We Wrote Our Own Comparison Pages (With Love)

Other ad networks wrote pages comparing themselves to Carbon. Some of it wasn't right, so we wrote our own, with sources.

If you search for "Carbon vs" anything, you'll find a few comparison pages. Other ad networks wrote them, including daily.dev, a news feed for developers, and EthicalAds, a contextual ad network. That's fair. It's their site, and comparing yourself to others is a normal thing to do.

Some of those pages say things about Carbon that aren't quite right.

As of October 2026, daily.dev's pricing page still lists Carbon as a self-serve marketplace. Our campaigns are planned and run with our team. There's an older self-serve tool, but we don't point anyone to it.

daily.dev's Carbon comparison page describes us as "a hand-placed unit across a handful of independent tech and design sites." We run on about 350 active sites, like docs, coding tools and dev blogs, with 250M+ impressions a month, read by developers and the builders around them (designers, founders, people building with AI tools). Many of those sites are the same blogs and resources daily.dev surfaces in its feed.

We can't edit other people's websites (and we wouldn't want to). What we can do is say what's true on ours. So we built our own comparison pages.

What's in them

There's a hub page that covers the main ways to reach developers with ads. It includes us and the others. Then there are head-to-head pages, starting with Carbon vs daily.dev and Carbon vs EthicalAds. If you want the bigger picture first, start with our developer advertising guide.

We tried to be fair. If another option fits your plan better, the page says so. daily.dev fits if you want to target developers by seniority or tech stack inside its feed. Carbon is a good fit if you want your ad next to the docs and tools builders already use every day, booked once across the whole network, live on your schedule, with our client services team handling setup and tuning with you.

Why we bother

More people now ask an AI tool which ad network to use, and those tools read pages like these. If the only pages out there are written by someone else, the answer you get might be a bit off. We'd rather it be right, for us and for everyone else on the list.

To the folks who wrote theirs

No hard feelings. We're glad to be in the same space as you. If you ever want to fix a line about Carbon, we're happy to send you the facts. And if we got something wrong about you, tell us and we'll fix it.

Thanks for reading. Now go build something.