Laurence vs Helium 10

Almost every Amazon seller has used Helium 10 at some point. Plenty of brands found their first winning keywords in Cerebro or sized up a category in Black Box. It’s one of the most useful toolkits a seller can have, and we have a lot of respect for it.

So this comparison is a little different from the others. Helium 10 is a set of tools for running your Amazon business yourself: research, listings, inventory, profits and, as one part of that, ads. Laurence does one thing: we run your Amazon ads for you, with models that price every click from your own economics every hour, and a team that reviews the work. For many brands the honest answer isn’t one or the other. It’s Helium 10 for research and Laurence for ads.

Helium 10, in a few paragraphs

Helium 10 started in 2015 and grew into the default toolkit for Amazon sellers. It says it has more than 4.5 million users and supports more than 24 marketplaces, and it now covers TikTok Shop and Walmart as well. Since 2020 it has been part of the group now known as Pacvue (formerly Assembly), where it serves sellers who run their own business while Pacvue serves larger brands and agencies.

The suite is broad. Black Box and Xray help you find and size products. Cerebro and Magnet find the keywords that matter, and Keyword Tracker follows your rank on them. Listing Builder writes and checks listings. Profits and Inventory Management handle the operations side. Its new Helium Agent works across all of it, and there’s a large library of courses and workshops for sellers learning the ropes.

Ads are one part of that. Helium 10 Ads, which used to be called Adtomic and is now powered by Pacvue’s technology, gives you two ways to work. In its AI mode you pick a product, a target ACOS and a daily budget, and it builds campaigns, harvests keywords and adjusts bids. Or you take full control with rules for bids, keyword harvesting, negatives, dayparting, budgets and keyword rank, plus suggestions you can apply by hand or let run.

Laurence, in a few paragraphs

We’re building autonomous advertising across the entire internet, starting with Amazon Ads for e-commerce brands. We’re a full-stack AI company: we aren’t a tool your team has to operate, and we aren’t an agency selling hours. Our models run every account, and our deployments team sets your strategy with you, reviews what the models did, and is who you talk to.

The idea underneath is that advertising is a math problem. Every click has an expected profit you can work out: how likely it is to convert, what the order is worth, what you keep after costs, and what the click cost. Once you can price a single click, the right bid, placement modifier and budget follow. Our methodology explains it in more detail.

Doing it yourself, or having it done

Helium 10 is built for the seller who wants to run the business themselves, and it’s very good at making that person more capable. With Helium 10 Ads, you decide what each product should aim for, choose between the AI mode and your own rules, write and tune those rules, review the suggestions, and keep an eye on results. Helium 10 offers onboarding help with an in-house ads expert, but the account is yours to run.

Laurence is for the brand that would rather not. You tell us the goal, whether that’s profit, growth, or a CAC, TACOS or ROAS number, and the limits you want. The models make the calls a person would otherwise make: which searches to go after, what to bid on each one every hour, how to price each placement, and how to set budgets. Our team checks the work and is there when you want to talk it through.

Neither is better in general. If you enjoy running your ads and have the time, Helium 10 gives you a lot of control for the money. If your time is better spent on product, sourcing and brand, that’s what we’re for.

What each bid is aiming at

Helium 10 Ads bids toward a target you choose. Most often that’s a target ACOS, and its bid suggestions start from 30% unless you change it; campaigns can also bid for the most impressions or the most orders. It’s a sensible, familiar way to work.

We start one step earlier, with what the click is worth to you:

Order value is what the shopper spends on that order. A customer who comes back is worth more than one order, and we already measure how often that happens for each product; bringing it into the bid is what we’re building next. Margin is what you keep after the cost of the product, Amazon’s fees and returns. A 30% ACOS target is the right bid only for a product with about a 30% margin. For anything else it’s either too cautious or too generous:

You can set a different target for each campaign, and careful sellers do. The hard part is choosing each one well and keeping it right as prices, margins and CVR move. That’s the part we do for you, for every search term every hour and every placement every night, with your ROAS, CAC or TACOS goal on top as a limit. We also treat your target as a limit rather than the goal, and try to win every click that clears it.

Search terms with only a few clicks

Most of what an Amazon account pays for barely has any data. On the median account we run, 95% of the search terms that get a click get fewer than ten clicks a month. A term with four clicks and no orders reads as a 0% CVR, but all it really tells you is that you don’t know yet.

