Smartly.io vs Pattern89
Last updated: February 2026 · By AI-Ready CMO Editorial Team
advertising
Strategic Summary
Smartly.io and Pattern89 both promise to automate and optimize digital advertising, but they serve fundamentally different organizational needs and maturity levels. Smartly.io is a comprehensive creative operations and campaign management platform built for large, sophisticated marketing teams running complex, multi-channel campaigns at scale. Pattern89 is a performance-focused optimization engine designed to help mid-market and enterprise teams maximize ROAS through rapid creative testing and algorithmic bidding adjustments. The choice between them hinges on whether your organization prioritizes creative workflow efficiency and centralized campaign governance (Smartly.io) or pure performance optimization and creative variant testing velocity (Pattern89).
Smartly.io positions itself as the operating system for performance marketing teams. It excels when your CMO mandate includes taming creative chaos—managing dozens of campaigns, hundreds of ad variants, and coordinating across multiple channels (Meta, Google, TikTok, Snapchat) from a single interface. Smartly.io's strength is workflow: it helps large teams collaborate on creative production, maintain brand consistency, and execute campaigns faster. The ideal buyer is a CMO at a DTC brand, mid-market SaaS company, or agency managing $5M+ in annual ad spend with a dedicated performance marketing team. If your bottleneck is creative production speed and campaign coordination across channels, Smartly.io removes friction.
Pattern89 takes a different approach: it assumes your creative and campaign structure are already in place, and focuses on the optimization layer. Its AI continuously tests creative variations, adjusts bidding strategies, and identifies winning patterns in your ad performance data. Pattern89 is ideal for performance-driven CMOs who want to squeeze incremental ROAS improvements from existing campaigns without heavy manual intervention. The typical buyer is a growth-focused e-commerce or app marketing leader with $2M–$20M in ad spend who can feed Pattern89 consistent campaign data and trusts algorithmic optimization. If your constraint is performance efficiency rather than creative workflow, Pattern89 delivers faster ROI improvements.
Our Recommendation: Smartly.io
Smartly.io wins for most CMOs because it solves a broader strategic problem—creative operations at scale—while Pattern89 optimizes a narrower, downstream problem. However, Pattern89 wins decisively for performance-obsessed teams with mature creative workflows who prioritize ROAS velocity over campaign governance.
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Choose Smartly.io when...
Choose Smartly.io if your team is scaling creative production, managing multiple stakeholders across creative and performance, or running campaigns across 3+ channels simultaneously. It's the right choice when your bottleneck is campaign speed and coordination, not optimization. Smartly.io is also better if you need centralized brand governance and audit trails for compliance-heavy industries.
Choose Pattern89 when...
Choose Pattern89 if your creative and campaign structure are already optimized, your team is small and technical, and your primary goal is maximizing ROAS through rapid testing and algorithmic adjustments. It's ideal if you have consistent, high-volume campaign data and can tolerate less hands-on control in exchange for faster performance gains.
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