Someone in your market is running the same Facebook ad for four months. It costs money every day it runs. If it's still live, it's working. If you knew what it looked like, you'd know something worth knowing.
That's the basic logic behind Facebook ad spy tools: look at what competitors are running, how long they've been running it, and what angles they're testing. Duration is the signal. An ad that's been live for 90 days isn't an accident.
What these tools actually show you
The best spy tools surface competitor ad creatives, copy, targeting angles, and run duration. Some go deeper with engagement metrics, comments, and filtering by country or ad format. The useful ones let you filter precisely so you're not just browsing a firehose.
The main options
Meta Ad Library (free)
Free, official, and always current. You can search any advertiser's active ads across Facebook and Instagram. It's a reasonable first stop for a quick look at a competitor. The limitations are real though: no performance data, weak filters, and no way to save or organize anything you find. You're browsing, not researching.
BigSpy
A paid tool with a large database spanning multiple platforms. Good filters for engagement, date, and ad type. Works well for teams doing broad competitor research across categories. The breadth is its main selling point.
AdSpy
Where most serious ecommerce brands and affiliate marketers end up when they need real depth. Filters by country, ad text, likes, comments, and more. It's more expensive than BigSpy, but the filtering quality shows. If you're doing this regularly, it pays for itself in saved testing costs.
PowerAdSpy
Covers Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and a few others. Worth looking at if your research crosses platforms and you'd rather use one tool instead of switching between several.
Minea
Built specifically for ecommerce and dropshipping. Pulls ads from Facebook, TikTok, and Pinterest. If product research is your main use case, Minea is well-regarded for exactly that.
The part most teams handle badly
Finding good ads is one job. Saving and organizing them is a completely different one, and most teams do it poorly.
The pattern is familiar: screenshots in Slack threads, links buried in Notion docs, a folder structure that made sense in January. By the time someone needs to reference an ad for a brief or a campaign, it's effectively gone. You know it exists somewhere. You can't find it.
Spreshapp is built for the second half of this workflow. You save ads directly from the Meta Ad Library using the Spreshapp Chrome extension, tag them by format, hook type, platform, or funnel stage, and find them when you need them. Briefing a creative team, building a new campaign, trying to remember what angle worked six months ago: the reference library is actually there.
The spy tool finds the ad. Spreshapp makes sure it doesn't disappear into a Slack thread two weeks later.
A practical approach
Start with the free Meta Ad Library to get oriented. If you're doing serious volume research, AdSpy or BigSpy will get you there faster. Whatever you find, save it to Spreshapp, tag it, and share it with whoever is writing copy or building creative.
The value of a swipe file is that it grows. You stop reinventing the same angles every quarter and start building on what you already know works. That compounds, but only if the ads are actually findable.