Three different products hide under one search. This guide splits Smartly.io alternatives into creative automation, media buying and point tools, with prices.
Nubu Team··12 minute read
Search for Smartly.io alternatives and you get an odd harvest. Software directories rank Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Semrush and Jasper as replacements, which is a bit like recommending a spreadsheet to someone shopping for a camera: technically software, practically useless. The handful of vendor posts that stay on topic are thin, and none of them tells you the one thing that actually matters.
Here it is: three different kinds of product hide under the phrase "Smartly alternative", and until you know which one you are shopping for, every list is noise.
This guide segments the market honestly. It covers what Smartly.io actually is and roughly costs, the three slices hiding under the alternative label, and nine concrete options with real pricing wherever real pricing exists. Full disclosure before we start: we build Nubu, one of the tools below, and it competes in exactly one of the three slices. We will tell you which one, and we will also tell you when Smartly is simply the right answer.
Smartly.io is an enterprise AI advertising platform that unifies creative production, media buying and reporting across social channels and connected TV. Its own homepage title reads "Smartly | AI Advertising Platform", and the positioning is accurate: one contract covers the making of ads, the buying of media and the measurement of both.
Smartly publishes no price list. Pricing is quote-based and tied to a percentage of your ad spend. Third-party pricing guides put the floor at roughly 4,000 to 5,000 dollars per month and describe the platform as the right fit for advertisers spending 50,000 dollars or more per month on media. Its G2 rating sits around 4.4, the customer logos are genuinely enterprise, and the analyst coverage is real.
So let us concede the obvious up front. If your team spends at that level, has a platform operations function and runs proper procurement, Smartly is a genuine category leader, not an overpriced incumbent waiting to be disrupted. The reason to read on is not that Smartly is bad. It is that most people searching for alternatives do not need everything Smartly bundles, and they are about to price a bundle when they need a slice.
Strip the branding away and Smartly does three jobs. Every alternative on the market does one of them well, occasionally two, almost never all three. Decide which job you are hiring for before you book a single demo.
1. Creative automation platforms. These produce and version the ads: take a master template, feed it data and assets, and output hundreds of correct variants for every market, product and placement. Nubu lives here, alongside Celtra and Storyteq at the enterprise end, and Plainly for pure After Effects rendering. If phrases like "too many variants", "too many markets" or "the resizing is killing us" started your search, this is your slice. New to the category? Start with our plain-English primer on what creative advertising automation is.
2. Media buying automation. This optimises spend, bids and placements once the ads exist. It is the part of Smartly that Nubu deliberately does not do, and we will say so every time it comes up. Be aware that the free baseline here is strong: Meta's Advantage+ and Google's Performance Max already automate placement, bidding and budget allocation inside the platforms you buy from, at no software cost. Any paid media buying tool has to beat tools you already have.
3. Point tools for feed-driven catalogue ads. If your entire problem is turning a product feed into thousands of good-looking catalogue ads, a specialist will serve you better than a platform. Hunch and Marpipe are the two worth knowing.
Nubu competes in slice one, full stop. If slice two is your real need beyond the native tools, the honest answer is Smartly, one of its direct media buying rivals, or an agency. With that map in hand, here are the options.
Nubu: creative automation with prices on the page#
Nubu is our product, so read this entry as the maker's case, held to the same headings as everyone else.
Nubu is a creative advertising automation platform built around one strong opinion: your ads should come from your real templates, not from a web editor's approximation of them. Motion designers keep working in After Effects as usual; Nubu renders those actual project files at scale, so the variant for Poland looks exactly like the master your brand team signed off, in every frame.
Around the rendering sits the workflow. A node-based flow editor connects campaign data, CSV datasets, assets and templates into a visual pipeline you can read at a glance: pipe a spreadsheet of markets and offers in one end, get named, versioned renders out the other.
