15 competitor analysis tools to keep tabs on your competition

Regardless of your industry, marketing is a game of competing for your audience’s attention.

Competitive analysis is a subject that can be uncomfortable for marketers.

The reality? You can’t afford to ignore your competitors. Especially since competition for traffic, ad placement, followers and sales are so fierce.

While conducting competitive analysis isn’t always “fun,” business intelligence is crucial for growing and maintaining your brand. Having the right competitor analysis tools makes all the difference.

What tools can be used for competitor analysis?

Competitor analysis can be done in many different ways and with many different tools. Any tool that lets you monitor your brand and others can be used to monitor competitors and draw invaluable competitive insights.

A few different types of tools include:

• Social media management tools
• Competitive monitoring and social listening tools
• Keyword tools
• Analytics tools
• AI tools

We’ve broken down a comprehensive list of the different types of competitor analysis tools that’ll help you get started:

Competitor analysis tools for social media

1. Sprout Social

With social media ranked the No. 1 channel for connecting with customers, there’s no better starting point for competitive analysis.

Sprout Social enables you to understand competitor performance on social media from multiple angles and data points.

You can use Sprout’s suite of competitive reports to assess and optimize your social strategy with rich data points you can track across Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

Whether you want to get a sneak peek at what your competitors are posting or benchmark your growth against the average of the profiles being compared, it’s all a click away, minus the tedious manual research and messy spreadsheets.

Up your analytics game with Sprout’s Premium Analytics tool that offers deeper insights into your social platforms, along with interactive charts and graphs that you can customize to align with your goals.

Sprout offers the same competitive analytics on Instagram too.

And you can dive even deeper using Sprout’s Advanced Listening tool.

By tapping into publicly available social conversations, you can quickly find out how consumers feel about your competitors’ products and services, as well as examine your own share of voice in your industry.

With direct access to consumer sentiment, Sprout makes it easy to identify opportunities to differentiate your brand from competitors.

2. Phlanx

This free Instagram and TikTok engagement calculator clues you in on how active any given account’s followers are. Phlanx is a good resource for high level analysis of your competitor’s audience interactions compared to your account and industry.

For Instagram, this competitor analysis tool’s engagement ratio is calculated based on the number of followers an account has versus the rate at which followers interact with content (likes, comments, etc).

Meanwhile, Phlanx’s TikTok engagement rate calculator measures video views relative to how many interactions it earns.

These scores aren’t the be-all, end-all of a brand’s social presence, but they do offer some helpful perspective, especially when comparing a larger brand account to a smaller one.

This speaks to a bigger point about competitive analysis on social media. Context matters. It’s easy to get caught up in follower counts, but engagement is a much more important metric.

3. HypeAuditor

HypeAuditor offers competitive analysis tools for social media specific to influencer marketing campaigns. Brands can analyze their competitors’ creator campaigns, including budgets and content performance across social media.

The tool also allows brands to compare the demographics of different influencers’ audiences.

This lets brands put their influencer campaigns into context, offering a way to benchmark campaigns that are traditionally tough to track. Brands can assess metrics including campaign reach, EMV and total mentions versus competitors.

AI tools for competitor analysis

4. Kompyte

Kompyte is a competitive intelligence tool that automatically pulls competitor updates into a single, easy-to-monitor dashboard. This includes updates from their website, review sites, content, social media, ads, job openings and more.

You can create side-by-side comparison reports in Kompyte alongside real-time feeds that inform you of website changes your competitors make.

AI features via Kompyte GPT automate competitive analysis tasks like creating battle cards for sales teams. These battle cards include daily competitor updates and instant summaries of how your brand’s wins and losses stack up against specific features.

Kompyte’s AI summary tools also provide quick takeaways so businesses can stay ahead of the competition and make data-driven decisions without waiting days or weeks to react.

5. Crayon

Crayon is an artificial intelligence tool that can help with both competitor analysis and competitive intelligence. It helps users put together a dashboard of automatically compiled and organized competitor updates so brands can always be in-the-know about what their competitors are doing.

Crayon also has collaboration features, ensuring teams can work together to manage and monitor competitive insights.

Like Kompyte, Crayon offers the ability to create sales battle cards and customizable reports and dashboards. Their AI features include anomaly detection which clues you in on major marketing performance or messaging updates that seem out of the ordinary.

6. Klue

Klue’s competitive analysis platform shares many of Kompyte and Crayon’s features, including automated competitive summaries and battle cards. Most notable among Klue’s latest AI features is the ability to conduct sentiment analysis and summarize thousands of competitor reviews across the web.

The platform touts its ability to filter out irrelevant and extra information in its AI summaries so brands focus on the most important aspects of any given analysis.

Competitor analysis tools for SEO

7. SEMRush

SEMRush is one of the most widely used SEO tools on the market, but its competitor analysis features set them apart from the pack. For starters, you can use SEMRush to pull your competitor’s backlinks and monitor changes in their ranking.

Here’s a sample dashboard after running a domain analysis. Note that you can add competitors to measure traffic against each other.

And here’s the piece of the analysis that provides a by-the-numbers view of competing websites that overlap in rankings for the same keywords.

