Squared.io is a genuinely good audit-and-pacing tool: it scores your Google and Microsoft accounts against best practice every day and emails you the moment a budget drifts off-pace. ROASt answers the next question: once you know a budget is wrong, what should it be? A statistical engine fits a response curve to every campaign and moves the money to its highest marginal return, across Google, Microsoft and Meta, every night. This page is an honest look at which of those jobs you actually need.
Squared isn’t a tool we’ll pretend is bad. It’s a well-built, well-regarded UK platform that does its core job properly. Three things it does well that any honest comparison has to start from.
Squared scores your Google account every day across quality scores, RSA performance, ad disapprovals, keyword cannibalisation and shopping issues. As a standing best-practice hygiene check for Google specifically, it’s thorough and clear.
Budget pacing across Google and Microsoft in one view, with automated emails the moment you’re projected to over- or under-spend. If month-end surprises are the thing that burns you, Squared has built exactly the early warning system for it.
Every Squared tier includes the entire product: no upgrade gates, no add-ons. For a tool pitched at agencies managing serious spend, that pricing honesty is genuinely refreshing, and rarer than it should be.
Squared tells you a budget is drifting and shows you best-practice fixes to apply but the doing is still yours. ROASt fits a response curve to every campaign’s own spend-vs-return history and solves the allocation mathematically: each pound moves to its highest marginal return, every night, staged for your approval or applied automatically inside your caps.
The engine fits Hill response curves to each campaign’s spend-vs-return history (91 days, recent days weighted more) and refits them nightly. Two campaigns with identical average ROAS can hide wildly different headroom; an audit score can’t see that, a curve can.
Squared’s pacing tells you that a budget is wrong. ROASt works out what it should be (where the next pound returns most, not where yesterday’s average looked best) and either stages the change for one click or applies it inside your guardrails.
Squared tracks pacing across Google and Microsoft in one view. A ROASt portfolio holds one budget and one goal across Google, Microsoft and Meta, and the engine shifts money between them when the curves say so. Clients think in budgets and goals, not account boundaries.
Every night the engine checks its own predictions against what actually happened and shows you the calibration score on your dashboard. Automation that marks itself in front of you is the difference between trusting a tool and hoping it’s right.
Squared earns a genuine run of ticks; daily auditing is its home turf and it does it well. The rows that matter are the ones where an audit-and-alert tool and an allocation engine answer a different question.
| Capability | Squared.io | ROASt Labs |
|---|---|---|
| Budget pacing across accounts | ✓Google + Microsoft, one view, over/under-spend alerts | ✓Google, Microsoft + Meta, with nightly adjustments |
| Daily account audit & scoring | ✓The category strength: five-dimension best-practice scoring, daily | ✓Six-dimension health score: 35+ tracking checks, budget utilisation, creative health, keyword quality, plus Shopify/GA4/CRM revenue reconciliation |
| Negative-keyword automation | ✓Best-practice negative optimisation | ✓Search Waste Hunter: finds wasted spend, suggests negatives |
| Surfaces wasteful spend | ✓Inefficiency + cannibalisation reports across the account | ✓Search waste, creative fatigue, untracked-spend audit |
| Decides where the budget goes | —Alerts you it’s off-pace; you decide and apply the change | ✓Marginal-ROAS engine works out the number and moves it |
| Optimisation method | ◐Best-practice rules + daily audit scoring | ✓Fitted response curves, refit nightly, solved at the margin |
| One budget + goal across platforms | ◐Tracks pacing across engines; doesn’t move money between them | ✓Portfolios: the engine reallocates between Google, Microsoft & Meta |
| Meta / Facebook optimisation | ◐Facebook insights; Meta budget automation not advertised | ✓Full Meta budget optimisation + creative-fatigue pausing |
| Optimises on your revenue data | —External revenue sources (GA4 / Shopify / CRM) not advertised | ✓GA4, Shopify & HubSpot as revenue sources: optimise on numbers you trust |
| Shows its working | ◐Audit explains what’s wrong against best practice | ✓Every decision decomposes into its exact factors, every action logged |
| Grades its own predictions | —Not advertised | ✓Nightly calibration score, on your dashboard |
| AI on the account | ◐Automated insights; a conversational assistant isn’t advertised | ✓Nine specialist agents + Flume chat + MCP for your own AI tools |
| Pricing | Tiered by accounts + ad spend, figures on request at squared.io | Public: from £119/$149 per month, 30-day free trial, no card up front |
Squared column based on squared.io’s public pages: homepage, budgets, Google Ads and pricing (checked June 2026). Squared ships often, so if anything here is out of date or unfair, tell us at [email protected] and we’ll fix it.
A comparison page you can trust has to cut both ways. Four honest reasons to pick Squared over ROASt:
Squared’s five-dimension daily hygiene scoring (quality scores, cannibalisation, disapprovals, RSA structure, shopping) is more mature than ROASt’s on that specific dimension. ROASt audits tracking and measurement health more deeply, but if the job is a standing Google account hygiene check, Squared is built for exactly that.
Squared’s model is alert-and-recommend: it flags the issue, you make every change yourself. If you’d rather keep your hands on every budget and just want a sharper early-warning system, that control is the point, and ROASt’s “let the engine move it” will feel like too much.
Squared is an established product with real customers and years behind it. ROASt is new. If you need a long reference list and a known quantity today, that’s a fair reason to wait, though our 30-day trial and seeded demo let you judge the engine before you commit anything.
If your accounts leak through disapprovals, cannibalisation and weak quality scores more than through misallocated budget, fixing hygiene comes first, and Squared’s daily audit is built for exactly that. ROASt checks your tracking and measurement health (35+ checks across all platforms), but its core job is reallocating budget once the plumbing is sound.
The questions people actually ask when comparing the two.
Partly. Both pace budgets across Google and Microsoft and both surface wasted spend, so there’s real overlap. The difference is what happens next: Squared audits your account and emails you when a budget drifts; ROASt works out the right number and moves the money. If your need is a daily hygiene audit plus a pacing alarm, Squared is the better fit. If the decision that actually moves your results is “where should the budget go?”, that’s the whole of what ROASt does.
No. Squared tracks pacing and emails you when you’re projected to over- or under-spend, but the reallocation is still yours to make. ROASt is built the other way round: the engine fits a response curve to each campaign, solves the allocation at the margin, and either stages the change for one click or applies it automatically inside your velocity caps and kill switches.
Squared scores your account against best-practice rules and pacing targets. ROASt fits a Hill response curve to every campaign’s own spend-vs-return history, refits nightly, and moves each pound to where the next pound returns most, across platforms, inside one portfolio budget. Rules and audits tell you what’s wrong; curves work out what’s right.
Google Ads, Microsoft Advertising and Meta, with GA4, Shopify and HubSpot as revenue sources, so the engine can optimise against the numbers you actually trust rather than platform-reported conversions. Squared covers Google and Microsoft for optimisation, with Facebook insights alongside.
ROASt’s pricing is public: plans start at £119/$149 per month with a 30-day free trial and no card up front. Squared’s pricing keys to the number of accounts and your ad spend, starting higher, which makes ROASt a notably cheaper entry point for freelancers and smaller agencies. See our pricing page for the full breakdown.
That’s the whole point of the product. Every recommendation decomposes into the exact factors that produced it, every action is logged, and the engine grades its own predictions against reality every night. Start with how the engine works, or run it in dry-run mode and watch what it would have done before it touches a budget.
30-day free trial, no card up front, and a seeded demo workspace so you can see the engine’s working before connecting anything.
