Kevel vs Topsort vs Criteo vs Mirakl Ads: four ways to run retail media, compared

Each cell is sourced on the vendor's profile page, and the key source for each column is linked in the first row. "n/d" means the vendor publishes nothing on the point as of 9 November 2026 (Kevel, Topsort, Criteo, Mirakl Ads profiles).

Profiles with full sourcing: Kevel, Topsort, Criteo and Mirakl Ads.

API-first (Kevel, and Topsort's API path). The vendor runs the decision and the auction; the retailer builds everything the shopper and the advertiser see. The retailer's search team decides relevance, its developers render the ads, and its sales team brings the brands. In return, the retailer owns the interface, the data and the advertiser relationship. Kevel describes its role as data processor, with the retailer as controller (Kevel).

Managed platform with demand (Criteo). The vendor runs the ads and also sells them. Criteo counted roughly 4,700 brands on its retail media side in Q3 2026 (Criteo, 4 November 2026). A retailer can earn from launch without hiring sellers. The price is a shared advertiser relationship and fees on both sides of each sale.

Marketplace-native (Mirakl Ads). The vendor turns a marketplace's sellers into advertisers. Sellers on a Mirakl marketplace can advertise from day one, and their budgets can come from their seller balance (Mirakl Ads). The fit is strongest where third-party sellers carry much of the catalogue; the dynamics of those networks are covered in marketplace retail media.

Where the ad server sits among the other parts of a network, from catalog to clean room, is drawn in retail media network architecture.

Both let engineers integrate through documented APIs, and both leave selling to the retailer. They differ in what they treat as the core product.

Kevel is a general ad server. Its Decision API can return any creative, from sponsored products to display, audio and screens. Retailers rank demand sources by priority tiers. Inside a tier, Kevel runs a first-price or second-price auction and converts click and conversion bids to eCPM so they compete fairly (Kevel retail media guide). That suits retailers with many ad formats and partners, such as Dollar General, whose onsite and offsite buying now connects to The Trade Desk through Kevel (Kevel, 4 May 2026).

Topsort is an auction engine for retail formats. Its Auctions API takes the products the retailer wants to sell, the number of slots and optional relevance scores between 0 and 1 for each product (Topsort docs). The retailer's own recommender decides what is eligible; Topsort prices the slots. Topsort also adds a demand layer of its own. Toppie is a buying tool where brands manage campaigns across every Topsort network, and Skai has been its first API buying partner since 23 September 2025 (PPC Land, September 2025).

A practical test. A marketplace with a strong search team and thousands of sellers will find Topsort's quality-score model maps directly onto what it already has. A grocer that wants to sell search ads, store screens and an email slot through one decision engine will find Kevel's format-agnostic API closer to its needs. Either way, the retailer still needs people to sell.

Criteo calls its product the Commerce Intelligence Platform today; its 2024 materials called it the Commerce Media Platform. The core offer to a retailer is demand. Brands reach Criteo-run placements through Commerce Max, through Google Search Ads 360 since a beta that began on 10 September 2025, through Microsoft Advertising, and through 14 API buying partners (Criteo 10-K, FY2025).

That demand is why large retailers keep signing. Lidl, Loblaw Advance, Massmart and Notino all joined in 2026. It also explains the main risk. When Criteo's largest retail client dropped managed and brand sales services from November 2025, the effect showed up across Criteo's whole segment. A retailer weighing Criteo should ask the mirror question: what would its own business lose if it later moved those services in-house? The details, dates and figures are on the Criteo profile.

Mirakl Ads launched in November 2022 and had more than 20 retailers two years later (Mirakl, 10 December 2024). It is not a renamed Adspert: Mirakl bought Adspert in December 2024 to help sellers optimise bids. Its clients are mostly marketplaces and marketplace-heavy retailers in Europe, Africa and the US, such as Rakuten France, Jumia and La Redoute.