This is an invaluable tool for understanding who your competition is from a strictly SEO perspective. Likewise, highlighting what keywords are targeted by competitors directly influences your own content strategy.

8. Ahrefs

Another staple competitor analysis tool for SEO is Ahrefs’ site explorer, which allows you to check any URL’s top organic keywords. Additionally, you get a rough estimate of how much traffic a competitor receives on those keywords.

It’s easy to check out a site’s highest-performing content based on backlinks (as opposed to shares), too. This information teaches you what sort of content is working best for a brand and is attracting the most attention.

And in addition to most-linked content, you assess what keywords bring in the most traffic to a competing site compared to your own.

The takeaway here? Your competition’s traffic doesn’t have to be a guessing game when you’re regularly running your own reports. SEO is where competitor analysis tools can shine and inform your marketing strategy.

9. Conductor

Conductor‘s free browser extension for Chrome provides a quick overview of how individual websites are optimized for Google search.

Simply go to a page and run the analysis to see details like word count, keyword density and frequently used phrases. This is useful for understanding the structure of a page that might be outranking your own.

Settled atop your browser, Conductor can quickly determine a site’s strength in the SERPs at a glance. Beyond word count, you can also assess details like metadata and site speed. These features are useful for not only analyzing competitors but also benchmarking your SEO performance.

Competitor analysis tools for content

10. Buzzsumo

Buzzsumo allows you to look at the top-performing content for relevant topics for your brand and specific competitors. The tool looks at a piece of content’s engagement on social sites as well as its total shares across the web.

Not only does this clue you in on who’s killing it in terms of industry content but also it helps you identify potentially hot topics to explore yourself. The tool even gets as granular as indicating how different types of content perform across competing websites.

Whether you’re looking for movers and shakers in your industry or simply a new idea for a blog post, Buzzsumo provides you with definitive answers.

11. Similarweb

Similarweb is a comprehensive tool for both content and SEO. The platform helps you dig deep into your competitor’s content and where their traffic comes from.

Using the tool, you can determine a site’s referral traffic and likewise where a site ends up sending its visitors.

And more importantly, content marketers can see what topics visitors search for and what other relevant sites they visit.

12. VisualPing

VisualPing is a competitor monitoring tool that helps brands track changes to competing websites. Built-in alerts and collaborative features empower teams to stay on top of multiple competitors at once.

For content specifically, VisualPing can track press releases and other marketing initiatives from your competitors as they happen. This also includes changes in messaging and website copy.

Users can filter alerts to focus on key website and content strategy changes instead of every monitor detail.

Competitor analysis tools for emails, ads and industries

13. SendView

SendView is designed to help email marketers stay one step ahead of their competition. The tool tracks email activity including their choice of ESPs, email frequency, content themes and design choices.

This translates into actionable strategic changes for email marketing campaigns. For example, you can directly compare your company’s email schedule to that of your top competitors to find a frequency that is optimal for engagement.

Also, SendView provides trend reports and campaign timeline boards to help marketers understand how their changes are paying off.

14. SpyFu

SpyFu boasts features for competitive analysis that are specific to PPC advertising. The platform provides an overview of competitors’ ad copy, campaign budgets and ad performance.

With historical data insights, brands adjust their PPC campaigns to align with industry and competitor-specific trends to gain a competitive edge with their ads.

15. Owler

Last but not least, Owler uses community data to curate data and content from startups relevant to your niche. Again another tool reserved for bigger brands, you input brands to create your custom dashboard of industry names to watch.

And that wraps up our list!

How do you do a competitor analysis?

While each of these tools can effectively help you analyze your competitors, you also need to keep in mind what happens after you run the numbers. Follow these steps to make the most of your competitive intelligence strategy.

Analyze your actual competitors

There’s no use in trying to punch above your weight. A local coffee shop with 1,000 followers shouldn’t beat itself up because they don’t have as many followers as Starbucks or Dunkin’ Donuts.

As noted earlier, context matters. Sure, take a look at what the big players in your industry are doing. But when assessing your competition, focus first on those who are the most similar in terms of size and target audience.

Focus on metrics first

When looking at competitors, it’s tempting to obsess over messaging.

However, it’s more prudent to take a data-driven approach to analysis first. Try to pick out as many metrics before trying to break down the “why” of their marketing.

For example, how often do your competitors post new content? What’s the ratio of promotional versus non-promotional posts? What are their top-performing keywords and hashtags?

The answers to these questions are arguably as important as understanding someone’s messaging.

Turn analysis into action

Finally, make sure the data you uncover translates into some sort of action.

Maybe you uncover a new set of keywords to target in your content based on your research. Perhaps you haven’t been pushing your content nearly hard enough based on how active your competitors are.

Either way, the end game of competitive analysis is to improve your marketing strategy. The more information you glean from competitors, the better.

Conducting competitive analysis requires the right tools

Ongoing competitive analysis should be part of your marketing strategy.

With the right tools and approach to analyzing other businesses in your space, you can keep a pulse on companies around you without wasting time or stressing over small details.

Conducting competitive analysis might seem daunting if you’ve never done it before. Check out our step-by-step guide to doing a social media competitive analysis which includes a free template to get you started.