AppNexus vs. OpenX

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
AppNexus
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
AppNexus AppNexus offers online auction infrastructure and technology for data management, optimization, financial clearing and support for directly negotiated advertising campaigns. It integrates with advertising sources including Google's DoubleClick, Microsoft's AdECN, and aggregators.[3]N/A
OpenX
Score 1.1 out of 10
N/A
OpenX is an ad serving platform. It is sold option as a hosted solution for can be purchased as an installed application. It allows for easy inventory management , geo-targeting of ads by country, and provides statistics for each ad placement.N/A
Pricing
AppNexusOpenX
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
AppNexusOpenX
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details——
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
AppNexusOpenX
Considered Both Products
AppNexus

No answer on this topic

OpenX
Chose OpenX
If OpenX wants to be used or adopted by more desks or RTB partners than it needs to provide the transparency and premium inventory that a AppNexus, ADX and Rubicon provide. This goes for the open exchange and private marketplaces.
Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
AppNexusOpenX
Ad Network Integration
Comparison of Ad Network Integration features of Product A and Product B
AppNexus
8.5
8 Ratings
14% above category average
OpenX
6.6
3 Ratings
11% below category average
Data Transfer8.06 Ratings6.53 Ratings
DSP integration9.08 Ratings6.83 Ratings
Ad Campaigns
Comparison of Ad Campaigns features of Product A and Product B
AppNexus
8.0
8 Ratings
3% above category average
OpenX
7.0
5 Ratings
10% below category average
Ad campaign creation8.08 Ratings6.85 Ratings
Ad deployment9.07 Ratings6.65 Ratings
Display advertising7.07 Ratings7.35 Ratings
Ad display and retargeting segmentation8.07 Ratings6.55 Ratings
Sequence targeting8.07 Ratings7.54 Ratings
Ad Reporting & Analytics
Comparison of Ad Reporting & Analytics features of Product A and Product B
AppNexus
8.2
9 Ratings
6% above category average
OpenX
6.6
5 Ratings
16% below category average
Ad dashboards9.09 Ratings5.95 Ratings
Ad performance reports7.09 Ratings6.05 Ratings
Ad conversion tracking8.08 Ratings6.15 Ratings
Ad attribution reporting8.08 Ratings7.04 Ratings
Cross-channel ad management9.08 Ratings7.25 Ratings
Ad forecasting and optimization8.08 Ratings7.64 Ratings
Best Alternatives
AppNexusOpenX
Small Businesses
Google Ad Manager
Google Ad Manager
Score 8.5 out of 10
Google Ad Manager
Google Ad Manager
Score 8.5 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
The Trade Desk
The Trade Desk
Score 7.0 out of 10
The Trade Desk
The Trade Desk
Score 7.0 out of 10
Enterprises
Adobe Advertising Cloud
Adobe Advertising Cloud
Score 8.9 out of 10
Adobe Advertising Cloud
Adobe Advertising Cloud
Score 8.9 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
AppNexusOpenX
Likelihood to Recommend
8.0
(16 ratings)
7.3
(15 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
4.0
(6 ratings)
7.0
(10 ratings)
Usability
5.0
(2 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
Availability
10.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
10.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
6.0
(1 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
Online Training
2.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
5.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Configurability
5.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
5.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
5.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
6.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
4.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
AppNexusOpenX
Likelihood to Recommend
AppNexus
Appnexus is specifically well suited for CTV campaigns. They have the full technology stack to help you scale campaigns in any format, whether you need a lot of volume in traditional formats like banners and interstitials or if you need high-impact formats like video and other alternatives. Appnexus has a very strong set of unique publishers which makes it a great DSP for branding campaigns.
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OpenX
What are the best ways to integrate it with salesforce.com? What are the best ways to target our users with this tool? To segment the users? How can I integrate my ads with your adexchange-what sizes are you looking for in terms of banners, skyscrapers and so on. In this way I can plan my in house ad and those for the exchange to be the same size, to avoid duplication of work.
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Pros
AppNexus
  • As per my experience they have strong support personnel. Solving the issues as and when required.
  • We can solve certain issues like campaign performance, inventory optimization and more with the help of AppNexus wiki. We get all the required information in the Wiki itself.
  • They have given the right platform to both buyers and sellers to workout and meet their digital marketing needs and goals.
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OpenX
  • OpenX is a system that was designed to scale as is evident in some key design decisions found throughout the platform. The multi-server setup that was chosen at Mail.com allowed for a distributed server architecture which separated the front end web delivery nodes from the backend MySQL Database master which replicated data back to each front end delivery node mysql slave. This eased the ability to horizontally scale as needed due to the ingenious separation of the ad impressions data tables on the delivery nodes which were being collected locally on each ad impression and then processed periodically back to to the master database which replicated the aggregated statistics back to the delivery nodes. The ability to load balance across the front end web delivery nodes, add caching at many different layers, utilize a CDN for the static ad images, implement PHP accelerators, and hit memcached instead of the MySQL master made the OpenX platform a service that was very resilient to failures.
  • The ability to optimize the platform is also something that OpenX does very well. This is evident in many of the config key parameters available. In addition to OpenX specific tunable's, optimizations can be made at many different levels in which the system sits. These include hardware and operating system level optimizations, tcp and networking stack optimizations, web server/php-cgi configurations, and database (MySQL InnoDB) tunable's. There are many different optimization knobs that can be tuned to help scale the application for the best performance possible
