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Ecommerce has entered a new era. Shoppers discover products not just through static search results or retargeting campaigns but through algorithmic recommendations, TikTok discovery, AI-driven shopping assistants, and catalog-powered ads on every major platform. Catalog ads have moved from being a narrow retargeting format to becoming the infrastructure of modern ecommerce growth.
That shift raises an important question for brands: which platforms are truly built for this new landscape? Two names that often come up are Marpipe and Confect.io. On the surface, both help brands design catalog ads. But in practice, they represent very different philosophies about what catalog ads can and should be.
Confect.io approaches catalog ads as a design layer. It plugs into Meta Ads Manager and makes it easier to produce creative templates. For brands just starting out, that simplicity feels accessible.
Marpipe takes a different stance. We see catalog ads as an engine for growth, one powered by product feed management, scalable creative, and optimization. The brands that win in 2025 will be those that treat their catalog as a living, dynamic system, not just a file feeding into static templates.
Catalog ads are the backbone of ecommerce advertising. They’re powering discovery, conversion, and retention across every major channel, from Meta and TikTok to Pinterest and Google Shopping.
The reason is simple: catalog ads scale. With a well-structured product feed, a single template can power thousands of creative variations, each dynamically personalized to a shopper’s behavior or context. That makes them not just efficient, but essential. As we explored in our Catalog Ads Guide, the format has grown into a full-funnel tool for ecommerce marketers.
Performance speaks for itself. Our breakdown in Are Catalog Ads Effective? shows how brands are using catalog ads not only for retargeting but also for prospecting, seasonal campaigns, and product launches. And as we explained in What’s the Difference Between Carousel Ads and Catalog Ads?, catalog ads have quietly become the more powerful and scalable format.
This evolution is why the Marpipe vs. Confect.io debate matters so much. If catalog ads are your infrastructure for growth, then the platform you choose isn’t about saving a few dollars per month. It’s about whether you’re set up to compete in a world where feeds, creative, and optimization define performance.
When Confect.io published their “Marpipe or Confect?” comparison piece, they framed the two platforms as virtually identical, with only minor differences in pricing and workflow. That framing misses the bigger picture.
Yes, both tools let you build catalog ad templates, design product-level videos, and export creatives across placements. Both talk about AI features like background removal or color adjustments. And both target ecommerce marketers as their core users.
But that’s where the similarities stop. Confect.io operates as a plug-in that makes Meta’s catalog ads more design-friendly. Marpipe, on the other hand, is a full catalog ads platform — one that addresses the core challenges of ecommerce performance marketing: product feed quality, optimization, and creative scalability.
That distinction is critical. Catalog ads are no longer just a retargeting format. As we’ve discussed in our Catalog Ads Guide, they’ve become the backbone of full-funnel ecommerce campaigns across every major platform. Without the right infrastructure, your campaigns are capped before they begin.
Confect.io assumes your product feed is already flawless. But anyone who’s worked in ecommerce knows that’s never true. Product feeds are messy. They have missing titles, inconsistent attributes, outdated prices, duplicate SKUs, and categories that don’t match the way people shop.
Marpipe solves this problem with built-in product feed management. You can organize, clean, and enrich product data directly in the platform. That means fixing titles, structuring attributes, adding marketing copy, and syncing changes across channels.
Confect.io doesn’t offer feed enrichment. In fact, they explicitly removed product filtering tools, saying performance was “rarely improved” by excluding certain products. That decision puts the burden back on brands to maintain a perfect feed outside the platform.
For performance marketers, the difference is massive. Marpipe lets you treat your feed as an optimization engine, while Confect.io leaves it as a static input. In an era where product feed management best practices determine campaign outcomes, that gap is decisive.
Confect.io likes to highlight its After Effects–style video timeline editor. For creative teams used to motion design, that might feel familiar. But for most ecommerce teams, it’s overkill. They don’t need a new editing suite; they need scalable creative templates that anyone can update and apply across thousands of products.
That’s where Marpipe’s template-based creative workflow stands out. Think Canva simplicity, but applied to catalog ads at enterprise scale. You can build a creative framework once and instantly apply it across every SKU in your catalog. Updating design variations takes minutes, not hours, and templates can automatically adjust to new products or attributes in your feed.
On top of that, Marpipe integrates product-level video (PLV) directly into catalog templates. That means you can automatically generate video ads for your entire catalog, which is such a game-changer for platforms like TikTok and Instagram Reels. Confect.io offers PLV on certain higher-tier plans, but Marpipe makes it a core part of the creative engine.
It’s the difference between a workflow designed to make a few designers happy and a workflow designed to help entire teams scale.
Confect.io pitches itself as the simpler, cheaper tool. But simplicity has a cost: limited optimization.
Marpipe goes beyond design by giving marketers the tools to optimize catalog ads as a performance channel. With Marpipe, you can:
These optimization workflows mean your ad spend flows toward products that perform, not products that simply exist in your feed.
