Kargo vs MARPIPE

Kargo bought a creative tool... Marpipe built one. They’re a programmatic media company. Catalog creative acquired via StitcherAds in 2021. The result? Creative as a side feature inside a media management platform.

KARGO

Purpose-built for catalog creative. Feed management included. Flat monthly fee. Design, publish, and iterate — all in one platform.

MARPIPE

Month-to-month pricing.

Leave anytime!

3 Reasons to consider

Catalog creative wasn't built there. It was bought.

Kargo is a programmatic advertising company. Their core business is mobile ads and premium publisher ad placements. In 2021, they acquired StitcherAds for $64 million to add catalog creative capabilities to their media management stack.

That means the catalog creative tool you're evaluating didn't grow up inside Kargo. It was a startup acquisition — bolted onto a platform built for a fundamentally different purpose. Catalog creative competes for priority against everything else.

Marpipe was built from scratch for catalog creative. It's not a bolt-on, an acquisition, or a feature buried inside a media company. Every engineer, every product decision, every roadmap item exists to make your catalog ads better.

Built for it beats bolted on. Every time.

Programmatic media company. Acquired catalog creative in 2021.

Built for catalog creative from the ground up. It's all we do.

Percentage-of-spend pricing. On a creative tool?

Kargo uses a percentage-of-ad-spend pricing model — the same model media buying platforms use. The more you spend on ads, the more you pay Kargo. This made sense when Kargo was a media management company. But for catalog creative? You're being taxed on your ad budget for access to a design tool.

Your catalog creative cost should be based on what you're creating, not on how much you're spending on media.

Marpipe charges one flat monthly fee. Spend $50K or $5M on ads — your Marpipe cost stays the same. No escalating fees. No annual lock-in. Cancel anytime.

Your creative tool shouldn't profit from your media spend.

% of ad spend model. Cost scales with your budget, not your usage.

Flat monthly fee. No % of spend. Cancel anytime.

Seen enough?

We tested every single catalog creative platform that’s out there - all of them. Without a doubt, Marpipe comes out on top. It’s the obvious choice for fast-scaling DTC brands.

Nik Sharma

Founder @ Sharma Brands

+53% ROAS in a/b test

No feed management. Publishing still manual.

Kargo lets you build feed creatives in their platform, but feed management isn't included. Your product data still needs to come from somewhere else — a separate vendor, a separate contract, a separate integration to manage.

And even after you've designed your catalog ads, publishing still happens manually through native ad platforms. You solve the design bottleneck but leave every other bottleneck in place.

Marpipe has feed management built in. Your product data and your creative templates live in the same platform. Design, test, and publish — all without leaving Marpipe. No third-party feed tool. No manual publishing. No gaps between creation and deployment.

A complete platform. Not a partial one.

Feature Comparison:

Design

Generative Design

Category Specific Design

(complex setup)

Feed Management

Ease of use

Self-serve capable

(Email their team)

Works with your media buyer

(wants to replace them)

Learning Curve

(steep)

Pricing

No % of Media

Cancel Anytime

(contract lock-in)

Big Brands. big results.

Dermstreet +30% How DermStreet Used Price Overlays to Cut CPA 30% and Scale Profitable Catalog Spend

PopSockets 7x increase in catalog Ad Spend for the cell phone cases brand PopSockets.

Cozy Earth 60% increase in ROAS for apparel and luxury home goods brand Cozy Earth.