Keitaro vs Northbeam

What each one actually is

Keitaro is a self-hosted click tracker and traffic-distribution system you install on your own Linux server. You route your campaign links through it, and beyond recording every click, its cost, the conversion and the ROI, it does the media buyer's daily job: it splits traffic across landing pages and offers by rules you set, on GEO, device, browser, operator and schedule, with offer and lander rotation, A/B tests, server-to-server postbacks and bot filtering built in. Apliteni has sold it for years, it runs on hardware you control, and the licence is a flat monthly fee that ignores how many clicks you push through it.

Northbeam is a cross-channel marketing measurement platform, and it is not a tag you drop on a page to count clicks. It sits over a brand's whole paid-media mix and answers one question: across Meta, Google, TikTok, YouTube, email and the rest, which channels and creatives are driving new revenue, and which are claiming sales that would have happened anyway. Multi-touch attribution stitches the touchpoints into one first-party view, media-mix modeling forecasts revenue by budget scenario, and Northbeam Apex feeds first-party conversions back into the Meta and AppLovin algorithms. It is a cloud platform, onboarded after a demo, and priced for brands already spending six or seven figures a month.

The split that decides it

These two barely overlap, so the choice is not a feature race. Ask one question: are you routing paid clicks across offers you promote, or measuring which channels earned the revenue for a brand selling its own products? If you buy traffic and send it across a rotation of offers and landers, deciding who sees what and cutting the losers, that is a traffic-distribution job and it is what Keitaro is built for. If you run a store, spend across many channels, and need one honest, independent read on where the growth actually came from, that is a measurement job and it is what Northbeam does.

A blunter version settles most cases: how much do you spend, and on whose products? Northbeam's own pricing is written for brands spending over a million a year on ads, and its value only shows up at high six or seven-figure monthly budgets. Keitaro costs a flat two figures a month plus a server. If you are an affiliate or media buyer promoting offers, Northbeam's own team points you at a self-hosted tracker instead, which is exactly what Keitaro is. If you are still unsure, the Keitaro review and the Northbeam review lay out who each one is for.

What Keitaro does that Northbeam does not

Keitaro routes. It distributes clicks across offers and landers by rule, rotates them, caps the losers, runs A/B tests and cloaks where you allow it. Northbeam does none of that; it measures traffic a brand has already bought, it does not decide where a click goes. Keitaro also puts the engine and the data on your own server, so your click and conversion history lives on hardware you control with retention you set, and the flat licence never trips an overage fee no matter how much volume a winning campaign suddenly does. For a high-volume affiliate that flat, uncapped cost is most of the argument, and Northbeam's demo-quoted, spend-tied contract is the opposite model. If routing many offers is the job, this is not a close call, and a measurement platform does not replace it, which is the same reason RedTrack sits closer to Keitaro than Northbeam ever will.

What Northbeam does that Keitaro does not

Northbeam measures the whole mix. It applies one independent, first-party model across every ad platform, credits new revenue over long lookback windows, values the view-through and top-of-funnel spend a last-click tracker ignores, forecasts budget with media-mix modeling, and runs incrementality tests to separate sales it caused from sales that would have landed anyway. Keitaro tracks the clicks you route through it well, but it cannot tell a brand whether its YouTube spend lifted total revenue or just took credit for it. Northbeam's Apex also pipes its corrected, cross-channel conversions into the Meta and AppLovin bidding engines, a step past a standard conversions API. For a scaled store deciding where the next hundred thousand in budget should go, that blended read is the entire point, and Keitaro was never built to give it. A brand weighing that job usually shortlists Northbeam against other measurement tools, not trackers, which is why the same split decides CPV Lab Pro vs Northbeam.

Setup, who runs it, and what neither fixes

Keitaro is a project. The docs want a clean VPS with KVM, 20 GB of SSD and 4 GB of RAM or more, and the domains, SSL, backups, updates and security are yours to keep up. The sharpest reviews describe 502 errors on conversion postbacks, usually tracing to an under-provisioned box rather than the tracker itself, but on a self-hosted tool part of your uptime is your responsibility. Keitaro's routing engine also carries reputation baggage: security researchers have documented it abused in malware and cloaking campaigns, so some strict ad networks view the toolset warily. That is criminal misuse of a general routing tool, not honest tracking, but keep your redirects clean.

Northbeam asks nothing of your server, because there is nothing to host; the vendor onboards you after a demo. What it asks for instead is money and reconciliation. There is no free trial and no free tier, so you commit before you can test, and its numbers will disagree with Meta and Google by design, which means reconciling models and lookback windows against backend revenue rather than reading one ROAS as truth. And the point both share: a tracker or a model tells you where the money is going, it does not fix a weak offer or thin margins. If the funnel does not convert, neither Keitaro's routing nor Northbeam's corrected attribution will save it. Fix the offer first, then pick the tool that fits the job. If you route many offers and want to see the field, look also at the alternatives to Keitaro.

Keitaro publishes a flat licence that ignores your click count. Individual plans are billed yearly at EUR 40 (Starter), EUR 72 (Advanced) and EUR 104 (Expert) a month, with Team and Enterprise higher, and Keitaro lists discounts for paying up front. There is no free trial, only a public live demo, and the Linux VPS you host it on is a separate ongoing cost on top of the licence.

Northbeam does not publish a self-serve price. Its plans start at $1,500 a month (Starter, for brands under $1.5m a year in ad spend) and $3,500 a month (Professional), with custom Growth and Enterprise tiers, all quoted after a demo and tied to your spend. Media-mix modeling and incrementality are optional add-ons. Buyers report the real annual cost lands near $30,000 to $50,000, and there is no free trial to test it first.

Prices read from each vendor's own pricing page, current as of 24 September 2026.