Two design choices stand out. Unspent budget flows automatically to Google Shopping, so small sellers get offsite reach without a second campaign. The Criteo integration lets marketplace sellers appear in Criteo-run placements, which is unusual: one of the four vendors in this comparison is a channel for another.

No vendor here publishes a rate card. What a buyer can use:

The figure that matters is your effective take rate: all vendor fees divided by gross ad spend on your properties. For a network vendor, add the retailer-side and brand-side fees. For an API vendor, add the licence or usage fee to the cost of the sales and engineering team you will need. Ask each vendor to state its fees at your expected spend in year one and year three; the gap between the two often tells you more than the headline.

Take a home and garden retailer with an online marketplace of about 2,000 third-party sellers, a five-person engineering team and no ad sales staff. The scenario is illustrative, not a vendor case. The four first meetings would go very differently.

1. Kevel would ask what formats the retailer wants and who will build the pages. With five engineers, the retailer would likely start on Kevel Console rather than a custom interface, and would still need someone to sell to brands.
2. Topsort would ask for the product catalog and the retailer's search ranking. The retailer's own recommender would choose eligible products; Topsort would run the auction, and Toppie would let brands find the new network.
3. Criteo would ask for traffic, placements and sales data, and would bring brands itself. The retailer would earn fastest here but would share the buyer relationship and pay fees on both sides.
4. Mirakl Ads would ask about the 2,000 sellers. If the marketplace already runs on Mirakl, those sellers could advertise from day one, with unspent budget moving to Google Shopping.

None of these answers is wrong. Each trades engineering effort, sales effort and control in a different way, which is why the next table lists situations rather than winners.

This table does not rank the vendors. It maps common situations to the model that matches them.

Many retailers combine vendors. The Home Depot runs its in-house platform on Kevel and its self-serve tool on Vantage. Vendors outside this four-way view, such as Koddi for programmatic sales of onsite inventory and Moloco Commerce Media for machine learning ranking, often appear on the same shortlists. A neutral way to run the selection is the commerce media platform RFP, and the strategic choice behind it is set out in retail media infrastructure: build vs buy. The wider topic lives on the retail media hub.

1. Criteo S.A., Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended 31 December 2025 (filed 26 February 2026). https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1576427/000157642726000014/crto-20251231.htm
2. Criteo S.A., "Criteo Reports Third Quarter 2026 Results", Exhibit 99.1 (4 November 2026). https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1576427/000162828026069790/exhibit991-8xkq32026.htm
3. Criteo, "Criteo and Mirakl Ads launch global integration" (17 July 2025). https://www.criteo.com/news/press-releases/2025/07/criteo-and-mirakl-ads-launch-global-integration-to-accelerate-marketplace-revenue-growth/
4. Kevel, "Kevel Secures $52 Million to Scale AI-Driven Infrastructure for the Future of Commerce Media" (21 October 2026). https://www.kevel.com/blog/kevel-secures-52-million-to-scale-ai-driven-infrastructure-for-the-future-of-commerce-media
5. Kevel developer documentation, "Introduction to Kevel" (updated 1 August 2026). https://dev.kevel.com/docs/understanding-kevel
6. Kevel developer documentation, "Retail Media Guide" (updated 2 October 2026). https://dev.kevel.com/docs/retail-media
7. Kevel, "Kevel, Dollar General, and The Trade Desk Introduce First-of-its-Kind Retail Media Solution" (4 May 2026). https://www.kevel.com/blog/kevel-dg-ttd-partnership-announcement
8. Kevel, "Kevel partners with The Home Depot" (8 October 2024). https://www.kevel.com/blog/kevel-home-depot-press-release
9. Kevel, home page and "Retail media" (accessed 9 November 2026). https://www.kevel.com/ and https://www.kevel.com/retail-media
10. Topsort, "About" and home page (accessed 9 November 2026). https://www.topsort.com/about and https://www.topsort.com/