The back half of the workflow is where most creative tools stop and Nubu keeps going. Reviewers comment directly on rendered outputs, with roles controlling who can approve, so sign-off happens next to the work instead of in an email thread. Approved ads then move without re-uploading: delivery to Meta Ads and Google Ads arrives paused, and a human switches it live inside the ad platform. Teams that hand assets to an external buying team instead can export a ZIP with a media-buyer manifest describing every file, destination and UTM, so nothing gets lost between the people who made the ads and the people who run them.
On Business+, Nubu also ships an AI campaign builder assistant that drafts campaigns and whole flows as proposal cards a human reviews and approves; nothing applies itself. Every flow it offers has already been test-built before it reaches you, so an accepted proposal is one that genuinely builds, and the assistant cannot render, publish, spend or delete anything. It runs on your organisation's own OpenAI, Anthropic or Gemini key at raw provider prices with no margin added. The full detail is in our AI campaign builder write-up and the note on bringing your own AI keys.
Pricing is per seat, in pounds, VAT-inclusive, and printed on the pricing page rather than hidden behind a call:
Free: £0, for trying the whole workflow properly.
Starter: £29 per month plus £12 per seat.
Pro: £79 per month plus £24 per seat.
Business+: £199 per month plus £39 per seat, the tier that includes the AI campaign builder.
Yearly billing takes 20% off everything.
Who it is for: in-house and agency teams producing serious volumes of ad variants from real After Effects templates, who want production, review and delivery in one tool without enterprise procurement.
Standout strengths: genuine After Effects rendering, the node-based flow editor, CSV-driven versioning, review and approval with comments and roles, paused delivery to Meta and Google Ads, ZIP export with a media-buyer manifest, and pricing you can read. The feature tour covers the lot.
Cost shape: free tier, then transparent per-seat GBP plans from £29 per month plus £12 per seat.
Celtra is one of the longest-established names in creative automation, and it shows in the breadth: large-scale production of display, social and video variants, with the brand governance and collaboration features that big organisations demand. Where Nubu leans on After Effects as the source of truth, Celtra centres its own creative tooling, which suits teams standardising production across many internal brands and regions.
Who it is for: enterprise brands and their agencies producing very large variant volumes under strict brand control.
Standout strengths: scaled variant production, format breadth, governance and collaboration built for big teams.
Cost shape: no public pricing; demo-gated enterprise contracts.
Storyteq: creative automation inside a marketing ops group#
Storyteq covers templated video and banner production at enterprise scale, and after its merger with Papirfly it now sits inside a wider brand and content operations group. That makes it interesting for a specific buyer: the marketing organisation that wants creative automation as one module of a bigger content, brand and asset management stack rather than as a standalone tool.
Who it is for: enterprise marketing organisations buying creative automation as part of a broader operations platform.
Standout strengths: template-driven production at scale, the surrounding brand and content management suite.
Cost shape: no public pricing; demo-gated enterprise contracts.
Hunch: feed-driven paid social creative plus automation#
Hunch pairs feed-driven creative production with campaign automation for paid social, with a strong Meta focus. It sits between slices: it makes catalogue-driven creative and it automates launching it, which is why performance teams with large product feeds rate it. It is not trying to be a full cross-channel buying platform, and it is not trying to be a motion design pipeline either.
Who it is for: performance marketing teams running catalogue-heavy paid social who want creative generation and launch automation in one tool.
Standout strengths: feed-to-creative templates, automated campaign creation, localisation of catalogue creative at scale.
Marpipe specialises in catalogue ads: enriching product feeds so dynamic product ads stop looking like a white background with a price on it, plus multivariate testing to learn which creative elements actually perform. If your paid social is dominated by catalogue formats, this level of focus beats a general platform.
Who it is for: retailers and DTC brands whose spend concentrates in dynamic product and catalogue formats.
