With increasing online businesses and well-known players, hitting the podium in a hyper-competitive market becomes challenging. You know the saying “ keep your friends close and your enemies closer,” which recommends paying attention to the actions of your competitors you want to outperform. In this blog, we’ll analyse some of the best competitor analysis tools available on the market.
Knowing your competitors’ merits and flaws is the foundation for a good marketing strategy. 90% of Fortune 500 Companies focus on competitive Intelligence, including online competitor analysis, to outrank their competitors. 56% of marketers look closely at potential competitors and plan to win new ones in the following three years.
💡 Read: Competitive Analysis: All You Need to Know
Fortunately, many competitor analysis tools are on the market; each can help you track, analyze, and learn much about your competitors’ strategies. I’ve done all the research for you and listed the top ten competitor analysis tools.
What is a Competitor Analysis Tool?
Staying ahead of your competitors is significant in the fast-paced digital world. But how do you outsmart them if you aren’t sure what they are doing? That’s where competitor analysis comes into play.
Competition can make or break your business. The more you know about your industry and main players, the better decisions and results you can make.
Competitor analysis tools help you track competitors’ traffic, website rankings, paid strategies, and social media engagement. You can also find their earnings reports, prices, company culture, customer care strategies, content distribution, etc.
These insights and relevant data can adjust your marketing strategy and beat your competitors in the market.
Read 5 Easy Steps to Conduct a Competitor SWOT Analysis
Top 11 Competitor Analysis Tools
Competitive analysis is a multi-faceted project that tracks KPIs and SEO metrics for brand awareness and social media presence. With the right tools, you can spend less effort outsmarting your competitors and more time marketing.
Now let’s look at these competitor analysis tools.
1. WebCEO
The first step to success is to analyze your current SEO situation and collect as much information about your dangerous competitors as possible. To overcome them, see their overall website quality, traffic, rankings, online presence, and backlinks.
WebCEO is one of the most widely-used marketing software on the market that allows managing daily SEO data in one place. This digital marketing suite includes valuable features like keyword research, website audit, social media management, SEO reporting, backlink monitoring, and many more.
Using WebCEO’s competitive SEO analysis tool, you can detect competitors’ keywords that generate traffic, review recently added backlinks, and monitor changes in their website rankings. For those needing a more detailed competitor analysis, WebCEO allows you to see and export historical data to analyze keywords for the previous months.
Best Features of WebCEO:
- In-depth examination of website rankings for 20 competitors;
- A comprehensive report of website traffic and top keywords they get every month;
- In-depth research on competitors’ backlinks quality, backlinking gaps, and list of domains that have linked to their content;
- A complete summary of competitors’ social media activity and citations to see what they do better than you do and find inspiration;
- The ability to evaluate competitors’ online reputation (reviews, comments, brand mentions;
- Different competitor comparison features allow identifying new competitors, the detection of keyword gaps, and a better understanding of traffic distribution.
WebCEO Pricing:
WebCEO offers a free 14-day trial to test the best features. The paid plans range from $37 to $299 per month.
Read The Advantages of Competitor Analysis in Today’s Market
2. Determ
One area of business nowadays many brands compete in is the presence in online media. That allows you to build your brand, find new customers, and outperform the competition. In this context, Determ is a fun tool for checking out how people perceive your brand and what they say in real-time.
The Determ’s competitor analysis feature provides a complete overview of all your competitors and tracks all their news, social media activities, and media coverage in one place. It helps you better understand and compare your market position with Share of Voice and find new market trends by getting real-time mentions and data.
The biggest benefit is knowing when a crisis will happen and what people think about your immediate competitors. This way, you can quickly and effectively review the content and reply to the comments if needed.
Best Features of Determ:
- Quick competitor insights with specialized reports;
- The ability to compare popularity per channel, sentiment, or over a while;
- Find influential people or media outlets that talk about your competitors;
- Detect spot spikes in online mentions and the reasons behind them;
- Track competitors’ keywords, phrases, or specific sources in real-time and filter results in a single place.
- Access to historical data about your competitors.
Determ pricing
Determ has three pricing plans. You can book a demo to explore the best features.
3. SE Ranking
Suppose you want to examine both competitors’ organic and paid strategies. In that case, SE Ranking offers an advanced AI-powered all-in-one marketing suite to gather comprehensive insights on websites’ SEO performance. It includes many dedicated tools for backlink monitoring, keyword research, website audit, content and marketing strategy planning, and more.
You can easily access competitors’ data using SE Ranking’s competitor analysis tool, including search rankings, traffic cost, backlinks, domain and page trust, keywords, SERP features, CPC, and some advertisers. You can easily detect competitors’ traffic drops and the reasons behind them, top-performing keywords for paid promotion efforts, and any changes in your niche landscape.
The competitor analysis toolkit helps you check whether competitors use paid search advertising and where they are directing their paid traffic. The tool shows PPC keywords, landing pages they’re targeting, and top-performing creatives they’re using.
