Retargeting Tools: 14 Platforms Compared for 2026

Last updated August 31, 2026. Pricing was checked on that date and vendors change it often, so confirm on their site before you buy.

Retargeting tools let you get back in front of people who already visited your site and left without converting. That audience is the cheapest one you will ever advertise to, because you are not paying to introduce yourself. You are paying to finish a conversation.

What has changed since most lists of retargeting tools were written is where that follow-up actually happens. In April 2025 Google confirmed it would not deprecate third-party cookies in Chrome, and later retired most of the Privacy Sandbox APIs it had built to replace them. So cookie-based ad retargeting is not going away. But Safari and Firefox have blocked third-party cookies by default for years, which means a meaningful slice of your traffic was never reachable by pixel retargeting in the first place. The teams getting the best results now run paid retargeting alongside owned channels (web push, email, SMS) that identify a visitor directly instead of inferring them.

Below are 14 retargeting tools grouped by how they actually reach people: paid ad platforms, owned channels you control, and onsite tools that convert the visit before you have to pay to win it back. Each one gets the same four things: what it does, what it costs, who it fits, and where it falls down.

Retargeting tools at a glance

Paid ad retargeting platforms

These are the tools that buy impressions on your behalf. They reach the largest audiences, they work whether or not a visitor ever gave you contact details, and they stop the moment you stop paying.

1. Google Ads

• What it does: Builds remarketing lists from the Google tag in Audience Manager, then serves them across the Display Network, YouTube, Gmail, Demand Gen and Performance Max. Dynamic remarketing pulls the exact products a visitor viewed straight from a Merchant Center feed.
• Pricing: No platform fee. You pay only for the media, on whatever daily budget you set.
• Best for: Nearly everyone. No other single account gives you this much retargeting inventory.
• Limitation: Google enforces a minimum audience size before a remarketing list will serve, so a low-traffic site can sit for weeks before its first impression.

2. Meta Ads Manager

• What it does: Website Custom Audiences built from the Meta Pixel and the Conversions API, retargeted across Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and the Audience Network. Advantage+ catalog ads handle the dynamic product version.
• Pricing: No platform fee. Auction-based media cost.
• Best for: Ecommerce and DTC brands with products that sell on a photograph.
• Limitation: Signal loss from Apple’s App Tracking Transparency means the pixel alone under-reports. You really need the Conversions API running server-side to keep match rates usable.

3. LinkedIn Ads

• What it does: Matched Audiences lets you retarget site visitors via the LinkedIn Insight Tag, and also retarget by video view, lead form open, or an uploaded company list.
• Pricing: No platform fee, but LinkedIn enforces a minimum daily budget per campaign.
• Best for: B2B, especially deals with a long consideration window and a buying committee.
• Limitation: The highest cost per click of any major network. It rarely pays back on a low-value conversion.

4. Microsoft Advertising

• What it does: Remarketing lists built from the UET tag, served on Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, MSN and the Microsoft Audience Network. You can import existing Google Ads campaigns rather than rebuild them.
• Pricing: No platform fee. Auction-based media cost.
• Best for: Teams already running Google Ads who want incremental reach at a lower cost per click.
• Limitation: Far less search volume than Google, so the retargeting pool it can build on its own is small.

5. AdRoll

• What it does: Runs display, social and email retargeting from one dashboard, with audience segmentation and exclusion rules (so a customer who just bought does not get an ad asking them to buy).
• Pricing: Pay as you go against your ad spend. AdRoll states there is no minimum spend. Managed service tiers are contact-sales.
• Best for: Small and mid-size ecommerce teams who would rather manage one tool than three ad accounts.
• Limitation: You are buying media through a middle layer, so you carry AdRoll’s margin on top of the media cost and get less granular reporting than the native platforms.

6. Criteo

• What it does: Dynamic Retargeting on Criteo’s Commerce Media Platform serves personalized product ads across the open internet, using a large retail data set to predict what a shopper will click. Criteo GO is the self-service version.
• Pricing: Contact sales.
• Best for: Retailers with a big catalog and enough traffic for the models to learn from.
• Limitation: The approach leans heavily on third-party identifiers, so performance is uneven across browsers that block them.

