Kenshoo alternative — the product you remember has been called Skai since 2021

The name changed five years ago and the search results did not

On 8 June 2021 the company announced it was rebranding as Skai, on the back of investment in e-commerce and retail data and the acquisition of Signals Analytics. Five years later the change is still only half-completed in public: reading skai.io on 20 August 2026, the footer says © 2026 Kenshoo, Ltd. All Rights Reserved. and the customer sign-in link points at app.kenshoo.com. Kenshoo is the legal entity. Skai is the product. Both statements are true, which is precisely why the confusion persists.

What that does to this search is worth seeing. Of the pages ranking for this phrase when we checked, one presents 85 alternatives and never mentions the rebrand at all. Another lists Kenshoo's competitors as Zoho Social, Buffer, Amplifr, Marketing 360 and Simply Measured — social publishing and analytics tools that do not overlap with a commerce media platform in any meaningful way — and records the price as "contact for pricing" while skai.io publishes a full tier list on its own site.

None of that is dishonest. It is what happens to review directories when a category moves faster than the pages describing it. But it means a buyer who takes those lists at face value will shortlist the wrong products against a four-year-old idea of the incumbent. So this page does the boring thing first and updates the mental model, then argues.

Written by Dr. DSP, Amazon DSP run as a managed product by Full Circle, a full-service Amazon management company with more than $500M in managed revenue across 100+ brands.

What actually changed between the Kenshoo you knew and the Skai on sale now

Only what we could verify on skai.io on 20 August 2026 goes in this list. Everything else is memory, and memory is the reason you are on this page.

• The category it sells into. The site now organises itself around commerce media — retail media, search, social and omnichannel planning as four surfaces of one plan — rather than around paid search with retail bolted on.
• A named data layer. Skai Data Hub is presented as the foundation the rest sits on, described as the data footing agents actually need. Bid management is no longer the headline; the data underneath it is.
• An agent, not a dashboard. Celeste AI is positioned as a generative-AI agent purpose-built for commerce media. Whatever you make of that framing, it is a different product surface from a bid-management console, and it is what a 2026 demo will show you.
• Retail operations alongside media. Digital shelf work, retail insights, content optimisation and revenue recovery appear beside the advertising modules — territory that a search-bidding platform historically did not touch.
• Amazon DSP is in scope. Skai's own case-study copy references Amazon DSP outcomes, so display is not outside what the platform manages.

If your last hands-on experience was Kenshoo the search bidder, that is a substantially different purchase. Go and look before you replace it, because "we outgrew Kenshoo" and "we outgrew Skai" are not the same sentence and only one of them can be tested.

The price question has an unusually clean answer here

Most vendors in this market route pricing to a demo booking. Skai does not, and that deserves credit rather than suspicion. Read on 20 August 2026, skai.io/pricing lists five bands keyed to how much annual advertising spend runs through the platform, quoted as annual figures in US dollars:

• Standard — $114k per year, advertisers spending up to $4M per year.
• Advanced — $276k per year, up to $10M per year.
• Enterprise — $504k per year, up to $20M per year.
• Enterprise Premier — $756k per year, up to $35M per year. This is the band where incrementality testing is listed.
• Enterprise Premier + — tailored, above $35M per year.

The page also offers the flexibility to review the commitment after the first three months. Two things follow. First, verify those figures yourself on the day you budget: a published list is the vendor's to change, and any number on a page like this one is a photograph, not a contract. Second, note where proof sits in the ladder. Incrementality testing appearing at the fourth band is a defensible commercial choice — that work is expensive to deliver and needs scale to read at all — but it means a buyer lower down gets a strong machine for improving what is reported and no built-in way to check whether the report was true.

We are in no position to lecture anyone about disclosure. Dr. DSP publishes no price. On this specific measure Skai is ahead of us and we would rather write that than dance around it.

