15 competitor analysis tools to keep tabs on your competition

Marketing is a competition for attention, and your rivals are playing to win. To beat them, you need to understand their strategy. That means analyzing everything: their messaging, ad placements, audience engagement, and more. 

But surface-level tracking only tells you so much. You also need to figure out which tactics drive results and which are just noise. 

With the right competitor analysis tools, you get a fuller picture faster. That way, you can benchmark performance, uncover gaps in your own strategy, and take opportunities before your competitors even see them.

Why use competitor analysis tools?

Tracking competitors manually isn’t just inefficient—it’s also unreliable. You might bounce between websites, scribble down prices, scour competitor websites and attempt to reverse-engineer ad strategies, but you have no clue which of their tactics work.

Manual competitor research only gives you a general idea of your rivals’ strategies. Without the right tools, you just see the what, not the why or how. 

A competitor analysis tool fills in the gaps by showing you what your competition does and what works. That way, you don’t have to guess which keywords, content or campaigns move the needle. Instead, you’ll have in-depth performance metrics, such as how much website traffic they get, which competitor keywords rank best or how their audience engages with certain content.

These insights make it easier to do the following:

• Benchmark your marketing strategy with real data
• Identify content gaps or keyword gaps to target
• Track shifting industry and market trends
• Spot valuable insights that give your brand a competitive edge

The best part? It’s fast, repeatable and scalable—no more burning hours on manual research.

Here’s a quick look at the main types of tools to help you get started:

• Social media management tools compare engagement, content performance and brand voice.
• Social listening tools track sentiment, audience perception and emerging conversations.
• Social media analytics tools highlight engagement trends, audience growth and post-level metrics.
• Keyword research tools analyze SEO performance, keyword rankings and traffic volumes.
• AI-powered tools automate updates, monitor campaigns and surface competitor moves in real time.
• SEO competitor analysis tools show backlink profiles, top-performing pages and ranking gaps.
• Content analysis tools uncover your competitors’ top-performing content and engagement trends.
• Ad strategy monitoring tools track your competitors’ ad creatives, placements and spending across search and social platforms.

15 best competitor analysis tools in 2025

Now, let’s take a closer look at the best competitor analysis tools you can use to find performance gaps, spot trends and make faster, smarter marketing decisions:

Competitor analysis tools for social media

1. Sprout Social

More than three-quarters of consumers say social impacts their purchases, so you need a tool that shows you exactly what you’re up against. That’s where Sprout Social comes in—it’s your all-in-one command center for social media competitive analysis.

Sprout helps you break down every element of your competitors’ stories: what topics they’re leaning into, who’s responding and how it’s landing. This gives you a full picture of their approach to Facebook, Instagram, X and more.

But Sprout doesn’t just show you the competitive landscape—it also contextualizes these insights with your performance to enhance your digital marketing strategies.

Additionally, Sprout’s competitive analytics let you benchmark your performance against rival brands to see how your audience growth, publishing cadence and engagement stack up. Its charts and interactive dashboards help you visualize the data clearly to turn insights into action in seconds. 

Sprout’s Premium Analytics takes that visibility even further. With it, you can dissect performance data by network, content type or campaign and customize visual reports to match your goals. You can even build competitive analysis reports that you can share with teams and leaders who aren’t Sprout users so more people have access to this rich intelligence.

But what if you could see beyond the numbers? 

Sprout’s Social Listening tool shows you what’s driving your competitors’ engagement to uncover the strategy behind the numbers. It also gives you real-time access to conversations across social networks, forums and review sites, which helps you track share of voice, monitor sentiment and understand how people feel about your brand compared to others.

Whether you’re trying to spot rising competitors or find out which content resonates, Sprout’s Listening helps you connect the dots between competitor campaigns and their audiences’ reactions. Using built-in sentiment analysis, you can detect positive and negative trends to shape your campaign messaging. 

These insights don’t just stay with your social team. Product, customer care and sales teams can all use them to shape better experiences, workflows and offerings that keep you ahead of the competition.

2. Phlanx

This free engagement calculator tells you how active your followers are on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, X and Twitch. Phlanx is a good resource for high-level analysis of your competitor’s audience interactions compared to your account and industry.

For Instagram, Phlanx bases the engagement ratio on the number of followers an account has versus the rate at which followers interact with content (such as likes and comments).

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, earned media value (EMV) and total mentions versus competitors.

Competitor analysis tools that use AI

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 is winning or losing 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 AI tool that can help with both competitor analysis and competitive intelligence. It lets you build a dashboard that pulls in and organizes competitor updates automatically, so your team always knows what your competition is up to.

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

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

6. Klue

Klue’s competitive analysis platform offers many of the same features as similar tools—battle cards, automated summaries and real-time competitor tracking. But its latest launch, Compete Agent, harnesses generative AI to deliver competitive insights into the tools you ‌already use, like Slack and Salesforce.

It scans and analyzes competitor reviews from across the web, and uses sentiment analysis to surface what buyers resonate with. The AI cuts out irrelevant noise and turns relevant insights into summaries.

Competitor analysis tools for SEO and keyword research

7. SEMRush

Semrush is one of the most widely used SEO tools on the market, but its competitor analysis features set it apart from the pack. For starters, you can use SEMRush to pull your competitors’ 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 content works best for a brand and attracts the most attention.