7. StackAdapt

• What it does: A demand-side platform that runs retargeting alongside native, display, video, connected TV and audio, which is useful when you want reach outside the walled gardens.
• Pricing: Contact sales.
• Best for: Agencies and mid-market brands running multi-format programmatic campaigns.
• Limitation: Aimed at larger, managed budgets rather than a self-serve SMB spend.

Owned-channel retargeting tools

These tools retarget people you have a direct relationship with: a push subscriber, an email address, a phone number. There is no media cost per impression, the reach does not depend on a third-party cookie surviving in someone’s browser, and the audience keeps compounding instead of resetting when the budget runs out.

8. Aimtell

• What it does: Web push retargeting. Visitors opt in with a single browser click, with no email address and no form, and you can then trigger notifications on cart abandonment, specific page views, inactivity, price drops, or any custom event you track. Segmentation, automation and personalization all come with it.
• Pricing: $49/month for up to 10,000 subscribers, $99 for 50,000, $199 for 100,000, and $1 per 1,000 subscribers on Enterprise with a $499/month minimum. There is a 14-day free trial and it does not ask for a credit card. Full detail is on the pricing page.
• Best for: Ecommerce stores and publishers who want a retargeting channel that costs the same whether they send 10 campaigns or 100, and that does not depend on ad auctions or third-party cookies.
• Limitation: You can only reach visitors who opted in, so it takes a few weeks of traffic to build a list worth messaging. On iOS, a visitor has to add your site to their home screen before they can subscribe.

9. Klaviyo

• What it does: Email and SMS built around ecommerce behavior, with browse abandonment, cart abandonment and back-in-stock flows out of the box. It also syncs audiences out to Meta and Google so the same segment can be retargeted with paid ads.
• Pricing: Free up to 250 profiles and 500 email sends a month. Paid plans scale with your profile count.
• Best for: Shopify and other ecommerce stores that want owned-channel retargeting with deep segmentation.
• Limitation: Cost climbs quickly as the profile list grows, and you can only retarget people who handed over an email address or phone number.

10. Mailchimp

• What it does: Email marketing with customer journeys, product retargeting emails for connected stores, and built-in creation of Facebook and Instagram retargeting ads from the same audience.
• Pricing: Free up to 250 contacts. Essentials from $13/month, Standard from $20/month, Premium from $350/month.
• Best for: Smaller teams who want email retargeting running this week without a heavy implementation.
• Limitation: Ecommerce automation is thinner than Klaviyo’s, and you pay by contact count whether or not you actually email those contacts. It is also worth knowing how email compares to web push before you make it the only owned channel you run.

11. Attentive

• What it does: SMS, MMS, RCS, email and mobile push in one platform, with cart and browse abandonment journeys and identity tools for recognizing anonymous traffic.
• Pricing: Contact sales. Quotes are based on list size and messages sent.
• Best for: Larger ecommerce brands making SMS a primary retargeting channel rather than a side experiment.
• Limitation: Enterprise-oriented, and SMS carries per-message costs and TCPA consent obligations that display retargeting does not. Compare it against web push and SMS side by side before committing.

12. Twilio

• What it does: SMS and MMS APIs you build your own retargeting messages on, with scheduling and delivery tracking, plus rich messages that carry images and links.
• Pricing: Pay as you go. Outbound US SMS starts at $0.0083 per message, plus carrier fees of roughly $0.0025 to $0.0045 depending on the carrier.
• Best for: Teams with developers who want full control over the logic instead of a packaged SMS marketing tool.
• Limitation: It is infrastructure, not a marketing product. No segmentation interface, no journey builder, no consent management. You build all of that.

Onsite retargeting tools

The cheapest retargeting is the kind you never have to pay for, because you kept the visitor on the first visit. These tools work the session that is happening right now.

13. Justuno

• What it does: Onsite personalization. Overlays, banners and product recommendations triggered by behavior, exit intent, cart value or traffic source, so a wavering visitor gets an offer before they leave.
• Pricing: Lite from $59/month for up to 10,000 monthly visitors, Done-For-You from $299/month for up to 20,000. Both come with a free trial.
• Best for: Ecommerce stores with steady traffic and a conversion rate worth a few points of improvement.
• Limitation: Priced by monthly visitors, so a high-traffic, low-margin site outgrows the entry tier fast.

