Northbeam vs Triple Whale (2026): Pricing by GMV Band, Attribution Models and Which Fits Your Brand

Northbeam and Triple Whale both sell first-party multi-touch attribution to ecommerce brands. Both run their own pixel, both now offer a "Clicks + Deterministic Views" model, and both sell MMM and incrementality testing on top. Most head-to-heads stop at that overlap and call it a tie on features.

The differences that change your decision are further down: what each one meters to set your price, at what brand size each one publishes a number, and how their similarly named models actually split credit. This page compares those three things using only what each vendor publishes about itself, read on 2026-10-20. We have not run both tools on the same store, and we will not imply a measured accuracy difference. Neither vendor publishes a method that would let anyone test that from outside.

Neither product is ours. We build AI advertising software, and a short note on where it sits is at the end, after the comparison.

The Short Answer

• Triple Whale fits Shopify-centric brands from roughly $250K to $20M in annual GMV that want attribution, BI and an AI agent in one subscription. It also suits brands that want the agent to make ad changes inside guardrails. It publishes a price for every band in that range.
• Northbeam fits brands where paid media is the main growth lever and spend is meaningful: its own plan copy talks in ad spend, from under $1.5M a year up to more than $500K a month. It sells measurement plus human media strategy rather than an execution agent. Below Starter, it does not publish a number.
• Under about $1M GMV, Triple Whale Foundation's published prices are about 15–29% of Northbeam's lowest published figure. The gap closes as you grow. At Triple Whale's top published band, Northbeam Professional's list price is below Triple Whale Automate.

The One Difference That Explains The Bill

The two vendors meter different things.

Triple Whale meters your revenue. Its pricing FAQ states: "All prices are based on a combination of your brand's annual GMV and the package you choose: Foundation, Automate, or Enterprise." Every paid plan includes unlimited users and stores.

Northbeam meters your ad spend and your traffic. The pricing page header reads "Based on your annual marketing spend, choose the option that's best for you", and each plan is described by a spend ceiling. The FAQ then adds a second meter: "your monthly price is informed by the volume of data in your business (measured in pageviews)." That is why the cards say "Contact us for a quote" even where a number is printed.

Revenue, ad spend and pageviews move together, but not in a fixed ratio. A brand with high AOV and low traffic pays relatively little on Northbeam's meter. On Triple Whale's GMV meter, the same brand pays the same as any other brand of its size. A brand with heavy organic demand and light paid media looks small to Northbeam's plan copy and large to Triple Whale's. Work out which of the two meters your business is lean on before you compare any prices.

The Verified Price Tables

Triple Whale, verified 2026-10-20

Triple Whale's pricing page still renders no prices on screen. The GMV slider described in its own FAQ is switched off by a SHOW_SLIDER flag set to false in the page code. The full price table ships to every visitor's browser in that same code. We read it on 2026-10-20, and it is unchanged from the ladder in our Triple Whale pricing breakdown (verified 2026-09-10).

Free is $0 with 10 users. Enterprise is custom at every band. The comparison table's sticky header shows Foundation at $549 and Automate at $1,349, which is the $1M–$2.5M row. Per the FAQ, all three paid plans are 12-month subscriptions whether you pay monthly or annually. Annual prepay is "2 months free", and the page code computes it as exactly 10× the monthly price. Prepaying also locks your GMV tier for the year.

Northbeam, verified 2026-10-20

Contract terms, from Northbeam's FAQ: Starter is "month-to-month usage-based pricing for Shopify brands that are in the early growth stage." Professional and Enterprise are annual terms with annual or semi-annual billing.

Three things on Northbeam's page do not line up, and you should settle each one in writing:

1. The Starter card prints "$1,500 / for maximum value" with no period. The FAQ calls Starter month-to-month, so a monthly reading is the natural one, but the card does not say so. Every comparison below that treats it as monthly is labelled.
2. The Enterprise threshold differs. The Enterprise card says more than $500K a month in ad spend. The FAQ answer to "Which plan should I choose?" says "If you are spending more than $250,000 a month on performance marketing, we recommend Enterprise."
3. The FAQ refers to "Growth and Professional" as the plans below Enterprise and does not mention Starter.

Fit By GMV Band

This is where the two price lists meet. Triple Whale publishes by GMV, Northbeam by ad spend. Getting from one to the other needs an assumption about how much of your revenue you spend on ads. Neither vendor publishes that. The ratio below is ours, used only to place Northbeam's ad-spend lines on a GMV axis. Change it to your own.