Plainly does one job: it renders After Effects templates programmatically. Connect a CSV or its API, and it turns your AE project into videos at whatever volume you feed it, from $69 per month as listed on its site. There is no flow editor, approval workflow or ad platform delivery; it is a rendering engine you build your own process around, which is exactly right for some teams.
Who it is for: teams with AE templates and developer capacity who need rendering, not an end-to-end workflow.
Standout strengths: focused scope, API-first design, the lowest published entry price in this guide.
Cost shape: public pricing, from $69 per month as listed.
If you are weighing a rendering engine against a full workflow platform, we wrote an honest head-to-head: Nubu vs Plainly.
The free baseline: Meta Advantage+ and Google Performance Max#
Before paying anyone for media buying automation, remember you already own some. Meta's Advantage+ and Google's Performance Max automate placements, bidding, budget shifting and a degree of creative recombination natively, and they are free: you pay for media, not software. The trade-off is control. You hand over assets and accept what the machine assembles, reporting is less granular than performance teams would like, and creative control is thin. They are also improving constantly, because Meta and Google want them to win.
Who they are for: every advertiser, because you already have them; and specifically smaller teams whose "Smartly need" is really just automated buying.
Standout strengths: free, native, no integration work, continuously upgraded by the platforms themselves.
Cost shape: no software fee at all; media spend only. This is the bar any paid media buying tool must clear.
Smartly.io itself: when staying is the right call#
An honest alternatives guide includes the incumbent. Choose, or stay with, Smartly when the following are true: your monthly media spend is comfortably past 50,000 dollars; you want creative production, media buying and reporting in one contract across social and CTV; you have the operations people to run a platform of this size; and consolidation itself is part of the value, because five tools with five logins is its own cost. In that world, the roughly 4,000 to 5,000 dollars per month that third-party guides cite is a rounding error against media spend, and the platform earns it.
We will repeat our own disclosure here: Nubu does not do media buying automation. If that capability is the core of your need, the alternatives are Smartly, its direct enterprise rivals, or the native tools above, not us.
Who it is for: enterprise advertisers spending 50,000 dollars plus per month who want the whole stack under one roof.
Standout strengths: genuine breadth across creative, buying and reporting, CTV reach, enterprise support and analyst-backed credibility.
Cost shape: quote-based, tied to a percentage of ad spend; no public price list.
First, what is your spend level? Below roughly 50,000 dollars per month in media, Smartly's economics simply do not fit, whatever a comparison chart says; third-party coverage consistently frames it as a platform for spend above that line. Pick the tool that serves your slice and revisit the bundle when your spend grows. Above that line, shortlist Smartly seriously and make the alternatives prove they beat it in your specific slice.
Second, which slice do you actually need? If ads are being made too slowly, in too few versions, with too many hand-finished resizes, you need creative automation: Nubu, Celtra or Storyteq depending on your size, or Plainly if you only need rendering. If spend allocation is the problem, exhaust Advantage+ and Performance Max before paying anyone, then look at Smartly's tier. If the whole problem is catalogue ads, go straight to Hunch or Marpipe. Buying a platform to solve a point problem is how shelfware happens.
Third, how do you feel about pricing you cannot see? Six of the nine options above will not tell you a price until you have sat through a demo. That is normal at enterprise scale, where pricing genuinely varies by contract, but it costs you weeks of evaluation time and it makes comparison quotes hard to trust. If your procurement process is one person with a company card, weight the transparent options accordingly: with Nubu you can price a five-seat team to the penny before you ever speak to us. And if AI features are on your checklist, apply one more transparency test: prefer tools where AI proposes and humans approve, and where you can see exactly what the AI is allowed to touch.
If your slice is creative automation, the ads themselves, produced from real After Effects templates and moved through review to paused delivery, that is the slice Nubu was built for. Every price is on the pricing page, and the free tier lets you run a real template through the whole workflow before paying anything. If your slice is media buying, take the concession in the spirit it is offered: start with the free native tools, and if you outgrow them, Smartly is a very good version of the thing it actually is.