14. OptinMonster

• What it does: Exit-intent overlays, scroll and inactivity triggers, and page-level targeting to capture a visitor’s contact details before they close the tab. It connects to most email tools.
• Pricing: Four tiers with list prices from $210 to $1,470 a year. Annual plans are heavily discounted most of the time, so the effective price is usually well below list.
• Best for: Content sites and smaller stores whose main goal is list building.
• Limitation: It captures, it does not follow up. You still need an email, SMS or push tool to run the actual retargeting.

Why web push belongs in your retargeting stack

Every paid tool on this list has the same structural problem: reach costs money every single time, and the audience evaporates the moment the budget does. Every email and SMS tool has a different one: the visitor has to hand over personal information first, and most will not.

Web push sits between the two. A visitor opts in with one browser click, no form and no email address, and from that point you can message them on desktop and mobile without buying an impression. Because the subscription lives in the browser’s own push service rather than a third-party cookie, it is not affected by the tracking protections in Safari and Firefox that quietly shrink your pixel audiences.

The retargeting plays are the ones you would expect, and they run on autopilot:

• Cart and browse abandonment. Fire a notification a set time after someone leaves with items in the cart. Our free ecommerce push notification templates cover the copy for this.
• Price drops and back in stock. Trigger on the product a subscriber actually looked at.
• Win-back. Segment on subscribers who have not visited in 30 or 60 days and give them a reason to return.
• Funnel abandonment. Catch people who started a signup, quote or checkout flow and stopped partway.

Setup is a snippet of JavaScript on any site, or an app install if you are on Shopify or WordPress. It also connects to the rest of your stack, so push audiences and events can flow between the tools you already run. Browse the full list on the integrations page, or start with the ecommerce retargeting quick start guide.

How to choose between them

Most teams do not need 14 tools. They need one from each of three groups:

• One paid platform to start. Pick the network where your audience already spends time, which is Google or Meta for most consumer businesses and LinkedIn for most B2B. Adding a second network before the first one is profitable just splits your data.
• One owned channel that does not require an email address. This is where web push earns its place, because it turns anonymous traffic into a reachable audience without ever asking for personal information.
• One onsite tool, if traffic justifies it. Below roughly 10,000 monthly visitors, focus on the first two. Onsite optimization needs volume to be worth the subscription.

If you want the strategy behind the tooling, we have written up retargeting strategies that actually work and the core retargeting techniques every marketer should know.

Frequently asked questions

What are retargeting tools?

Retargeting tools are platforms that let you reach people who already interacted with your business but did not convert. They work by identifying a past visitor, either through an advertising pixel, a push subscription, an email address or a phone number, and then delivering a follow-up message to that specific person. The category spans paid ad platforms like Google Ads and Meta, owned channels like web push, email and SMS, and onsite tools that intervene before a visitor leaves.

What is the difference between retargeting and remarketing?

In practice the two words are used interchangeably, and Google’s own product is called remarketing while the rest of the ad industry mostly says retargeting. Where people do draw a line, retargeting means paid ads served to past visitors, and remarketing means re-engaging existing contacts through channels you own, usually email. It is a distinction worth knowing so you can follow a conversation, but not one worth arguing about. Both describe the same goal: getting a second chance with someone who already showed interest.

Are there free retargeting tools?

There are free tiers, but no genuinely free way to retarget at scale. Google Ads, Meta, LinkedIn and Microsoft Advertising all charge no platform fee, so the software is free and the media is not. Klaviyo is free up to 250 profiles and 500 email sends a month, and Mailchimp is free up to 250 contacts, which is enough to test a cart abandonment flow but not to run a store on. Aimtell has a 14-day free trial with no credit card required, then starts at $49 a month. The cheapest real path for a small site is usually one owned channel on an entry plan, since the cost is fixed no matter how many notifications or emails you send, rather than an ad budget that only reaches people while it is being spent.

Wrapping up

The retargeting tools worth your money in 2026 are the ones that match how you actually reach people. Paid platforms give you scale and cost you every impression. Owned channels cost a flat fee and compound over time, but only reach the audience you have built. Onsite tools convert the visit you already paid for. A good stack has one of each, not fourteen of any.

If the gap in your stack is the owned channel, web push is the fastest one to fill, because it does not need an email address, a form or an ad budget to start working. Read the Beginner’s Guide to Web Push Notifications if you want the background first, or start a trial and have your first cart abandonment campaign running this afternoon.

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