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 helps you understand the structure of a page that might be outranking your own.

From 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 not only for analyzing competitors but also for benchmarking your SEO performance.

Competitor analysis tools for content marketing

10. Buzzsumo

BuzzSumo allows you to look at the top-performing content for relevant topics for your brand and specific competitors. The tool measures 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 it also 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, determine a site’s referral traffic and likewise, where a site ends up sending its visitors.

More importantly, examine 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 to 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, paid search and ads

13. SendView

SendView helps email marketers stay one step ahead of their competition. The tool tracks email activity, including their choice of email service provider (ESP), 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 an optimal frequency 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.

How to pick the right competitor analysis tool

The right competitor analysis tool matches your business objectives, not just your budget. 

Whether you’re looking at SEO strategy, social performance or content gaps, here’s how to narrow down your choices:

• Start with your goals: Define what you want to achieve so you know where to focus your competitive research. Do you want to drive more organic traffic, reverse-engineer competitor ad campaigns or benchmark social media performance? Once you figure this out, you’ll know what platform you need.
• Pick tools that analyze the right channels: Match your tools to the platforms your competitors use. If they thrive on TikTok and Google Ads, for instance, an X-only tool won’t do. Instead, find all-in-one tools that cover every marketing channel, from search to social.
• Go beyond surface-level metrics: Choose tools with features that show you what works, not just what your competitors do. The top tools reveal competitor keywords, backlink profiles, top-performing content and even customer sentiment.
• Opt for customizable dashboards and reporting: Find tools that let you build dashboards around your goals. This makes it easier for you and your stakeholders to identify the trends, gaps and metrics that matter most and visualize that data in a clear, actionable way.
• Think about scalability and workflow fit: Select a platform that integrates with your existing workflows and grows with your research needs.
• Consider support and usability: Look for platforms that are intuitive and offer strong support and onboarding. If your teams can’t use the tool well, they won’t benefit from it.

How to use competitor analysis tools to sharpen your strategy

Picking the right tool is just the start. The next step is knowing how to turn raw data into smart, strategic action.

Your competitive intelligence strategy is about more than simply watching what others do. It’s also about finding patterns, spotting gaps and using those insights to guide your next move. Whether you’re refining content plans, adjusting ad spend or shifting your social positioning, the way you apply what you learn makes all the difference.

Here’s how to turn competitive insights into a sharper social strategy:

Identify the right competitors to monitor

You need to know who your competitors are, and it’s not always the biggest names in your industry. To find your competitors, look at both indirect and direct competitors that share your business model, audience or content angle.

Not sure how to do this? Sprout’s Listening Topics help you zero in on competitors, spot trends and understand where your brand fits in the conversation. To make this even easier, its Industry Insights Listening Template filters out the noise. You can then uncover the brands your audience is talking about by tracking relevant keywords, product names and industry conversations.

Take River Island, for example. The clothing company’s team uses Listening to track trends and measure its share of voice against other fashion brands. This shows it who it’s up against and how to stay one step ahead.

Once you’ve found your core competitors, Sprout’s Listening Competitive Analysis report gives you a side-by-side view of performance, post types and engagement. This comparison makes it easy to spot gaps or gains in your strategy.

Track competitor performance across key metrics

Know your competition? Now it’s time to benchmark. 

Sprout’s Competitor Reports help you track follower growth, post volume, engagement rates and audience behavior across platforms like Facebook, Instagram and X.

Want to go deeper? Use profile comparison tools to drill down into performance by content type, hashtag and publishing cadence. You’ll see what’s working and what isn’t so you know where to adjust your tactics with confidence.

Analyze content themes and brand positioning

If you want to know how your competitors are trying to win over customers, Sprout will show you. Competitive Analysis Topic Templates in Listening track the keywords, hashtags and themes that your competitors mention most often. 

These conversation insights show you the following:

• Which campaigns they push
• What topics they prioritize
• How they position themselves in the market

On top of that, Sprout shows you how customers feel about the content your competitors share. By breaking down sentiment over time, it’s clear which campaigns resonate and which fall flat. These insights help you identify the themes that are worth tapping into and find new ways to position your brand to stand out.

Sprout also shows you how people feel about your competitors’ products and services, not just their content. Listening highlights what customers love, what they complain about and how their feelings shift over time. By revealing your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses, it helps you adjust your messaging to focus on what your brand does better to position yourself better in the market.

Translate insights into action

Competitor analysis isn’t just about watching what others are doing. It’s about using those insights to guide decision-making and sharpen your own strategy.

Sprout makes this easier with benchmarking tools, custom report builders and post tagging features. Together, these help you track your engagement rates, follower growth, content performance and sentiment to see exactly how you stack up against the competition.

Then, tag your own posts by theme, campaign or product line, then compare those metrics directly to competitor activity. That way, every insight you collect turns into a clearer picture of what’s working and what to improve across your marketing efforts.

Conducting competitive analysis requires the right tools

With the right tools and approach to analyzing other businesses in your space, you can use competitor analysis to 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, but that’s where Sprout comes in. Check out this step-by-step guide to performing a social media competitive analysis, which includes a free template to get you started.