Northbeam vs Cometly

If you are down to Northbeam and Cometly, the honest starting point is that these two were built for two different businesses. Both promise to tell you which of your ads actually made money, but they answer that for two different kinds of company. Northbeam is a modeled attribution and media-mix platform for a high-spend DTC ecommerce brand. Cometly is an ad-to-revenue attribution tool for B2B SaaS and subscription companies that need to tie paid spend to money in Stripe and deals in a CRM. The reader stuck between them is really deciding what they sell and how a sale closes.

Northbeam blends first-party click data with modeled and deterministic view-through data, then layers multi-touch attribution, media-mix modeling and incrementality testing on top, so a brand spending across Meta, Google and TikTok can decide where the next dollar goes. Cometly follows a click through a longer funnel, writes the full touch history onto the deal in HubSpot or Salesforce, and reports which campaign produced pipeline and closed-won revenue, with MRR and LTV attached. One models the whole media mix for an ecommerce brand. The other connects ad spend to recurring revenue for a software company. The pricing points the same way: Northbeam publishes a high entry tier, and Cometly quotes a usage-based fee it does not publish.

The one question that decides it: what you sell

Answer this before you compare a single feature: do you sell physical products to consumers at high volume, or do you sell software or a subscription through a longer, sales-assisted funnel? If your problem is splitting a large budget across Meta, Google, TikTok and more, and proving whether a channel is genuinely incremental, that is Northbeam's problem to solve. If your problem is knowing which ad started a trial that became a paying customer weeks later, and getting that signal back to the ad platforms so they bid toward revenue instead of form fills, that is what Cometly is for.

Your business model makes the decision. Northbeam's models assume the scale and channel mix of a funded DTC brand, and its most common complaint is onboarding: without a dedicated analyst to run the models and act on them, it becomes expensive shelfware. Cometly assumes a Stripe subscription or a CRM pipeline and a sale that takes weeks, which is why it writes pre- and post-form touch history onto each deal, the part a CRM's own tracking usually cannot see. Ask Cometly an ecommerce media-mix question and it has no modeling to answer it. Ask Northbeam a B2B closed-won question and you are paying for view-through ecommerce models you will not use.

Northbeam: modeled attribution for a high-spend ecommerce brand

Northbeam is the tool you graduate to when a percentage point of attribution accuracy is worth thousands of dollars in reallocated spend. Its modeling covers view-through as well as clicks, so for a DTC brand spending across Meta, Google and TikTok it gives a fuller picture than a click tracker or a Shopify-first dashboard, because it tries to say where the whole budget should go.

The most common complaint about Northbeam is onboarding: one reviewer described paying for Northbeam and being unable to get it live. It earns its keep for a brand that has both the spend and the person to own it, and we rank it second in our ecommerce attribution ranking for exactly that buyer. The full Northbeam review covers how the modeling holds up in practice.

Cometly: ad spend tied to Stripe and CRM revenue

Cometly does a narrower and, for a software company, more useful thing: it ties ad spend to money that actually arrived. Its pixel and server-side events feed Stripe revenue and CRM deal stages into the attribution, so you can see the ad behind each opportunity and each signed customer, with MRR and LTV attached, instead of trusting Meta to grade its own homework. It runs first, last, linear, U-shaped and data-driven models, and it sends deal-stage-aware events back to Meta, Google, LinkedIn, TikTok, Microsoft, Reddit and Snapchat through a server-side conversion API on both plans, so bidding optimizes toward paying customers rather than raw leads. Its G2 record is strong and consistent, 4.8 out of 5 across 36 reviews, with praise clustering on tracking accuracy and fast, human support.

Cometly publishes no price and offers no free trial: the Core and Enterprise plans are quoted on a sales call, usage-based on your monthly pageviews, and some buyers report the quote feels high. Make the live demo run on your real numbers, because that is the only up-front proof you get. The full Cometly review walks through the setup and the sentiment in detail.