First, where Northbeam's own ad-spend lines fall in GMV terms at three ad-spend-to-GMV ratios. This is our arithmetic on Northbeam's published thresholds:

Now the full matrix, using 20% ad spend as an illustration:

What the matrix shows, treating Northbeam's Starter figure as monthly:

• Under $1M GMV: Triple Whale Foundation is $219–$429 against $1,500 for Northbeam Starter, which is 3.5× to 6.8× cheaper. Even Automate, at $749–$1,099, sits below Northbeam's lowest published figure.
• $1M–$5M GMV: the gap narrows. Foundation at $549–$799 is 1.9× to 2.7× cheaper than Starter, and Automate ($1,349–$1,799) is close to it.
• $5M–$10M GMV: Foundation at $1,129–$1,529 is roughly level with Starter. Once Northbeam's ad-spend line pushes you to Professional, it is $3,500 against $2,399–$2,899 for Automate.
• $15M–$20M GMV: Northbeam Professional at $3,500 is $699 a month below Triple Whale Automate at $4,199, and $971 above Foundation at $2,529. This is the only published band where Northbeam's list price beats Triple Whale's AI tier.
• Above $20M GMV: Triple Whale publishes nothing. Northbeam publishes Professional at $3,500 a month up to its $500K-a-month spend ceiling. At that size you are negotiating with both.

Northbeam's FAQ says plans "start at" these rates and scale with pageviews, so the Northbeam column is a floor, not a quote. Triple Whale's numbers are its list prices, but they are not shown on screen. Treat both as the place a negotiation starts.

The Attribution Models, Side By Side

Both vendors say they offer roughly the same set of models. Here is what each one documents, as read on 2026-10-20.

Two of these rows matter more than the rest.

Northbeam's accounting modes are a real difference. Accrual Performance puts revenue on the day the ad touched the customer, which is what a media buyer needs to judge yesterday's spend. Cash Snapshot puts it on the day the money arrived, which is what finance needs to reconcile with Shopify. Northbeam's own docs describe MER as the Cash Snapshot metric and ROAS as the Accrual metric. If finance and media buying argue about which number is right, a tool that names the two views and lets you switch between them is worth more than another model.

Triple Attribution should not be summed. Triple Whale's own help centre warns that because each platform gets 100% credit, total attributed revenue across channels will exceed actual revenue, and that the model should not be used for financial reporting. That is fine for in-platform optimisation, but if your team adds up the All Channels view, the total is wrong by design.

Same Name, Different Rules: The Two C+DV Models

This is the comparison most coverage of these two tools misses. Both vendors now sell a "Clicks + Deterministic Views" model. Both define deterministic the same way: a view counts only when the ad platform verifies it and it can be joined to a real order, rather than inferred. Below that shared definition, the documented credit rules diverge.

To see how far apart those rules land, take one journey. A customer clicks a Meta ad 7 days before buying, sees a Snap ad 3 days before, sees a TikTok ad 1 day before, then clicks a branded search ad and places a $100 order.

• Northbeam's rules: branded search is excluded because paid touchpoints exist. That leaves three platforms with one touchpoint each. Northbeam documents no time decay and no weighting by platform or funnel position, and in its own worked example a click and a view in the same platform pool earned the same amount. So the three split evenly, at about $33 each.
• Triple Whale's rules: a 7-day-old click has weight 0.5, a 1-day-old view 0.5, and a 3-day-old view 0.125. Normalised to $100, that gives Meta ~$44, TikTok ~$44, Snap ~$11. Triple Whale publishes the half-lives but not the full normalisation formula, so proportional normalisation is our reading. Its "most recent ad view" wording could also be read to drop the Snap view entirely, giving a 50/50 split.

Neither split is more correct, because the two models answer different questions. Triple Whale's rewards recency, so views shown close to purchase carry most of the credit. Northbeam's ignores timing, so a view a week ago counts as much as one yesterday. If your prospecting runs on view-heavy placements with long consideration windows, the two tools will report different winners from the same spend. Decide which assumption you believe before you pick the tool, not after.

One more gap is worth knowing. Northbeam's own docs contain a view-only example (1 Snap view, 2 Meta views, 3 TikTok views) where the prose says each platform "starts with an equal share", but the table credits 21%, 35% and 44%. The table implies a platform's pool grows with its view count, less than proportionally. If view counts per platform vary a lot in your journeys, ask Northbeam which of the two descriptions the product follows.

