Branch vs Northbeam

Branch (Branch Metrics) is a mobile linking and measurement company founded in 2014 in California by Alex Austin, Mike Molinet, Mada Seghete and Dmitri Gaskin. It says more than 100,000 brands use its platform. Its core job: make links open the right screen inside an app across web, email, social, ads and SMS, and measure which campaigns drive installs and in-app actions.

The platform is split into products: Engagement for deep links that survive app installs and handle thousands of platform edge cases, Performance for mobile attribution (multi-touch, SKAdNetwork Conversion Studio, fraud detection, cohort and LTV analytics), Activation for branded short links and QR codes, Banners for web-to-app Journeys, LinkHub link management and data exports. Ivy is Branch's AI product for growth teams. Attribution is sold in Basics, Essentials and Enterprise tiers without public prices; Basics comes with a free trial.

Branch fits consumer apps with heavy web-to-app, email and referral traffic where reliable deep linking matters as much as attribution. Pricing can climb steeply with usage, and its attribution suite is less dominant than AppsFlyer, the market leader for paid user acquisition, or Adjust, which is strong in gaming. Teams using Firebase Dynamic Links need a replacement since Google shut that service down in August 2025.

If you mainly need deep links, ask Branch for an Engagement-only quote; if you need an MMP, run Branch against AppsFlyer and Adjust and compare SKAN modelling and partner coverage with your own ad networks.

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.