Northbeam vs Triple Whale: attribution for Shopify brands

Northbeam and Triple Whale are both first-party attribution platforms for ecommerce brands: each installs its own pixel, builds customer journeys across ad channels and credits orders to the ads that drove them. The differences are in pricing and contracts, how many attribution models and accounting options they offer, what they send back to ad platforms, and how much else comes in the box.

Facts on Northbeam and Triple Whale come from each vendor's pricing page, product pages and documentation on October 25, 2026. Facts on Billy Grace and Google Meridian were checked on November 4, 2026. We rechecked Triple Whale's pricing on November 5.

Summary

	Northbeam	Triple Whale
Lowest listed price	Starter listed at $1,500.00, by quote	Free plan
Price based on	Ad spend tier and pageviews	Annual GMV and package
Contract	Starter month-to-month; Professional and Enterprise annual	Paid plans 12 months
Attribution models	7, plus 2 accounting modes	8 on paid plans
View-through	Deterministic and modeled views	Deterministic views; platform-reported views
Sends data to ad platforms	Apex (Meta, AppLovin)	Sonar Optimize
Beyond attribution	MMM+, incrementality, media strategists	BI, SQL editor, Moby agent, Sonar Send

Pricing and contracts

Northbeam lists four plans:

• Starter, listed at $1,500.00, for brands spending under $1.5M a year on ads. Its FAQ calls Starter "month-to-month usage-based pricing for Shopify brands".
• Professional at $3,500.00 per month, for brands spending up to $500K a month on ads. It adds unlimited users, exports and integrations, platforms other than Shopify, and a dedicated media strategist.
• Enterprise by quote, for more than $500K a month in ad spend.
• Growth by quote, sold together with a Northbeam partner agency.

Northbeam's FAQ explains that plans "start at" these rates because the monthly price depends on data volume, measured in pageviews. Professional and Enterprise are annual terms.

Triple Whale lists a free plan and three paid packages (Foundation, Automate, Enterprise). Its own pricing page shows no prices and says the price depends on annual GMV. On October 25 its Shopify App Store listing showed Foundation at $219.00 a month ($2,190.00 a year) and Automate at $749.00 a month ($7,490.00 a year). On November 5 that page said the app wasn't currently available, so we couldn't confirm those prices. Ask for a quote. Paid plans are 12-month subscriptions, billed monthly or yearly with two months free on yearly billing.

The practical difference: you can try Triple Whale's pixel and basic attribution for free, and Northbeam's Starter is month-to-month while Triple Whale's paid plans run for 12 months.

Attribution models

Northbeam's documentation lists seven models:

• First Touch, Last Touch and Last Non-Direct Touch
• Linear
• Clicks-Only, which skips lower-funnel touchpoints such as branded search and email when an upper-funnel touchpoint exists
• Clicks + Modeled Views, which adds an estimate of view-through impact from Northbeam's own model
• Clicks + Deterministic Views, which adds views verified by the ad platform

It also has two accounting modes. Cash Snapshot credits revenue to the day of the order; Northbeam suggests it for cash flow questions. Accrual Performance credits it to the day of the ad interaction; Northbeam suggests it for questions like which ad performed best over the past seven days.

Triple Whale lists eight models on paid plans: Total Impact (pixel data plus post-purchase survey answers), Clicks & Deterministic Views, Triple Attribution (each channel gets full credit for orders it touched, similar to platform reporting), Triple Attribution + Platform Views, Linear All, Linear Paid, First Click and Last Click. The free plan has first and last click.

Both offer a view-through model based on platform-verified views. Northbeam's list adds Clicks + Modeled Views and the two accounting modes; Triple Whale's adds Total Impact, which uses post-purchase survey answers.

Sending data back to ad platforms

Northbeam's Apex sends its attribution data into Meta's and AppLovin's ad algorithms. Northbeam says it needs no development work.

Triple Whale's Sonar Optimize sends enriched conversion data back to ad platforms, and Sonar Send passes on-site behavior to email and SMS tools; Triple Whale says this lets existing flows reach more shoppers. Both are included in every paid plan.

What else you get

Our take: Northbeam stays closer to measurement and media buying. Its plans add MMM+ (media mix modeling that uses Northbeam's attribution data) and incrementality testing as options on higher plans, and Professional and above include a dedicated media strategist.

Triple Whale covers more of the store's reporting. Paid plans include no-code dashboards, customer segments, custom metrics and a SQL editor, its comparison table lists cohort and product analysis, and there's Moby, an AI agent that answers questions about the data. On the Automate plan Moby can also run scheduled tasks and change budgets or pause ads within limits you set. Its comparison table lists MMM and incrementality testing as add-ons, and Compass (attribution, MMM and incrementality together) as included on Enterprise.

Where Billy Grace and Google Meridian fit

These two often come up in the same search. One is a direct competitor, and the other answers a different question.

Billy Grace

Billy Grace is the closest match to Northbeam and Triple Whale: first-party tracking, modeled attribution across clicks and views, dashboards and an AI agent. Its main addition is automatic optimization. Billy Grace says it shifts budget across channels and campaigns within limits you set. For comparison, Northbeam's Apex sends data into ad platforms' algorithms, and Triple Whale's Moby can change budgets on the Automate plan.

Its pricing page lists plans in euros, with the option to switch to pounds or dollars:

Plan	Price per month	Monthly ad spend listed
Launch	EUR 499.00	EUR 25,000.00
Grow	EUR 999.00	EUR 60,000.00
Expansion	EUR 1,499.00	EUR 100,000.00
Scale	EUR 1,999.00	EUR 150,000.00
Professional	EUR 3,250.00	EUR 250,000.00

Above that, Enterprise is priced by quote. Billy Grace says it suits companies with at least EUR 15,000.00 of monthly ad spend and 300 monthly conversions, and there's no free plan on the page. Most of its published customer stories are European brands, and it describes its tracking as GDPR-compliant first-party tracking.

Google Meridian

Meridian isn't an attribution tool. It's an open-source media mix model (MMM) built by Google and free to use. Its documentation says it answers three questions: the historical ROI of each channel, how impact changes with spend, and how to allocate future budget.

The differences from Northbeam and Triple Whale are practical:

• Data: an MMM works from aggregated data. Meridian's documentation says it uses no cookies or user-level information, so you won't see customer journeys or which ad drove a specific order.
• Setup: you run it yourself. It needs Python, and Google recommends at least one GPU.
• Cost: the software is free under an Apache 2.0 license. The cost is the time of whoever builds and maintains the model.

Both vendors also sell MMM as an extra, as covered above. You could pair Meridian with either tool: use attribution for day-to-day decisions and the model for budget questions across channels. That's our suggestion, not a vendor recommendation.

Which one to pick

Our take, based on what each vendor offers:

• Pick Northbeam if attribution is the main job, your ad budget is large enough that a plan listed from $1,500.00 is a small share of it, and you want modeled views, accrual accounting or help from a media strategist.
• Pick Triple Whale if you want attribution and the store's day-to-day dashboards in one tool, want to start free, or plan to use Sonar Send for email and SMS flows.
• Look at Billy Grace if you sell mainly in Europe and want budget shifts handled for you.
• Look at Meridian if you have someone who can build a statistical model and your question is how to split budget across channels, not which ad drove an order.
• Trial both on the same model. Install both pixels for a few weeks, set both to first click or linear, and compare against your Shopify orders. Northbeam's FAQ says its numbers are different by design and may not line up with Meta Ads Manager. Expect differences between any two tools that use different models and lookback windows.

If you're also weighing other tools, the Triple Whale alternatives guide covers Polar, Hyros, Lebesgue and server-side tracking tools.