MagicBrief has shut down. Here is where to go next.

MagicBrief shut down on 31 July 2026 at 8pm EST. Canva acquired the company in June 2025, the team moved across to build Canva Grow, and the standalone product was switched off. Billing was cancelled when the shutdown was announced, so there is nothing left to unwind. The good news, and the part most people get wrong: your Meta ad history did not go with it. Here is what happened, what you can still recover, and the five best replacements compared.

Where to go, by the part of MagicBrief you used

First, you did not lose your ad data

The thing almost everyone assumes after a shutdown is that the history went down with the product. Here it did not, and this is worth two minutes of your time before you start comparing anything.

MagicBrief connected to your ad accounts. It never held the underlying numbers. Your spend, your results and your creative performance have been sitting inside Meta the entire time, and they are still sitting there today. MagicBrief said so in its own shutdown FAQ: your campaign data, spend and creative performance all remain in your ad platforms and are completely unaffected, and you can connect those accounts to any other analytics tool at any time.

So when you move to a new tool, the history comes with it rather than starting from a blank page today. How far back you can see depends on the tool and the plan you land on. With Wilow the free plan reads your last 30 days, and Pro backfills 12 months of performance and activity the moment you upgrade, so the deeper window fills itself in.

Two things genuinely are gone. Any Insights report you did not export as a CSV before 31 July, and your Inspire collections, meaning the competitor ads you had saved. MagicBrief never offered a bulk export for those, because those ads were other people's creative rather than yours. Rebuilding that swipe file is the one real job the shutdown actually left you.

Start for free No credit card required, and it takes about two minutes to set up.

What happened to MagicBrief

MagicBrief was a creative intelligence tool for Meta advertisers. It tracked ad performance, held a searchable library of competitor ads, and turned what was working into briefs for creative teams. Canva announced its acquisition of the Sydney startup on 17 June 2025, and the team joined Canva full time.

For the following year MagicBrief kept running as its own product while that team built Canva Grow, a new ads and creative analytics workflow inside Canva. With Canva Grow live, MagicBrief closed on 31 July 2026, and the platform is no longer accessible.

Canva has been upfront that Canva Grow is a net-new product built on the same DNA rather than a direct port, so parts of the workflow you knew do not carry across one to one. That is the whole reason people are still searching for a MagicBrief alternative weeks after the lights went out, rather than simply following the team.

The five alternatives, compared

Prices are the published starting price for each tool, checked against our own competitor tracking. Every one of these does a different part of what MagicBrief did, which is why no single row wins outright.

Sources: each tool's published pricing page, plus our own competitor tracking. MagicBrief's figure is what it charged before it closed. Motion and Madgicx price on your ad spend, so the entry figure rises as you scale.

The five, in detail

1. Wilow

Wilow is creative analytics built specifically for Meta advertisers. It labels every ad in your account by what the creative actually is, its content style (UGC, product shot, demo) and its messaging theme (benefit-led, social proof, urgency), then ranks them all on a Creative Leaderboard so you can see what is genuinely winning rather than guessing.

If you used MagicBrief to work out which ads to scale and which to cut, this is the part you are missing, and AI Creative Tagging is the closest equivalent to its creative labelling. The free Ad Library covers the other half: search any brand's live Meta ads with no login, and save the ones you want, which is how you rebuild the Inspire collections you could not export.

Free is $0 forever with no credit card and reads your last 30 days. Pro is $49 a month flat and backfills 12 months.

The catch: Meta only. If you are buying on TikTok or YouTube as well and need those in the same report, look at Motion instead.

Start for free No credit card required.

2. Canva Grow

Canva Grow is where the MagicBrief team went and where parts of the product continue. If your team already designs in Canva, it is the lowest-friction move by a distance: create, launch and analyse ads without leaving the tool your designers already live in. It covers Meta and TikTok for both publishing and analytics.

The catch: Canva describes Grow as a net-new product rather than a port of MagicBrief, so treat it as a new tool to evaluate on its own merits rather than a like-for-like migration. Check the competitor research side against how you actually used Inspire before you commit the team to it.