MMM, Incrementality And The AI Layer

The pattern is consistent. Triple Whale is building software that acts. Northbeam sells measurement plus people. If you have a media buyer or agency and want better numbers to hand them, Northbeam's shape fits. If you are a small team that wants the tool to take the next step itself, Triple Whale's Automate tier is built for that. It is also the tier where its price rises fastest relative to Foundation (3.4× at the smallest band).

Which One To Choose

Choose Triple Whale if:

• You are under about $5M in GMV and want multi-touch attribution for a few hundred dollars a month. No Northbeam plan publishes a number in that range.
• You run Shopify, run several paid channels, and want BI, attribution, survey-weighted attribution and an AI agent in one contract.
• You want software, not a strategist, to pause ads and shift budgets within guardrails, and you can justify Automate's step up.
• You value unlimited seats on every paid plan.

Choose Northbeam if:

• Paid media is your main growth lever and you spend well into six figures a month. That is where its published Professional price is competitive, and at Triple Whale's top published band it undercuts Automate.
• Finance and media buying need different views of the same revenue, and Accrual versus Cash Snapshot would end that argument.
• You want a dedicated Media Strategist included, or you already work with a Northbeam agency partner (Growth).
• You run a non-Shopify ecommerce platform. Professional lists "any ecommerce platform, not just Shopify", and the FAQ describes Starter as aimed at Shopify brands.

Choose neither yet if you run one paid channel and its in-platform numbers already match your store revenue within a margin you can live with. A multi-touch model needs several channels to reallocate credit between. Without them it adds cost and little information. Our guide to multi-touch attribution models covers how much conversion volume each method needs before it can tell you anything, and our ranked list of marketing attribution software covers the wider field.

For more on Triple Whale on its own, the Triple Whale alternatives page covers who switches and why, and the pricing breakdown works through cost as a share of GMV, the band cliffs and cost per order.

Where Soku Fits

For completeness, since we build in this space: Soku is not an attribution platform, and it does not compete with either product on multi-touch attribution, MMM or incrementality. It is an AI advertising agent that connects to your ad accounts and works inside them. It creates and adjusts campaigns on Meta, Google, TikTok, LinkedIn and ChatGPT Ads, and reads and adjusts existing campaigns on Reddit and X. For a measurement check that needs no extra pixel, Soku's Second Opinion view compares what each ad platform reports about itself with what your own GA4 property attributes to that platform. It is designed not to claim order-level de-duplication, multi-touch credit or incrementality. Soku does not currently import Northbeam or Triple Whale attribution data. Teams that already own one of these tools would use it as the measurement source of truth alongside Soku, not instead of it.

Sources

Read on 2026-10-20 from the vendors' own pages:

• Northbeam pricing, plan cards and FAQ: <https://www.northbeam.io/pricing>
• Northbeam attribution models: <https://docs.northbeam.io/docs/attribution-models>
• Northbeam Clicks + Deterministic Views: <https://docs.northbeam.io/docs/clicks-deterministic-views>
• Northbeam accounting modes: <https://docs.northbeam.io/docs/accounting-modes>
• Northbeam attribution windows: <https://docs.northbeam.io/docs/attribution-windows>
• Northbeam lookback windows: <https://docs.northbeam.io/docs/lookback-windows>
• Northbeam C+DV launch post: <https://www.northbeam.io/blog/discover-clicks-deterministic-views>
• Northbeam MMM+: <https://www.northbeam.io/products/mmm-plus> and Incrementality: <https://www.northbeam.io/products/incrementality>
• Triple Whale pricing, comparison table, FAQ and the price table shipped in the page code: <https://www.triplewhale.com/pricing>
• Triple Whale attribution models and windows: <https://kb.triplewhale.com/en/articles/5960333-understanding-and-utilizing-attribution-models>
• Triple Whale Clicks & Deterministic Views: <https://kb.triplewhale.com/en/articles/12400283-triple-whale-clicks-deterministic-views-attribution-model>
• Triple Whale plans explained: <https://kb.triplewhale.com/en/articles/16046642-understanding-triple-whale-plans-foundation-automate-and-enterprise>
• Triple Whale MMM data requirements: <https://kb.triplewhale.com/en/articles/15964182-mmm-data-requirements-and-prerequisites>