Best Features of SE Ranking:
- A dynamic overview of competitors’ organic and paid campaigns, including traffic cost, estimated clicks, and top-performing keywords;
- Comprehensive data on competitors’ keywords and analyze them against important SEO metrics like website rankings, search volume, keyword difficulty, CPC, and more;
- Evaluate your competitors’ backlink profiles and reveal backlink gaps;
- See the most profitable ads of your competitors with monthly ad history, keywords, and Google Ads marketing campaigns’ breakdown;
- Multiple competitor comparison feature to find new competitors, research traffic segmentation by country, and detect keyword gaps and overlaps.
SE Ranking Pricing:
SE Ranking offers a 14-day free trial and three pricing plans for business needs. There is an option to request a custom pricing plan.
4. Prisync
Discovering which competitors are increasing or lowering prices at particular times allows you effectively build a solid price management strategy and boost profitability. It helps you see how customers react to new prices and their dynamic changes.
With Prisync, you can keep track of your competitors’ pricing strategies, modify your prices accordingly, and import all your products into one dashboard. You can compare prices of your rivals from any website or sales channel, such as Shopify, Amazon, and Google Shopping. Stock availability information can be viewed automatically, and reports can be obtained in a single dashboard or email.
You can access your competitors’ product performance history and see how their prices change. Prisync doesn’t require technical operation or integration as it is a self-service product.
Read 5 Ways Social Listening Can Help You Make Better Business Decisions
Best Features of Prisync:
- See the price history and trends of your competitors;
- Unlimited number of competitor price tracking based on product costs and variants by size, color, etc.;
- Product listing and stock availability information;
- Worldwide site and currency coverage;
- Instant price change notifications and unlimited email alerting;
- Bulk importing and exporting.
Prisync Pricing:
You can try a free 14-day trial to test all Prisync’s features. You can choose any of the three pricing plans that fit your best. The paid plan starts from $99 per month.
5. BrightLocal
If you run a local business, performing detailed local competitor analysis and finding growth opportunities is essential. That’s where BrightLocal comes into play. The tool allows you to manage online listings, reviews, and SEO and see how your physical business performs in local search results against your competitors.
Another great feature is to monitor your business performance for keywords and compare how well your competitors are ranking for these keywords. You will find the average score of your business and your competitors, including the number of indexed pages by Google, links, linking domains, domain authority, and Majestic Flow. That helps you improve and refine your local search strategy.
BrightLocal conducts a detailed audit of your Google Business Profile, sees your top online competitors, and collects information about their citations, reviews, star ratings, links, primary and secondary categories, and website authority. You can compare the top 10 performing businesses for target keywords in any location.
Read 5 Ways Social Listening Enhances Your SEO Campaigns
Best Features of BrightLocal:
- Get a Google Business Profile audit and check the status of your Google My Business Profile and your competitors;
- Monitor competitor citations and build local citations for your business;
- Centralizing local SEO, online listings, and reviews data;
- Use Local Search Grid to clearly understand competitors’ local rankings and find gaps to improve your strategy.
BrightLocal Pricing:
BrightLocal has different pricing plans for any business needs. You can get a free 14-day trial without a credit card required. You can request a custom pricing plan for your local business.
6. ContentStudio
Developing content that encourages people to share and engage is the key to a successful social media strategy. The content you share on your social media channels embodies your brand. That’s why monitoring your competitors’ content is essential, seeing what works best for them and finding the right content for your business.
The ContentStudio’s Competitor Analytics tool helps you track and analyze competitors’ social media accounts and other channels. You can easily monitor what content they are posting and better understand topics and formats their target audience loves the most and performs well on social media.
The tool collects data from different sources and shows it in an easy-to-understand format. You can easily input competitors’ social media accounts and get valuable insights about their content strategy and performance. That will help you detect gaps in their content strategy and create more effective content for your brand.
ContentStudio provides you with key social media engagement metrics, such as comments, shares, and likes your competitors’ posts are receiving. By tracking your rivals’ content strategy, you can easily identify trends and best practices to outsmart them and optimize your campaign for better results.
Best Features of ContentStudio:
- Its content discovery feature allows one to find and curate competitors’ content from a variety of sources;
- The ability to get white-label customized reports about the performance of competitors’ social media channels via email;
- A complete summary of data-driven insights to improve the social media strategy;
- Multi-account social media management and analysis.
ContentStudio Pricing:
ContentStudio offers three monthly pricing plans ranging from $25 to $299. You can try it for free within 14 days.
7. Owletter
An email marketing competitive analysis lets you see how your email campaign stacks up against your competitors. With Owletter, you can easily discover and analyze competitors’ email marketing activities. It means you can track their emails and better understand what’s working for them and what’s not.
Owletter automatically takes a screenshot of competitors’ emails you get and analyzes them to notify you about the email if there are important insights out there. So, you need to be on your competitors’ mailing lists to get their emails. That will help you never lose significant emails and learn more about your rivals’ email behavior.
Using Owletter, you can get valuable insights about your competitors, including SPAM reputation, trending topics, untapped opportunities, changes in frequency, whether they follow a specific schedule, etc.
