Ad spy tools for coaches and consultants: 7 tools compared, with prices

An ad spy tool lets you see the ads other advertisers are running: the creative, the copy, the landing page and how long each ad has been live. Most tools pull from public sources such as Meta's Ad Library and add search, filters, saving and analysis. You pay for the time saved and the judgement.

The trouble for a coach or a consultant: most "best ad spy tools" lists are written for dropshipping. They rank tools by how fast they find a winning product. If you sell a programme, a course or a service, you need to know which offers in your market keep getting paid for, and why.

Disclosure: Pantheon is our product. We checked every price and feature below on each tool's own website on 6 November 2026, and we say where another tool fits you better than ours.

Prices as shown on each pricing page on 6 November 2026 (Whoscale, Foreplay, Atria, AdSpy, Minea), in the currency the page uses, before tax. Whoscale offers monthly, quarterly and annual billing and its page does not say which one the price refers to.

Foreplay comes up most, then Minea, then Atria and Whoscale. On 6 November 2026 we asked ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity five buyer questions about ad spy tools from a US location, 15 answers in all. One of them was "What is the best ad spy tool for coaches and course creators?". The counts:

Asked for tools not focused on e-commerce, two assistants still named Minea, which describes itself as an "All-In-One AI DropShipping Tool". And the pages the assistants cite are mostly comparison lists written by tool vendors. Read any "best of" list, this one included, knowing who wrote it.

One answer per question and assistant, collected on 6 November 2026. Answers change from day to day, so treat this as a snapshot, not a ranking.

1. Meta Ad Library: the free source behind most tools

Meta's Ad Library shows every active ad on Facebook and Instagram, with the date each one started running. It is free and needs no account. You can search by advertiser or keyword, filter by country, platform and format, and see every version of an ad.

What it lacks: it shows the ads that sell and the ones that burn money side by side, with no way to sort them by how long they have run. Our Meta Ads Library guide shows how to search it properly, and the free search builder writes the search for you. Start here before you pay for anything.

2. Pantheon: why an ad sells, adapted to your offer

Pantheon starts from your offer, not from a keyword. On the Pro plan it builds a radar for your offer with three lanes: your market, the best advertisers worldwide, and ideas from other industries. When you start it, an agent searches the Meta Ad Library in your countries and language and drops e-commerce, wrong languages and unrelated ads. Then it shows which persuasion mechanisms each ad uses (from a list of 22) and rewrites the ad you pick into 3 variants for your offer, without copying it.

Pantheon's plans: Starter costs €29/month (research tools, no AI), Pro €59/month (radar, agent and AI analysis) and Scale €259/month, with a 5-day free trial and no card. Pantheon suits coaches, consultants, trainers and B2B service businesses who want to know what to write next.

How each role uses Pantheon, from media buyers and copywriters to freelancers looking for clients, is on our Pantheon use cases page.

Pantheon's limits: it covers Meta only (Facebook and Instagram), and the curated public library is mostly French pages plus some US ones, while the agent searches your own market. It doesn't track funnels or organic content.

3. Whoscale: course creators, their ads and their funnels

Whoscale is built around course creators and coaches: its site says it tracks over 50,000 of them. Beyond Meta ads it maps funnels (with filters for tech stacks such as Skool, GoHighLevel and ClickFunnels) and organic content. Its pricing page lists Starter at $40/month (funnels and creators, no ads), Pro at $68/month with ads and organic content, and Business at $110/month for 5 users. You can start with a free account and no card.

If you want to see a competitor's whole path, from ad to webinar to sales page, Whoscale covers more of it than Pantheon does. Its pricing page doesn't list a feature that rewrites an ad for your own offer. Full comparison: Whoscale alternative for coaches.

4. Foreplay: swipe files for creative teams

Foreplay started as a swipe file and grew into a library: its Discovery counter showed about 54.7 million ads on 6 November 2026, and its Chrome extension saves ads from the Meta Ad Library, TikTok, LinkedIn and YouTube Shorts. Basic costs $59/month ($49 on the yearly plan) for one user; competitor tracking (Spyder) starts with Workflow at $175/month. The 7-day trial asks for a card.

Foreplay suits teams that save and share hundreds of ads across platforms. For a solo coach, much of what it offers goes unused, and tracking competitors costs three times the entry plan. Full comparison: Foreplay vs Pantheon.

5. Atria: AI creative for brand teams

Atria pairs a large ad library with AI tools that write concepts, scripts and copy and generate images. Core costs $219/month, or $129/month billed yearly, with 4,000 AI credits and 50 followed brands. The plans are described as being for "small teams", "growing teams" and "scaled marketing teams".

Atria fits a brand or an agency with an ad budget and a creative workflow to feed. For one person selling a programme, the entry price is high.

6. AdSpy: the big Facebook and Instagram search engine

AdSpy calls itself the largest searchable database of Facebook and Instagram ads. You can search ad copy, landing page URLs, advertiser names and even the comments under ads, and filter by how long an ad has run, by landing page technology or by affiliate network. It costs $149/month.

AdSpy's filters were built with affiliate marketers in mind. You get raw search power and do the judging yourself: AdSpy won't tell you why an ad works.

7. Minea: built for dropshipping

Minea describes itself as an "All-In-One AI DropShipping Tool": product listings, shop listings, brand tracking and AI analysis of ads, from $49/month.

If you sell a service, most of Minea's results won't concern you. Minea still shows up in AI answers for coaches, which is why it is on this list. More in our Minea alternative for service businesses.

Start free, then pay only for the step you are missing. For most coaches and consultants, that step is understanding why an ad sells, not finding more ads. Check five things before you subscribe:

1. Does it filter out e-commerce? If half the results are t-shirts and supplements, you will spend your time scrolling past them.
2. Does it show how long an ad has run? Nobody pays for months for an ad that loses money. Duration is the strongest public signal of what sells, though not a guarantee.
3. Does it explain the ad, or only show it? A swipe file tells you what others did. You still need the reason, or you copy the surface and miss what made it work.
4. Does it start from your offer? A tool that starts from a keyword returns the whole market. One that starts from your offer returns the pages that matter to you.
5. Does the price fit your ad budget? A €59 tool makes sense next to €20 a day of ad spend. A $219 one usually needs a team or a client paying for it.

A quick way to test any tool in 5 minutes: open the Meta Ad Library, find the best-known coach in your field and look at the start dates of their ads. The ones running for months are the ones that sell. A good tool should find those for you, in your market, without that coach's name.

Copying a competitor's ad word for word is risky (their copy and images are protected) and rarely works: you take the surface and leave behind what made it sell. Transfer the mechanism instead.

1. Pick an ad that has been running for at least 30 days.
2. Name what it does: a before-and-after story, a client's result, a free resource, a direct challenge to a belief.
3. Write your own version of that move, with your offer, your client and your words.
4. Test it next to your current ad, with the same budget.

That is the step Pantheon automates on the Pro plan: it names the mechanisms in the ad and writes 3 variants for your offer, in your Brand Voice.