TikTok vs Facebook Ads cost
Nobody can honestly tell you which is cheaper. Neither platform publishes a CPA benchmark; both price by auction against your audience and creative. The published universe: Meta's $5 starting-budget floor, TikTok's $50/day campaign and $20/day ad-group minimums. Everything else is somebody's sample.
Published
The complete published-number inventory
Meta: auction pricing, recommended starting budget of at least $5, no rate cardMeta · checked 2026. TikTok: auction pricing with hard budget floors, $50/day campaign and $20/day ad groupTikTok · checked 2026, and no benchmarkTikTok · checked 2026. Both absences hold their own rows in the register. Any blog quoting a definitive TikTok-vs-Meta CPA delta without naming its sample is decoration.
Economics
Where the platforms genuinely differ
- Fatigue speed: TikTok burns creative faster; its delivery rewards novelty, and a winner decays in weeks. Meta winners can run for months in stable audiences. Production cadence is a real cost line on TikTok (detail).
- Measurement maturity: Meta's modelled conversions post-iOS are battle-tested; TikTok attribution windows and event coverage behave differently. Cross-platform dashboards mix two different measurement regimes (Meta signal loss).
- Audience shape: overlap is large now, but format-native creative decides delivery. Reposting Meta assets to TikTok tests your repurposing, not the platform.
Test
Running the split fairly
- Same offer, same landing page, format-native creative made for each platform.
- Budgets above both floors and above each platform's learning threshold; four weeks minimum through at least one creative refresh on TikTok.
- Score on backend conversions with one fixed attribution window, not platform dashboards: the blended discipline applied pairwise.
- Judge marginal, not average: the platform that wins at $3k/month can lose at $30k. Re-test at each spend tier against your ceiling.