Best Features of Owletter:
- In-depth research on competitors’ email campaigns, frequency and timing of their email sends;
- Discover trends, patterns, and opportunities to outsmart your competition in email marketing;
- Emails are stored forever, and your team can access these emails at any time for analysis and reference.
Owletter Pricing:
Owletter offers a 14-day free trial to test the best features and decide to pay for what you want. The paid plan starts at $19 per month.
8. Wappalyzer
It’s important to know what digital tools and technologies your competition is using. Unfortunately, technical information can be confusing if you don’t have any special skills. That’s where Wappalyzer comes into play to help.
It’s a cross-platform utility that helps you profile and categorize technologies used on different websites. This add-on can detect any type of software, such as CMS, payment processor, or e-commerce platform.
You can see how your competitors configure their website tech and analyze gaps in your website’s tech stack, moreover, that allows you to compare technology trends and market shares to understand the digital landscape better.
Best Features of Wappalyzer:
- Find more targeted leads with websites, company, and contact details;
- Monitor your competitors’ website technology changes, web technologies, and version numbers;
- Custom reports and API access;
- CRM integration and browser extension;
- The option to verify email addresses to prevent bounced emails.
Wappalyzer Pricing:
Wappalyzer offers a free plan with limited features. You can try out one of its four pricing plans for extended features, starting at $149 monthly. Get two months free with annual billing.
Read How to Conduct a Competitor Audit: Steps and Tools
9. IPWhois.io
To reveal the competitive situation of the industry, it is essential to analyze not only the leading companies on a global scale but also regional small and medium-sized businesses. If you are going to open a new store, IPWhois.io can help you analyze basic consumer profiles and foot traffic of your regional competitors for certain locations.
You can easily detect users’ location with an IP address and better understand competitors’ dynamics in a particular area. The tool provides geolocation data of potential customers from different websites and helps make a personalized application. With API, you can personalize content for your local business based on geolocation using these competitors’ data.
Best Features of IPWhois.io:
- Easy to integrate with different domains;
- Accurate geolocation data for each API request;
- Multilingual response;
- Handle multiple time zones and display prices in local currency;
- Provide a user-friendly and functional API interface.
IPWhois.io Pricing:
If you build something for non-commercial use that requires less than 10.000 requests per month, you can use the tool for free. For commercial usage requiring more than 10,000 requests, you can choose any of its three pricing plans, starting at $10.99 monthly.
10. Lusha
Lusha works well for finding prospects based on location, revenue, and industry with email ID and contact details. This data analysis tool relies on lead nurturing and gives access to accurate B2B data. Its fresh and high-quality insights help you better understand the potential clients of your competitors.
Lusha provides the latest information about competitors’ prospects and extracts them from social platforms like LinkedIn, webpages, or email accounts. It offers an easy setup without lengthy onboarding processes. Thanks to Salesforce and API integrations, it can support a fresh database and ensure automated enrichment of its CRM.
Lusha provides detailed market and sales insights into customer activity to identify trends and anticipate customer needs. That helps you optimize your customer experience and better serve your customers.
Best Features of Lusha:
- Detailed analysis of highly competitive marketers;
- Integration to CRM and browser extension;
- Salesforce data and build enrichment;
- The option to find relevant prospects;
- Team management and marketing automation.
Lusha Pricing:
Lusha has a free plan with limited features and three additional pricing plans, starting at $39 per month per user. To get unlimited prospects, contact the sales team.
11. Keyhole
Keyhole is your go-to social media competitor analysis tool to capitalize on your online presence. Besides monitoring your brand’s and competitors’ profiles, the tool levels up its offering by giving you an exclusive peek into the latest trends with its QuickTrends feature.
You can even reap the benefits of social listening and track specific hashtags and keywords relevant to your competitors. That will help you understand their brand positioning in depth.
Since you get access to historical data on Keyhole, be rest assured to dig out uncompromised insights at all times.
Apart from this, unlock sentiment analysis for your competitor’s posts, their posting strategy with date, time, and frequency, average engagement details, and their most engaging post, as well as the media type.
Best Features of Keyhole:
- Profile analytics
- Influencer ROI
- Custom reporting
- Trend analysis
- Competitive benchmarking
Keyhole Pricing:
Try out every feature that Keyhole has to offer with its free trial. The paid plans start at $79 per month.
Bottom Line
Remember that knowledge is always power. If you want to stay ahead of the game, a good competitor analysis will help you get valuable insights into your competitors’ strategies and detect areas you can improve.
However, it can be intimidating to spy on competitors. But with the right competitor analysis tools, you can outperform the competition and enhance your marketing strategy. Go ahead and find the best tool (or tools) that resonate with your business needs.
Irina Weber is an expert on Content Marketing. She loves helping brands create, publish, repurpose, and distribute content through marketing channels. She regularly contributes to media outlets like SEW, Adweek, SME, SMT, CMI, etc. Follow her on Twitter @irinaweber048.