MurmAds vs AdLiSpy
AdLiSpy is the more capable tool today, and it gets that capability by replaying Meta's private internal API with tokens taken from your session. MurmAds reads only what Meta rendered on the page. That is the whole difference, and it decides which one suits you.
Short answer
If you want the deepest per-ad data and a crowdsourced feed of what other users are tracking, AdLiSpy does more. If you would rather your Facebook account generate no unusual traffic, keep your research private, and read a tool that breaks visibly rather than silently, MurmAds is the narrower instrument.
How to check any of this yourself. Open an extension's
Chrome Web Store page and read the grey permission line under the install
button, or go to chrome://extensions → Details → Site access.
Every permission figure below comes from the extension's own published
manifest. We are building a tool in this category, so verify rather than
take our word for it.
Side by side
| MurmAds | AdLiSpy Pro | |
|---|---|---|
| How it gets data | Parses the rendered page | Replays Meta's internal GraphQL API |
| Works logged out | Yes | No |
| Traffic attributed to your account | None beyond normal browsing | Yes |
| Package size | ~0.3 MB | ~32.7 MB |
cookies permission | Not requested | Requested |
| Your research leaves your machine | No | Scraped ads uploaded to their server |
| Shared trending-ads database | No | Yes |
| EU spend & reach | Yes, as published ranges | Yes, per-ad detail |
| Account required | No | Yes |
| Availability | Not yet released | Available now |
Where AdLiSpy is genuinely better
It surfaces more per ad than the rendered page shows, because it asks Meta's internal endpoint directly. Its shared database of ads collected across all its users is something a purely local tool cannot replicate — there is no crowdsourced layer without a server collecting from everyone. It is also available today, which MurmAds is not.
What the API-replay approach costs
- The traffic is yours. The requests carry your session, so any anti-automation response lands on your Facebook account rather than the vendor's.
- It breaks without warning. The internal endpoint is keyed by an id that rotates. When it changes, results stop or go stale.
- Your research is visible to the vendor. Ads you look at are uploaded to build the shared feed — that is how the feed exists.
What MurmAds does instead
It reads the ad cards Meta rendered, using stable text anchors rather than Meta's obfuscated class names, and surfaces what is there: how long each ad has run, how many variants it has, the landing domain, and the EU spend and reach ranges where Meta publishes them. Everything stays on your machine. When Meta changes the page, the panel reports that it could not read a card rather than inventing one.
It is also built to work in languages other than English — Meta renders the Ad Library in the viewer's own language, and a tool anchored to English strings reads zero ads for everyone else.
MurmAds
A Meta Ad Library reader that works on the page you are already looking at: reads the rendered results, surfaces the EU transparency figures Meta publishes, and exports what you can see.
Not yet released. It is built and in testing, not on the Chrome Web Store. Mail [email protected] to hear when it ships. In the meantime our published extension is MurmSpy, for Shopify store research.