Rules have a hard time here, because a rule needs a threshold, like adding a search term as a negative after 15 clicks with no order, and most terms never reach one. We treat each term’s CVR as a range instead of one number. A term with little history is bid with that uncertainty priced in, and it borrows evidence from similar searches, so it starts from a sensible guess and adjusts as each click comes in.

Placements, organic rank and timing

On the median account we run, clicks at the top of search convert at about twice the rate of clicks lower on the page. So we work out the CVR for each placement, set the base bid for the placement that converts worst, and raise the others with modifiers.

Organic rank is something Helium 10 does exceptionally well at measuring: Keyword Tracker follows your rank on every term, and Helium 10 Ads can even run rules based on it. We track rank every day on the terms we bid on too, and judge each product on TACOS so the organic sales your ads help earn are counted. Pricing what each rank is worth into the bid itself is what we’re building next.

On timing, Helium 10 says its AI checks performance and adjusts bids every one to four hours, and its help center describes ad data refreshing every 24 hours. We re-price every search term’s bid every hour from Amazon Marketing Stream data, reset placement modifiers every night and check budgets every hour.

Price, and who each is built for

Helium 10 publishes its pricing. Helium 10 Ads comes with the Diamond plan, at $359 a month or $279 a month billed yearly, for sellers doing roughly $100,000 to $10 million a year, plus a 2% fee on ad spend in the accounts it manages. The Platinum plan, at $129 a month ($99 billed yearly), covers the research tools for newer sellers, and Enterprise starts at $1,499 a month. For a seller who wants the whole toolkit and runs it themselves, that’s strong value.

We don’t publish a price; we agree it with you once we’ve seen your account. We start by asking you to connect your Amazon Ads and Seller Central or Vendor Central accounts with read access, then build a pilot proposal from your own data, showing where your ad money goes today, the targets we’d set for each product line, and the bids our models would place. Pricing is agreed with the pilot. We tend to be the better fit once ads are a meaningful line in your P&L and the time spent running them is worth more elsewhere.

Which one is right for you

Using both

Because Helium 10 is a toolkit and we run ads, they fit together well. You can keep Helium 10 for product research, keyword research, listings and inventory, and hand your Amazon ads to us. Getting started looks like this:

1. 01
   Connect with read access.We read your Amazon Ads and Seller Central or Vendor Central data to build your pilot proposal. Nothing in your account changes at this point.
2. 02
   Agree on the pilot.You pick the products and the goals. Switch off Helium 10 Ads on those products, so its rules and ours aren’t changing the same campaigns. The rest of Helium 10 keeps working as before.
3. 03
   We build our own campaigns.Our campaigns carry a Laurence prefix, so results stay easy to tell apart. Your history stays in your account.
4. 04
   If you stop.If you stop, we pause and archive our campaigns and leave yours as they were.

Common questions

Is Laurence an alternative to Helium 10?

For Amazon ads, yes. Helium 10 Ads is a tool you set up and oversee yourself, with an AI mode that works toward a target you choose. Laurence runs your Amazon ads for you, with models re-pricing every bid hourly and a team reviewing the work. For research, listings and inventory, Laurence isn’t a replacement, and the two work well together.

Can I use Helium 10 and Laurence together?

Yes. Keep using Helium 10 for research, listings and operations while Laurence runs your Amazon ads. Just switch off Helium 10 Ads on the products Laurence runs, so two systems aren’t changing the same campaigns.

Is Laurence worth it for a small seller?

Usually not at the very start. If you’re still finding your first products, Helium 10’s research tools are a better use of money. Laurence earns its place once ads are a meaningful share of your costs and you’d rather spend your time elsewhere.

Do I need someone on my team to run Laurence?

No. You set the goal and the limits, and Laurence does the day-to-day work. You can see every decision and the reason for it on the Laurence platform, and our team is there when you have questions.

How we wrote this. We described Helium 10’s tools, pricing and features from helium10.com and its help center as of November 10, 2026, and things may have changed since. Laurence figures are medians across the 15 store profiles we run, covering all of their Sponsored Products spend, October 6 to November 4, 2026. The charts use made-up numbers to show the idea. If we’ve got anything about Helium 10 wrong or out of date, tell us and we’ll fix it.