Adjust vs Northbeam

Adjust is a mobile measurement partner (MMP) founded in Berlin in 2012 and acquired by AppLovin in 2021 in a deal valued at about $1 billion. It tells app marketers which ad networks, campaigns and creatives drove installs, in-app events and revenue, so budget can move to the channels that actually pay back. Its SDK runs inside iOS, Android and Unity apps.

The platform covers attribution and deep linking, Datascape dashboards and cohort reporting, a Fraud Prevention Suite that blocks click spam and fake installs, and support for Apple's SKAdNetwork and AdAttributionKit privacy frameworks. Add-on modules include InSight for incrementality testing with synthetic control groups, Audience Builder, CTV AdVision for connected-TV campaigns and SpendWorks for ad-spend mapping. The free Base plan covers up to 1,500 attributions per month; Core and Enterprise are custom-priced annual contracts.

Adjust suits app publishers, games studios and fintech or ecommerce apps with real paid user-acquisition budgets. AppsFlyer is its biggest rival with a larger partner ecosystem, while Singular leans harder into cost aggregation. Northbeam and Rockerbox, also in our catalog, solve web and DTC attribution rather than app installs, so they are not like-for-like replacements.

In May 2025 Adjust launched Growth Copilot in beta, an AI assistant that answers reporting questions in plain language and, with Pulse, can publish scheduled AI reports. When negotiating, ask for fraud prevention to be bundled, since it is often quoted as a separate add-on.

Northbeam is a marketing measurement and attribution platform for scaling e-commerce and direct-to-consumer brands. It answers a question every growth team faces since iOS privacy changes weakened platform tracking: which channels, campaigns and creatives actually drive new customers and revenue. Northbeam combines first-party pixel data, order data from Shopify and other stores, and spend from ad platforms into one view of performance.

Its multi-touch attribution uses machine learning to assign credit across touchpoints and lets teams switch attribution models and windows, including clicks-only and view-through approaches. MMM+ adds media mix modeling for channels that are hard to track at the click level, such as TV, podcasts and out-of-home, and incrementality insights help separate true lift from conversions that would have happened anyway. Creative analytics compare ad performance, and dashboards report on metrics such as first-time customer ROAS. Pricing scales with ad spend, from a month-to-month Starter plan to custom-quoted Enterprise deals.

Northbeam suits brands spending substantial budgets across many paid channels, with analysts or growth leads who can act on model output. Smaller stores will find it expensive and data-hungry, and new users face a learning curve with models and windows. Triple Whale is the common starting point for Shopify brands wanting all-in-one dashboards, Rockerbox and Measured target similar measurement problems, and Google's open-source Meridian or Meta's Robyn are options for teams building their own MMM.