Celtra vs Smartly: Choosing the right creative platform

Celtra and Smartly are frequently compared by teams evaluating creative and advertising platforms. While both are built to improve digital advertising performance, they are structured around different priorities. Smartly centers its model on media execution and optimization across connected suites, while Celtra is designed as a creative-first platform, embedding intelligence throughout the creative lifecycle to scale quality, governance, and performance within a unified system.

In this article, we examine how each platform approaches unification, AI, workflows, and long-term scalability, so you can determine which solution best aligns with how your organization creates and scales advertising.

What is Smartly, and when does it work best?

Smartly positions itself as an advertising platform that brings creative and media together to eliminate fragmentation and streamline campaigns. Their messaging emphasizes one central system to coordinate strategy, execution, and performance across channels.

Smartly works particularly well for:

• Performance‑driven teams focused on paid social
• Organizations with large media budgets looking to optimize spend
• Teams prioritizing rapid experimentation and automated optimization

With strong integrations across major social platforms and a heavy emphasis on AI‑powered budget allocation and optimization, Smartly is often chosen by brands where media performance is the primary driver.

What is Celtra, and when does it work best?

Celtra is a creative-first enterprise platform designed to help brands and media organizations scale high-performing digital advertising without sacrificing creative quality or control. Rather than centering on media execution alone, Celtra embeds creative intelligence across the entire lifecycle, from design and production to activation and optimization.

Celtra works well for organizations seeking to:

• Scale on-brand creative across markets and formats
• Ensure governance and compliance at enterprise scale
• Apply AI responsibly within structured brand systems
• Replace guesswork with predictive creative intelligence
• Accelerate testing and personalization at volume
• Achieve omnichannel consistency with operational agility

With a unified architecture and intelligence embedded directly into the creative system, Celtra is often chosen by organizations that view creative as a primary performance lever, not simply a production output. 

What should you consider when comparing Celtra and Smartly?

When evaluating Celtra and Smartly, the decision often comes down to how each platform fits into your organization’s operating model – not just its feature set.

As teams expand across markets and channels, complexity increases. Production volume grows, localization needs multiply, testing requirements accelerate, and financial oversight becomes more important. The question shifts from “Can we optimize campaigns?” to “How well does our system support scale, coordination, and long-term control?”

Key considerations include:

• How tightly creative production is integrated with activation workflows
• Where and how AI is applied within the creative process
• How brand governance and compliance are enforced at high volume
• Whether the platform supports true cross-channel consistency
• How the pricing model behaves as budgets and operations grow

These factors determine whether your chosen platform supports sustainable operational efficiency, creative quality, and the tools needed to drive long-term advertising performance

At a glance: Celtra vs. Smartly

Here’s a high-level look at how the two platforms stack up.

This overview highlights key differences, but the real distinctions become clearer as we dive into how each platform operates in practice. 

1. What is the role of platform structure in operational efficiency? 

Smartly positions itself as a unified platform combining creative, media, and intelligence. In practice, this means its offering is structured around multiple connected suites. While tightly integrated, this architecture can introduce additional handoffs and coordination, particularly for creative teams operating at scale.

Celtra is unified at the architectural level. Creative production, feed management, governance, performance intelligence, and activation workflows operate within a single system. Teams work from a shared foundation of modular templates, centralized assets, and structured approval flows, reducing duplication and minimizing versioning errors across markets and channels.

“I like the fact that Celtra is easy to use, even for those with no design experience. Its effectiveness in delivering campaigns exactly as designed also adds to its undeniable appeal! The platform allows teams of people from different departments and external contributors to all have access to their own creative, making collaboration a breeze.

— G2 reviewer

The result is less operational friction, clearer collaboration between teams, and a creative supply system designed to scale.

2. Can creative scale without sacrificing brand integrity? 

Smartly’s creative capabilities are closely tied to media execution and optimization workflows. While this supports rapid activation and iteration, creative flexibility can be shaped by channel constraints and performance templates, which may limit experimentation or nuanced brand expression at scale.

Celtra is built around creative systems designed to expand, not restrict, creative possibilities. Advanced design environments, modular frameworks, and dynamic template structures allow teams to produce high volumes of variations without sacrificing originality or visual quality. Designers maintain control over animation, layout, and storytelling, while marketers can activate and localize assets independently within brand guardrails.

“The intuitiveness for generating automated content and the ease of creating great quality content, the ability to generate so many assets, does not sacrifice quality.”

— G2 reviewer

This balance between flexibility and structure enables organizations to scale creative output while protecting brand integrity and raising the overall standard of creative execution.

3. How does AI strategy influence long-term creative performance?

Smartly’s AI is primarily oriented toward campaign execution and media optimization through generative production, automated refreshes, and media-level decision-making, such as budget allocation and in-flight adjustments. This approach accelerates experimentation and optimizes performance once campaigns are live.

Celtra approaches AI from a broader perspective and applies creative intelligence across the full creative lifecycle through an integrated system that includes:

• Enterprise GenAI with brand governance
  Generating scalable, media-ready variations within structured design systems, ensuring compliance and brand integrity at scale.
• Predictive performance scoring
  Evaluating creative concepts before launch to reduce guesswork and prioritize high-performing assets before media spend begins.
• Creative performance intelligence
  Connecting results directly to visual, messaging, and structural elements, transforming every campaign into a measurable learning system.
• Agentic workflows across generation, activation, and insights
  Automating production and coordination between teams, linking creative generation, approvals, media activation, and performance tracking in one governed system.

In this way, AI becomes a decision-support layer that strengthens creative effectiveness, protects media investment, and drives sustainable performance over time.

4. Dynamic product advertising: automation or creative control?

Smartly’s DPA capabilities are closely aligned with media workflows, making it easy to automatically generate and optimize product ads. This allows teams to scale quickly, but creative formats are largely shaped by platform templates, limiting how much brands can control layout, storytelling, and visual structure.

Celtra also supports social DPA, but gives brands more control over how dynamic product ads look and behave. Product feeds connect to structured design templates, allowing teams to define layout rules on how products, prices, offers, and messaging appear within platform templates. 

Feed updates, such as pricing or inventory changes, happen automatically, while built-in brand guardrails ensure every variation stays compliant and visually consistent. This means teams can scale catalog campaigns without sacrificing creative quality or rebuilding assets manually.

By combining feed automation with creative governance and refresh logic, Celtra enables always-on catalog campaigns that maintain quality, reduce fatigue, and deliver more consistent performance over time.

Summary: Which platform is right for you?

Smartly may be a good fit if you:

• Are heavily focused on paid social and media optimization
• Manage very large media budgets
• Prioritize automated performance optimization over creative control

Celtra is designed for teams that:

• Need a unified creative system, not fragmented workflows
• Want to maximize performance through smarter creative decisions
• Need consistent brand execution across channels and markets
• Want brand-governed AI capabilities built in within the tool
• Value quality, governance, and scalability alongside speed
• Want predictable pricing and transparent ROI

Ready to learn more about Celtra?

Ultimately, choosing the right platform starts with understanding your needs and long-term goals. If you’d like to explore how Celtra aligns with your priorities, our team would be happy to connect.