Taboola vs Outbrain: What's Actually Different in 2026

Here's the thing nobody searching "Taboola vs Outbrain" in 2026 gets told up front: Outbrain doesn't exist as a separate brand anymore. In February 2025, Outbrain completed its roughly $900 million acquisition of Teads, and by June 2025 the combined company had fully rebranded under the Teads name. The Outbrain dashboard, the Outbrain sales reps, the Outbrain logo on your invoices — all of it is now Teads.

If you're comparing platforms today, you're really comparing Taboola vs. Teads. The core native ad unit — the in-feed widget you already know from Outbrain — still exists and still works the same way. What changed is the company behind it, and what it now offers beyond that original ad unit.

What actually changed after the merger

• The brand: Outbrain's advertiser-facing product, sales team, and public identity all now operate as Teads. If you log into what used to be your Outbrain Amplify account, you're in Teads' self-serve platform now — same login, new name.
• The offering: the merger combined Outbrain's native recommendation technology with Teads' premium video and CTV inventory, so the combined platform now sells a full-funnel pitch — awareness through video and CTV, performance through native — instead of just bottom-of-funnel native clicks.
• The scale: the combined company covers 50+ markets, reaches over 2 billion consumers monthly, and represents roughly $1.7 billion in combined annual ad spend behind one sales motion.
• What didn't change: the native widget itself, the publisher relationships that made Outbrain valuable in the first place, and (per practitioner reporting) pricing and approval standards that remain distinctly stricter than Taboola's.

Taboola vs. Teads (formerly Outbrain): the real differences

CPC ranges are practitioner-reported, non-official figures — actual cost varies significantly by geography, vertical, and creative performance.

Who Teads still works well for

The heaviest advertiser categories on the platform — insurance, finance, and health — are compliance-bound categories that wouldn't keep spending on a platform that didn't deliver measurable results. That's the same read we'd give you directly: Teads rewards advertisers who show up with a real content-driven funnel and a testing budget, and it punishes anyone who arrives with one creative and a landing page that can't hold attention.