3. Foreplay

Foreplay is a creative workflow tool built around a swipe file. Save the ads you like with the browser extension, organise them into boards, track competitor accounts, and turn saved inspiration into structured briefs for creators. If you used MagicBrief mainly for inspiration and briefing rather than for performance numbers, this is the closest match in the market.

The catch: it is a pre-production tool rather than a performance one. Creative analytics and the brief builder sit on higher tiers, and there is no free plan to test it on.

4. Motion

Motion covers more platforms than MagicBrief did, adding YouTube and LinkedIn alongside Meta and TikTok, and offers strong reporting for agencies and larger teams. If your team needs TikTok, YouTube or LinkedIn analytics sitting alongside Meta in one report, this is the pick, and the reporting depth is genuinely built for people managing many accounts.

The catch: the price. The entry Starter plan is $750 a month for brands spending up to $50k a month on ads, and it rises from there, so the multi-platform coverage has to be worth roughly fifteen times the Wilow Pro price to you.

5. Madgicx

Madgicx is an all-in-one Meta automation platform with creative tagging, audience management and AI-driven media buying. If you want the AI to manage campaigns rather than just report on them, it is the option on this list that actually does that.

The catch: it is built for agencies at significant spend, and the price scales with what you spend rather than staying flat.

Five more worth knowing

Switching from MagicBrief

If you were on MagicBrief, you are the person this was built for, and we would rather you spent twenty minutes with us than three weeks comparing spreadsheets. On a short call we will:

• Set up your Meta account so your leaderboard has real ads in it on day one rather than being empty, and tell you straight whether the free 30-day window is enough for how you work or whether you need Pro's 12 months.
• Rebuild the swipe file you could not export, using the free Ad Library to find and save the brands you were tracking in Inspire.
• Set up your creative labels so the tagging matches how your team actually talks about ads.

Free, no obligation, and if Foreplay or Canva Grow is the better fit for how you work we will tell you so on the call.

Book the switching call, or start for free and have a look around first.

Questions people are asking

When exactly did MagicBrief shut down?

31 July 2026 at 8pm EST. After that date and time the platform stopped being accessible. Billing was cancelled when the shutdown was first announced, so no one has been charged since.

Did I lose my ad data?

No. MagicBrief connected to your ad accounts but never stored the underlying numbers, so your spend, results and creative performance all remain in Meta and can be read by any other analytics tool you connect. What is genuinely gone is any Insights report you did not export as a CSV before the deadline, and your saved Inspire collections, which never had a bulk export.

Is Canva Grow the same as MagicBrief?

No. Canva describes Grow as built on the same DNA but net-new rather than a direct port, so it is a new tool to evaluate rather than a like-for-like replacement. It currently supports Meta and TikTok for both publishing and analytics.

What about the six months free on Canva Business?

Canva offered MagicBrief customers six months free on Canva Business, which carries the highest Canva Grow usage limits. Codes were issued by request through a form and, per MagicBrief's own FAQ, must be redeemed by 30 September 2026 or they become void. One code per business domain.

What did MagicBrief cost?

Its main plan was around $249 a month before it closed. For comparison, Wilow's free plan is $0 and Pro is $49 a month flat, with no pricing tied to how much you spend on ads.

What is the closest replacement for the analytics specifically?

Wilow. It is Meta only, it labels every ad in your account by content style and messaging theme, and it ranks them on a leaderboard so you can see what to scale and what to cut, which is the job most people used MagicBrief for. It has a permanent free plan, so you can check that for yourself before paying anything.

The bottom line

MagicBrief built a strong product in a space that matters, and Canva buying it was good for Canva. It still leaves a real gap for the performance marketers who relied on the standalone tool, and no single option fills all of it.

Canva Grow is the official path if your team lives in Canva. Foreplay is the closest match if briefs and swipe files were your workflow. Wilow is the closest direct replacement for the analytics: the same focus on Meta creative performance, a free plan that costs nothing to start, and AI labelling that reads the creative itself rather than the file name.

Whichever you choose, get it running now. Your history is sitting in Meta waiting to be read, and every week you run without creative analytics is a week of signal you cannot get back.

Start for free No credit card required.

See what users said about the tool while it was live on our MagicBrief reviews page.