  • The documentation was simple, to the point, and well written which led to an easy initial implementation and roll out of a multi-server setup. The installation and upgrade procedures were straight forward even for the complexities of the multi-server setup. I also found the OpenX team to be accessible and even got a chance to meet some of the team at their Up Close and Personal events at Cal Tech in Pasadena. Core developers were on hand to answer technical questions and also made themselves available to us via email and irq channels.
  • The open nature of the OpenX platform allows for flexibility in the choice of web serving platform to use (Apache, nginx, Lighttpd) and also the database management systems (MySQL, PostGreSQL)
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Cons
AppNexus
  • The platform is incredibly complex and requires a great deal of understanding of how the platform works that caught us by surprise.
  • The wiki is not enough and when we resorted to reaching out to AppNexus it was a nuisance of having several emails going back and forth.
  • No phone support is offered which would have made several things easier than exchanging confusing emails.
  • Video inventory is still not implemented.
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OpenX
  • Propagation could be improved; ad units that need to go live immediately could take up to 45 minutes to propagate.
  • Over-complexity can be confusing. There are multiple tiers before assigning ad units per order and it seems unnecessary.
  • Real-time reporting or a status dashboard would be great.
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Likelihood to Renew
AppNexus
I love almost everything about AppNexus because I feel like the user data is easy to track because of the identifiers, you can see which adverts got clicked and which were ignored. We can track the location of the ad on the page fold and this makes it so much easier for future campaigns. The only thing I don't like is that the data is only kept for a year, and I'd like it for a longer period of time
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OpenX
I no longer work at the company where I was using OpenX, but if I were then I'd certainly stay aboard. Frankly, there are a lot of sunk costs involved with building all of the infrastructure we had put in place, the system was working very well even if reporting was a hassle, and our team was trained on it. Also, I'm not aware of another product that does everything else we'd need it to.
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Usability
AppNexus
Because I think the interface is kind of confusing at the beginning and it confuses you a lot.
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OpenX
I was given the system to use as part of setting up a whole new site from scratch in less than 2 months, with a large number of specialty hub pages to run ads on and lots of content I needed to run disease specific ads on. The system was easy for me to learn on the fly in a very compressed time frame. I would have loved more chance to really dig in under the hood to see all that it could do, but given how fast I had to work, I got everything up and running and looking great. And I did it ahead of my launch deadline too. My only reservation might be for people who are not as patient as I am in picking things up, or as hands on. Customer service was great if I needed them, and a quick start guide with the essentials would be ideal for those people.
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Reliability and Availability
AppNexus
I've never had any problems with appnexus - the software is always available
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OpenX
No answers on this topic
Performance
AppNexus
Yes, everything works great in that sense
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OpenX
No answers on this topic
Support Rating
AppNexus
Because the support team does give you support, they take 24hrs to get back to you but once they open a ticket they focus on resolving the issue for you. My only problem is that you don't have a specific account representative assigned to you.
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OpenX
They went above and beyond without ever asking for additional money and we met our launch date and immediately started to meet and even surpass our business goals. Nothing was too much trouble, which really stood out compared to other companies I had and was at that time also working with. Customer service can really make or break any business; if i expect my staff to give good customer service, I expect to get it too, and Open X gave it.
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Online Training
AppNexus
Online training are not user friendly and not easy to understand
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OpenX
No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
AppNexus
The TTD platform seems to have better CTV/OLV inventory, so that is typically preferred over AppNexus (APN). Usually, if clients have an internal desk, they will use TTD, which can often lead to us bidding against them, which is also another benefit of running campaigns within AppNexus (APN). Google DSP is typically used to increase the scale for display and build larger re-messaging pools.
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OpenX
OpenX is less focused than MoPub and it has a bigger reach as it is not limited to the mobile app. Unlike MoPub that focuses on performance, OpenX comes from the branding world and is pushing into CTV and other areas of the industry more catered to traditional media agencies and not pure ad tech players.
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Scalability
AppNexus
Because it's a great DSP but not the best
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OpenX
No answers on this topic
Return on Investment
AppNexus
  • The 1 USD audit fee makes it very hard to A/B test creatives and improve performance, hurting ROI.
  • We have been able to reach some users that we weren't able to get before, increasing spending, which is good for ROI.
  • We can run campaigns on TV, which is a big boost for the business, and very ROI positive.
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OpenX
  • OpenX made it easy to manage online advertising. At the time I used the product I was the lead developer in charge of implementing the solution but quickly was put into the role of managing the traffic and training other users. It was really easy for a technical user to become a traffic manager. Getting other users trained and up to speed was very efficient.
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ScreenShots