Two businesses, two tools

Northbeam tells an ecommerce brand where its next budget dollar should go across every channel, with modeling that only pays off at heavy spend and only if someone runs it. Cometly tells a software company which ad produced recurring revenue, and feeds that signal back to the ad platforms. A solo software founder in Northbeam pays for ecommerce models they cannot staff. A scaling DTC brand asking Cometly about its media mix gets no answer, because ad-to-revenue attribution was never built for that question. What you sell breaks the tie.

Where the pricing diverges

The two do not price on the same axis, and that itself tells you who each is for. Northbeam opens at $1,500 a month and climbs to $3,500 for Professional, priced for a brand where reallocating spend more accurately is worth many times that. Cometly does not publish a price at all: its plans are usage-based on monthly pageviews and quoted on a call, so you cannot line its cost up against a competitor before you talk to sales. If Northbeam's floor sounds absurd for your situation, it was built for someone else. If you cannot get a straight number before a demo, that is the friction you accept with Cometly.

Northbeam's entry tier assumes a spend level, so confirm it fits yours with their sales team. Ask Cometly for a written quote against your real monthly pageviews, because usage-based pricing climbs as your traffic grows.

A third path if you host the funnel yourself

Neither of these tools builds or hosts the funnel it measures. Northbeam models attribution across channels and a store that lives elsewhere, and Cometly reads revenue out of a Stripe account and a CRM that sit elsewhere too. ElasticFunnels owns that middle instead. It is a funnel platform for teams running paid traffic that builds the pages, hosts the checkout, and keeps its spend and conversion reporting on the same data layer as the pages, the CRM and the sale. Because a sale closes in a checkout it hosts, that conversion is a first-party event it records directly, so a click, an order, a rebill and a refund sit on one record instead of being reconciled across a tracker, a checkout and a spreadsheet. It fires server-side postbacks to your networks on purchase, refund, chargeback and renewal, and it split-tests page variants under one campaign URL so a test never resets the ad platform's learning. It starts with a 14-day free trial that takes no card, on plans from $97 a month, plus 0.5% of revenue processed through its hosted checkout.

ElasticFunnels is newer than either tool here, and there is very little independent third-party review coverage to check its claims against, so until you run real volume through it you are largely taking the vendor's word for how its reporting and postbacks hold up. That is what you would expect of a platform this recent: Northbeam has years of public setups behind it, and Cometly a documented G2 record you can read before you buy. Its reporting also covers only the funnels it hosts, so a DTC brand with a store on Shopify still needs a platform like Northbeam, and a software team whose deals close in an outside CRM still needs a tool like Cometly. It suits the seller who runs their own funnel and checkout end to end.

Which one for you

You run a high-spend DTC ecommerce brand and have a data owner: Northbeam. Its cross-channel models are worth the floor price once a percentage point of accuracy moves real budget, provided you have the analyst to run the models and act on them.

You sell B2B SaaS or a subscription and need ad spend tied to revenue: Cometly. Stripe and CRM revenue attribution, long-journey multi-touch models and server-side conversion feeds to seven ad platforms are the right call, as long as you can commit without a public price or a free trial and you make the demo prove the tracking on your own numbers first.

You host your own funnel and checkout end to end: look at ElasticFunnels alongside them, with the newness caveat above in mind, and keep Northbeam for cross-channel ecommerce media-mix questions or Cometly for a software sale that closes in your CRM.

Cometly is our default pick because more readers who reach this comparison can actually use it: it needs no dedicated analyst and no high monthly floor, and it feeds the ad platforms on every plan, where Northbeam only pays off at a spend and staffing level most buyers weighing these two have not reached. For a high-spend DTC brand with an analyst, Northbeam is plainly the deeper platform, with media-mix modeling and incrementality tests Cometly lacks, and we rank it second in our ecommerce attribution ranking for exactly that buyer. If you are actually weighing two measurement platforms for an ecommerce brand, our Triple Whale vs Northbeam comparison takes the next step.