MagicBrief is gone. Here is where to go next.

MagicBrief shut down on July 31, 2026. If you are reading this, you probably got the wind-down email, watched your billing stop, and now have a creative workflow with a hole in it. This is an honest map of where to go, depending on what MagicBrief actually did for you.

Full disclosure before anything else: I am the founder of Peachblue, one of the tools on this list. I have tried to be straight about who each tool fits, including when that is not us. All prices were verified against live pricing pages on August 12, 2026, because a lot of the comparison content out there is months stale.

What happened to MagicBrief?

Canva acquired MagicBrief in mid-2025 and shut the standalone product down on July 31, 2026. The team and technology became Canva Grow, which Canva expanded into Canva Grow 2.0 at Cannes in June 2026. Grow is an ad creation, launch, and optimization layer inside Canva itself, covering Meta, TikTok, and LinkedIn, and it ships inside Canva plans (Pro at $18 and Business at $25 per user per month) rather than as a standalone product.

That answers the first question most former customers have: there is a successor, but it is a different kind of product. MagicBrief was built for people whose job is ads. Canva Grow is built for people whose job includes ads.

What did you actually use MagicBrief for?

Your replacement depends on which half of MagicBrief you lived in:

1. Research and swipe files. Saving competitor ads, building inspiration boards, briefing creators from winning examples.
2. Creative analytics. Connecting your Meta account and understanding which of your own creatives performed and why.

No single tool on this list is the best at both. MagicBrief itself was stronger on research than analytics, which shaped who loved it.

The alternatives at a glance

Prices verified August 12, 2026.

Canva Grow: the official successor

If your team already lives in Canva and your ads workload is creating and launching, Canva Grow is the path of least resistance. It inherits MagicBrief's insight engine, connects to Meta, TikTok, and LinkedIn, and costs nothing extra beyond the Canva plan you may already pay for.

What it is not: a media buyer's analytics tool. There is no deep creative-performance analysis, no agency reporting, and no way to interrogate why one concept beat another beyond surface metrics. If MagicBrief was your research or analytics tool rather than your creation tool, Grow will feel like a downgrade.

Choose Canva Grow if you are an SMB or generalist marketer, you already pay for Canva, and creation-to-launch speed matters more than analysis depth.

Foreplay: the research replacement

For swipe files and creative research, Foreplay is the strongest tool standing. Its discovery library is the largest in the category, the save-and-organize workflow is the most refined, and the Chrome extension makes collecting references frictionless. Basic starts at $49 per month billed annually ($59 monthly), with team workflow at $149 to $175 and agency tiers at $389 to $459. Creative analytics now ships in every tier through its Lens feature (brand coverage scales by plan), though the product remains research-first at its core.

Choose Foreplay if the thing you miss most is the swipe file. It is the closest one-to-one replacement for MagicBrief's research half.

Motion: the analytics incumbent, now firmly upmarket

Motion is the category-defining creative analytics product, and it earned that position: strong reporting, a large education and community layer, and attribution integrations. But Motion repriced in 2026. Entry is now $750 per month for accounts up to $50k monthly spend, with the Pro tier at $1,200. If you were on MagicBrief partly because Motion felt expensive at its old $250 entry price, that gap has tripled.

Choose Motion if your platforms are Meta, TikTok, YouTube, and LinkedIn and you want their ecosystem, Thumbstop, the summits, the courses, attached to your vendor relationship, at a $750 per month entry price. If your platforms include Google Ads or Amazon DSP, or you report to clients, Motion does not cover that at any tier.

Atria: research plus generation for Meta and TikTok

Atria combines creative research, analytics, and AI generation with an agent layer (Raya and Radar) on top. Core is $129 per month billed annually. Two honest caveats: the platform covers Meta and TikTok only, and the mid tier jumped roughly 80% in 2026 to $479 per month, with a Business tier at $959, so check current pricing against your growth plans before committing.

Choose Atria if you run Meta and TikTok only and want research, generation, and analytics in one place.

Peachblue: creative intelligence on your own ads, solo advertiser to agency

This is us, so weigh accordingly. Peachblue is the deepest analysis layer on this list for your own ads. It connects Meta, TikTok, Google Ads, and Amazon DSP, syncs every creative, and runs each one through AI analysis across 31 dimensions: hook style, emotional tone, format, CTA type, and more, with a written expert analysis and copy suggestions per creative. A composite score ranks everything from Top Performer to Underperformer, and perceptual fingerprinting recognizes the same creative across ads and platforms, even after re-crops and re-compression.

Scoring your ads is the floor, not the product. The Intelligence layer finds the patterns behind your winners, which hooks, tones, and formats keep beating the rest of your account, and clusters your creatives into archetypes, so the answer to "what should we make next" comes from your own data instead of a guess.

Then three things no other tool on this list does:

• Your ad data inside Claude. Agent Peach answers questions about your accounts in plain language, and Peachblue's MCP server puts the same tools into Claude, so your own cross-platform performance data, Amazon DSP included, works inside the AI you already use. Foreplay's MCP serves their inspiration library; ours serves your numbers.
• Brand Intel. Peachblue monitors Reddit for what people say about your brand, your competitors, and the topics you care about, reads the sentiment, and turns it into an editorial brief you can pull creative angles from. Nobody else in creative analytics touches this.
• Real agency infrastructure. The Agency tier at $1,499 runs multi-client workspaces with a client switcher, per-client reporting with agency margin applied, and DSP and CTV flight pacing across your whole roster. Motion, Atria, and Foreplay sell agency pricing tiers; none of them have per-client DSP reporting with margin handling, at any price.

Self-serve plans run from Starter at $79 through Scale at $499 for multi-platform teams; Power at $799 adds client-ready reports and pacing for in-house teams reporting to stakeholders. Details on pricing.

What we do not have today: an external ad library. Competitor ads comparison is shipping soon; if a deep swipe-file workflow is your immediate need, Foreplay covers it today and pairs well with Peachblue for performance.

Choose Peachblue if you want to know which of your creatives work, why, and what to make next, at any spend level; you run more than Meta and TikTok; you report to clients or stakeholders; or you want your ad data working inside Claude. From $79 per month on a self-serve plan.

How to decide in five minutes

• You mostly saved and organized competitor ads: Foreplay today; Peachblue's competitor ads comparison is shipping soon.
• You mostly made ads and launched them: Canva Grow.
• You mostly analyzed your own ad performance: Peachblue, from $79 self-serve to Power at $799 for stakeholder reporting.
• You are an agency managing multiple clients: Peachblue Agency. Multi-client workspaces, per-client reports with margin, and DSP/CTV pacing have no equivalent elsewhere on this list.
• You want the Motion ecosystem, Thumbstop, the summits, the courses, bundled with your vendor relationship: Motion. Their education layer is the best in the category. Worth knowing: most of it is free to everyone, whether or not you pay for the software.
• You are Meta plus TikTok only and want generation built in: Atria.

One last practical note: MagicBrief's export window closed with the shutdown, but if you kept CSV exports or board screenshots, every tool above can rebuild from them faster than starting cold. Whatever you pick, migrate your naming conventions and winning-ad archive first; the tool matters less than keeping that institutional memory intact.