Efekto vs Arcads vs AdCreative vs Madgicx: who actually runs your ads?

Every week someone asks how Efekto compares to a tool they already pay for. The honest answer is usually “it doesn’t, they do different jobs” - but that is not a helpful answer, so here is the longer one. We looked closely at three of the tools that come up most, and put the whole field into a capability matrix at /compare. This is the narrative version.

Arcads: the actor

Arcads makes UGC-style video: you give it a script, it gives you a convincing person reading it, with captions, translations and b-roll if you want them. The actor library is large and the output is good. It does not publish anything, manage a budget or decide whether the video earned a second day. It is a supplier. If you have a media buyer, Arcads makes their week easier. If you do not, you now have twenty videos and the same problem you had before.

Pricing is not on their site; third-party reviews report a Starter plan at $110 a month for ten videos and Creator at $220 for twenty, as of mid-2026. Roughly eleven dollars a video, which is fair for what it is.

AdCreative.ai: the generator with a score

AdCreative produces static creatives from a brand kit - many of them, cheaply - and attaches a predicted performance score to each. Starter is $39 a month for ten download credits, Professional $249 for fifty. It has grown video generators and competitor insights around the core, and it can connect to your Facebook and Google accounts.

What it does not do is run the campaign. There is no morning where it reads the leads, pauses what lost and protects what won. The score is a prediction made before the money is spent. That is a useful prior. It is not a verdict. And it has no idea which of the resulting leads your sales team qualified, because nothing tells it.

Madgicx: the buyer’s cockpit

Madgicx is the closest of the three to what we do, and it is worth being precise about the gap. It sits on top of Ads Manager with an ad launcher, audience tooling, automation rules that pause and scale on platform metrics, an AI ad analyzer and, more recently, an “AI Marketer”. Pricing scales with your Meta spend; reviews report about $99 a month under $2,500 in spend, rising to about $329 at $20–30k, plus $49 for server-side tracking. You see your own price after you connect an account.

It makes a media buyer faster. It does not remove the need for one: someone still writes the offer-specific copy, decides which video to make, sets the rule thresholds, reads the dashboard and answers for the result. And the rules judge on Meta’s own cost per result. A cheap form fill and a customer look identical to them.

What “runs your ads” means

For us it means one engine that does the whole loop and is accountable for the number at the end of it. Efekto writes the hooks and copy from your offer profile. It renders the statics, the talking head and the voiceover spot. It publishes them, paused, into your own ad account. At six in the morning it reads yesterday and decides: kill, refresh, scale, hold. It writes every decision down with the number that caused it. And it takes a second signal nobody else takes - which leads your team qualified and won - back to Meta through the Conversions API and back into the generator.

• Three rails you will not find in a rule builder: at least one ad set always stays live; ads younger than two days are never judged; a set with five or more lifetime leads gets a new release instead of a kill.
• Winners are frozen: no top-ups can enter an ad set that has proven itself. We learned that one at 99.48 zł ($27.63).
• Every angle carries the cost per lead it actually produced, including the expensive ones, labelled, so nobody rediscovers them with money.

When you should not pick Efekto

If you already buy media well and only need video assets, Arcads or Creatify will serve you at a fraction of the price. If you only want a hundred static variations to test by hand, AdCreative is the cheap, sensible choice. If you run an enterprise team across ten channels and a procurement process, look at Smartly. Efekto is for one brand, or an agency of small brands, that needs the buyer itself - and wants it judged on customers, not clicks.