Confect.io, by contrast, places that responsibility back on Meta’s algorithm. While Meta’s machine learning is powerful, brands that feed it better data (and filter out underperformers) consistently see stronger results. Marpipe gives you control; Confect asks you to trust the algorithm blindly.
Confect was built around Meta Ads Manager. While they do support other channels like TikTok, Pinterest, and Snap, Meta remains the center of gravity.
Marpipe, by contrast, was designed for multi-channel from day one. TikTok Shop, Meta, Google Shopping, Pinterest, and even emerging AI-driven shopping engines are supported within the same feed and creative infrastructure.
That matters because discovery is no longer confined to Meta. In 2025, shoppers are finding products through TikTok recommendations, AI-driven search, and integrated shopping feeds across Google and Pinterest. Marpipe prepares you for this future by unifying feeds and creative across every channel. Confect.io keeps you largely tied to Meta’s ecosystem.
Our piece on Are Catalog Ads Effective? breaks down why full-funnel discovery requires going beyond Meta, and why multi-channel catalog ad strategies are delivering the best ROAS today.
Confect.io leans hard on its pricing argument. Their pitch: Marpipe forces brands into enterprise tiers above 500 products or $25K monthly spend, while Confect offers cheaper, more flexible plans.
That comparison oversimplifies reality. Marpipe’s enterprise pricing reflects the fact that mid-market and enterprise ecommerce brands need more than templates. They need hourly syncs, performance optimization, product-level video at scale, and enriched feeds.
Confect.io may look cheaper upfront, but those missing features cost you in performance. Wasted ad spend on underperforming products. Lost sales from out-of-sync inventory. Slower creative production cycles.
When you factor in ROI, Marpipe consistently outperforms. A SaaS bill that’s $1,000 higher per month is nothing compared to the six or seven figures of incremental revenue brands unlock through better optimization.
Agencies managing multiple clients often try Confect.io first because it’s accessible. But they quickly run into limitations. Without centralized feed management or cross-account optimization, every client requires duplicate effort.
Marpipe gives agencies a way to standardize workflows across clients, scaling creative production, managing feeds in one place, and applying optimization rules consistently. That means higher margins for the agency and better results for clients.
Agencies don’t just want a design tool. They want a performance platform. That’s why they move to Marpipe.
Confect.io isn’t the only competitor ecommerce teams consider when evaluating catalog ad platforms. The landscape has grown crowded with tools that each tackle part of the challenge. Looking across the space reveals a pattern: most alternatives solve for one slice of the workflow, whether that’s creative production, data visibility, or enterprise automation, but stop short of delivering the unified infrastructure that catalog ads demand in 2025.
Take Smartly. As one of the earliest players in the space, Smartly built its reputation with enterprise contracts and integrations. For the right buyer, that level of scale looks appealing. But with long onboarding cycles, heavy training requirements, and a workflow designed more for agencies than in-house teams, Smartly often slows marketers down. Marpipe removes that friction — offering multi-channel catalog performance without the enterprise bureaucracy.
ROI Hunter is another example. Its strength lies in surfacing data views that help marketers understand product performance. But knowing which SKUs perform and actually optimizing spend against them are two different things. ROI Hunter stops at visibility. Marpipe goes further by embedding optimization into the workflow, letting brands automatically scale campaigns around what’s working.
Then there’s Hunch Ads, which emphasizes lightweight creative automation. For smaller teams, it’s a step up from manual design. But without integrated feed management, campaigns often struggle to achieve consistent performance at scale. Marpipe solves this by treating feed quality and creative automation as inseparable.
Socioh is another tool that often comes up, especially for Shopify-first brands. Socioh makes it easy for smaller ecommerce companies to launch catalog ads quickly, but its feature set is limited when it comes to scaling. Without advanced feed management or optimization workflows, teams often outgrow Socioh once they need more control over performance and multi-channel distribution. Marpipe fills that gap by providing both simplicity and the infrastructure to scale.
Finally, Abyssale represents the opposite extreme: a lightweight design tool with template generation. It’s useful for quickly spinning up creative, but it lacks the deeper performance capabilities needed to turn catalog ads into a profit center. Brands that start with Abyssale often move to Marpipe once they need optimization and feed-driven workflows.
Across all these competitors, the pattern is clear. Each tackles a piece of the puzzle. Whether it’s creative design, enterprise automation, or data visibility, none of these other competitors unites feed management, creative, and optimization into one system. Marpipe is the only platform built as catalog ad infrastructure, giving ecommerce brands the ability to not just design ads, but to scale them into engines of growth.
Confect.io is a useful tool for small teams that want to make Meta catalog ads look better. But the future of ecommerce doesn’t belong to template tools. It belongs to platforms that treat catalog ads as infrastructure: uniting data, creative, and optimization to drive scalable performance.
That’s what Marpipe was built for.
In 2025, the question isn’t whether you can design catalog ads. It’s whether you can optimize them into a growth engine across every channel that matters. Confect.io doesn’t answer that question. Marpipe does.
Ready to see how Marpipe can transform your catalog ads? Book a demo or start with our free product feed management tool.
