape. It provides some basic functionality for linking feeds to campaigns, but it does little to help enrich or repair the data itself. Marpipe takes the opposite approach, providing a free feed management tool designed to clean, validate, and enrich product data before it ever enters a campaign. This means product titles, descriptions, images, and attributes are optimized for visibility across Shopify, Meta, TikTok, Google Shopping, and beyond. For brands, this type of infrastructure determines whether their catalog even appears when a shopper asks a conversational search engine for a specific product.
Where Smartly and Marpipe diverge most visibly is in creative. Smartly was built to rotate ads at the campaign level, offering efficiency in asset deployment but not much in the way of catalog-specific creative. Marpipe specializes in this space, focusing squarely on the automation of catalog ad creative. It allows brands to generate product-level video, create AI-driven product descriptions and copy, and even understand which SKUs are your best performers versus lower performers that need optimization. The result is that when a shopper encounters an ad, the product is framed within high-quality, performance-ready creative that drives clicks. In 2025, this is the difference between visibility that converts and visibility that falls flat.
The final pillar is optimization. Smartly’s optimization features focus primarily on pacing and budget distribution at the campaign level. It can help prevent overspending, rebalance spend across channels, or execute rules that shift dollars as campaigns progress. But what it doesn’t do is address the single most common source of wasted spend in catalog advertising: poor-performing products.
Marpipe’s product optimization tool is different because it happens inside the catalog itself. The platform connects performance data directly to your product sets, making it possible to filter out SKUs that drag down results. That could mean removing the bottom 30% of sellers, excluding products with high return rates, or cutting out SKUs that burn ad spend without generating revenue. In practice, this means dollars are concentrated on the products that actually move the needle i.e. best sellers, high-margin items, and those with healthy engagement metrics, while underperformers are automatically suppressed.
The result is a tighter, more efficient feedback loop. Instead of optimizing only at the media level, Marpipe ensures optimization happens at the product level, where it directly impacts ROAS. For marketers, this approach shifts optimization from a blunt instrument into a precision tool, ensuring every dollar of catalog ad spend works harder.
While Marpipe stands out as the most complete Smartly alternative in 2025, there are other platforms that sometimes enter the conversation depending on a brand’s specific needs. Each has strengths in a narrow area, but none fully close the gap between feed health, catalog-specific creative automation, and product-level optimization the way Marpipe does.
Socioh is often the first step for smaller Shopify brands. It’s lightweight, easy to install, and gets a catalog campaign live quickly. For early-stage brands with limited budgets and a relatively small catalog, this can feel like a win. But Socioh’s simplicity is also its ceiling. As soon as a brand begins to scale their SKUs, spend, or a multi-channel distribution strategy, the cracks show. Feed enrichment is minimal, creative testing is limited, and optimization doesn’t extend beyond campaign toggles. This makes it a stepping stone rather than a long-term solution. See our full breakdown in Socioh Alternatives.
Hunch Ads pushes further into creative automation, offering templated ad design that saves time for smaller teams. The limitation is that Hunch stops at the creative layer. Without integrated feed management, it can’t guarantee that the products surfaced by the algorithm are optimized for discovery. Creative without feed structure is decoration on shaky infrastructure. Marpipe outperforms by marrying the two—ensuring clean data and creative automation work in tandem. Read more in Hunch Ad Alternatives.
Abyssale focuses on automated design generation, particularly for banner-style campaigns. It’s attractive for marketers who need high volumes of static assets across many channels. But Abyssale is not catalog-native. It was built for design efficiency, not performance efficiency, and lacks the product feed integration that fuels visibility in catalog ads. Brands using Abyssale may speed up creative production, but they’ll still miss the performance upside that comes from feed-driven discoverability. See Abyssale Alternatives.
ROI Hunter is often framed as a performance platform for large-scale ecommerce advertisers. It does provide data integrations and product performance insights, but its strength lies in analytics and dashboards rather than creative execution. ROI Hunter helps marketers see which products are working, but it doesn’t automate the creative or feed side of the equation. This makes it useful for reporting, but incomplete as a solution for brands that need both visibility and engagement. Read more in ROI Hunter Alternatives.
Confect.io is a niche player focused on automating product catalog creatives, especially for retailers that need templated ad designs. It fills a specific gap for smaller teams that want faster design turnover without investing in full-scale automation. But Confect.io stops short of feed optimization and doesn’t offer the performance-driven product set filtering that Marpipe brings. Creative without feed structure only solves half the problem. Check out our full breakdown in Confect.io Alternatives.
When taken together, these alternatives represent pieces of the puzzle: Socioh as a starter tool, Hunch and Confect.io for creative templates, Abyssale for banner generation, and ROI Hunter for analytics. Each offers value in a narrow lane. But none combine feed integrity, creative automation, and performance-driven optimization in one system.
That’s why Marpipe consistently outperforms. It doesn’t just bolt onto one stage of the process, it connects the full chain from feed to creative to optimization. For brands serious about growth in a discovery-first environment, Marpipe isn’t just an alternative to Smartly. It’s the upgrade the entire category has been waiting for.
Smartly earned its reputation by helping big brands manage media buying at scale. But ecommerce has changed. Performance no longer lives in spreadsheets and budgets—it lives in product feeds and creative execution. That’s where Marpipe separates itself.
With a flat-fee model, free feed management, and catalog-first creative automation, Marpipe gives marketers control where it matters most. You don’t need contracts, meetings, or managed services to get started. You can simply log in, optimize your catalog, and launch ads that convert.
For teams weighing Smartly alternatives, the choice comes down to philosophy. Do you want an enterprise platform that manages your spend, or a feed-and-creative platform that puts the power in your hands? In 2025, the brands winning on Meta, TikTok, and Google Shopping are the ones that prioritize agility, self-serve tools, and catalog performance.
Get started with Marpipe’s free product feed management tool and see why more brands are switching.