If you are leaving for evidence rather than features, the platform is not the variable

There are two honest reasons to replace a platform. One is that it cannot do a thing you need — more retailers, a market, a workflow, a governance model. That is a feature comparison and a demo settles it.

The other reason is the one people phrase as wanting "better measurement", and it is not a feature comparison at all. Reported performance and real performance come apart because attribution answers a question about sequence, not causation. It records that a purchase followed an impression. It has no way to tell you the purchase would not have happened anyway — and any system tuned toward reported conversions will drift, entirely rationally, toward the buys that report best. In display that means retargeting shoppers already walking back to your listing. The chart improves. The bank balance does not.

No dashboard fixes that, because the missing thing is not a metric, it is a counterfactual. What produces one is a holdout or a matched control: a comparable set of ASINs or regions from which display is deliberately withheld, over a stated window, with the failure condition written down before the money moves. Then the two groups get compared against actual purchase events in Amazon Marketing Cloud, where display and sponsored-ads records sit under one identity so the two stop crediting each other's orders. Amazon offers AMC at no cost to eligible advertisers, so the constraint is analyst time and appetite, not licence spend.

Which reframes the shortlist. If evidence is why you are moving, the question is not which platform you buy but who will design and run the test — and that is a question about a person and a scope of work, not about a login.

Our own book, scoped as pulled from the Amazon DSP API — 30 advertisers, July 2026 — returned 6.04x on ad spend over 78.4 million impressions at a $4.00 CPM, $1.42 blended cost per click and $5.49 cost per acquisition across 57,137 attributed purchases, 20.1% new to the brand. Amazon-attributed, one month, no guarantee attached.

Who Skai suits better than we do

Three situations where we would send you back to them without hesitating, and we mean each one.

• You buy across more than retail media. Search, social and retail managed from one seat is the product, and it is a lineage that runs back through fifteen years of paid-search engineering. An Amazon-only specialist cannot pretend to match that breadth and should not try.
• You need one system of record. Large organisations need permissions, audit trails, approval chains and a single place finance can reconcile. Enterprise workflow governance is unglamorous and genuinely hard to build, and it is why platforms at this tier exist.
• Procurement needs a published number to start. Some companies cannot open a process without a list price to benchmark against. Skai gives them one. Several of its closest competitors do not.

Where we would argue for ourselves instead: when Amazon is effectively the whole business, when nobody internally has display as their actual job title, and when the open question is not how to optimise faster but whether the display budget is producing sales that would not have happened anyway.

Four questions before you shortlist anything, and what we do

Answer these in writing before the first demo and the shortlist tends to write itself.

• What did the incumbent actually fail at? Name the specific task. "It felt dated" survives no procurement review and does not predict whether the replacement will help.
• Where does your annual spend genuinely sit? Any licence banded by spend is cheapest at the top of its band and dearest at the floor. Use the run rate your current quarter implies, not last year's and not the plan.
• Who logs in? If you cannot name the person and the hours, you are shopping for a service and a console will disappoint you. Amazon's own documentation, read on 20 August 2026, notes that its DSP self-service option has no minimum spend requirement while managed service typically requires a minimum investment of $50,000, varying by country — worth knowing before you decide which route you are on.
• Who designs the test? Ask every vendor, us included, for the holdout method, the minimum spend and duration for a readable result, who writes the query, and whether you may see an anonymised output.

What we offer against that: Dr. DSP runs Amazon display as a managed product. Every proposal carries the evidence behind it, the window it will be judged over and the condition that automatically reverses it. You pick the autonomy level and can change it at any time; inventory risk, pricing, new products, new creative and stopping display spend always come to a human. There is no published rate — a demo, thirty days at no cost, a number set on the call against real budget and scope, month to month, with Orbit included.

Two redirects. If you are actually comparing licence bands against your own spend, the Skai pricing breakdown runs that arithmetic properly. If you would rather buy this as an agency engagement with a named team, across more channels than Amazon, reMKTR does the same media buying from the service side.