Read this Comprehensive Review of the Top Competitive Intelligence Tools with Pricing & Comparison to Select the Best Competitive Intelligence Software:
Businesses don’t have the luxury of sailing through smooth waters. Tough competitions and a highly volatile market always manage to keep businesses thinking on their feet. It is not just the decisions that we make as entrepreneurs that affect our business, our competitors also contribute significantly to the performance of any business.
There is enough competition in any industry. There is simply no way to operate a monopoly in a world where things quickly become saturated.
Therefore, it is essential to learn about our competitors, observe them, assess their strategies, and find out what’s working for them and what’s not. This way we can replicate their successes and avoid the failures they have experienced.
Let’s just say that by keeping an eye on the competitors, a business can learn from mistakes without committing those mistakes. Thankfully, there are many competitive intelligence tools out there that promise to help businesses handle their competition.
Table of Contents:
What is a Competitive Intelligence Tool?
Competitive intelligence tools are those software, tools, and apps that facilitate gathering and analysis of crucial competitor information. The gathered information can later be used to draw strategies and to further achieve the goals of a business.
In this article, you’ll find ten such tools that are highly advanced, comprehensive, and boast of a good reputation. The tools were shortlisted keeping in mind their relevance to the current year, kind of features it harbors, and of course, how much it will end up in costing.
Rest assured, the tools we have picked for you can suit a variety of needs and requirements of competitive intelligence.
According to the same report, companies (Big, Medium, and Small) largely agree that competitive insights are critical in the success of any business.
Pro-Tip: Once you do get your hands on a competitive intelligence software, you also need to learn how to use it efficiently. The following key points will help:
- Take advantage of all publicly available info on your competitors. Find out what they are up to.
- Conduct customer surveys to find out what your customer wants, and if your competitor’s services are satisfying them.
- Use the insights you get from these tools to create a substantial product and marketing plan.
FAQ’s About Competitive Intelligence Software
Q #1) How do you gather Competitive Intelligence?
Answer: It can be gathered mainly by going through your competitor’s business ads or websites. Crucial information about your competitor’s strategy can be unearthed by referring to the materials they’ve made public. Many competitive intelligence tools make the job of scrounging through this material very easy.
Q #2) What is the Goal of Competitive Intelligence?
Answer: The primary goal is to find out potential risks and opportunities that the business might be facing. It helps companies react accordingly in response to their competitor’s strategies.
Q #3) Is a Competitive Intelligence ethical?
Answer: Absolutely! Competitive intelligence should not be mistaken for corporate espionage. The former is a research process that involves browsing through the information that the competitors themselves have made open for public reference.
List of Popular Competitive Intelligence Tools
- Semrush Traffic Analytics
- Crayon
- SpyFu
- Moat
- Owletter
- Wappalyzer
- SimilarWeb
- BuzzSumo
- Alexa
- TrackMaven
- Visualping
Comparison of Best Competitive Intelligence Software
| Name | Best For | Deployment | Free Trial | Ratings | Fees |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Semrush Traffic Analytics | Comparing Specific Competitors. Niche and New Market research | SaaS | 7 days | 3.5/5 | $129.95, $249.95, $499.95 / month |
| Crayon | Analyzing Competition Behavior pertaining to their performance, and launched marketing campaigns | SaaS | None | 4.5/5 | Flexible, A custom quote |
| SpyFu | SEO and PPC Keyword Competitiveness | SaaS | None | 4/5 | $39, $99, $ 299/month |
| Moat | Displaying Competitors Digital Creative History, Mid-Size Businesses | SaaS, iPhone, Android | Free Demo | 5/5 | Custom Quote |
| Owletter | Monitoring Competitor Performance, Small and Medium Enterprises | SaaS | 14 Days | 3.5/5 | $19, $39, $79 / month |
Review of the best Competitive Analysis Tools:
#1) Semrush Traffic Analytics
Semrush Traffic Analytics – Best for comparing specific competitors. Niche and New Market research.
Semrush lays bare all of its extensive marketing features and tools right at your feet. Its competitor analysis feature is incomparable to other tools of its stature. Semrush Traffic Analytics, in particular, is a must tool for competitor research.
The tool provides you with the opportunity to create benchmarks and compare your rivals against each other. With the help of strong visual cues, you can get a very comprehensive idea of what your competition is up to. It also allows you to monitor your competitors landing pages and gauge metrics such as bounce-back rate, traffic sources, visitors, and traffic by location.
You can learn what keywords your competitors are ranking for, whether the ranking is organic or paid, and how much are they paying to rank.
Features:
- Monitor visits, bounce rate, traffic sources of your competitors landing page
- Geo-location based web traffic analysis
- Mobile/Desktop traffic
- Comparison for up to 5 domains
Verdict: Semrush Traffic Analytics comes in handy when trying to find out what your competitor is up to, while also keeping an eye on new markets and niches. It is worth a try if you are seeking a tool that visually comprehensively represents your competitor’s metrics.
Price: With Semrush, monthly subscriptions, as well as annual billing options, are available. It offers three pricing plans,
- Monthly plans new pricing: Pro plan $129.95 , Guru $249.95 , and Business $499.95
- Annual plans new pricing: Pro plan $1299.95, Guru $2499.95, and Business $4999.95
- A free trial is available for Pro and Guru Plans.
#2) Crayon
Best for analyzing competition’s behavior about their performance, and launched marketing campaigns.
Crayon offers your business with a tool that arms your team with a sophisticated competitive intelligence software. It allows you to keep an eye on your competitor’s every move. You get to track more than 100 types of data associated with your rival.
It combines both human and artificial intelligence to provide insights that enable your core sales, marketing, and product team to device strategies that succeed. Everything from a pricing change to marketing campaigns by your competitors is consistently monitored and assessed by the tool.
Features:
- Centralized Platform
- Web tracking
- Customizable Dashboard
- Benchmark Reporting
- Channel Acquisition
Verdict: Crayon is a phenomenal tool to keep you constantly informed about your competitor’s every move. It always gives you valuable insight into what your market is up to as well. Definitely, it is worth a try.
Price: Flexible. A custom quote is delivered once your needs and requirements are noted by Crayon’s team.
Website: Crayon
#3) SpyFu
Best for SEO and PPC keyword competitiveness.
SpyFu is widely popular among the digital circles as a substantial SEO tracking and monitoring tool. It offers users a unique SEO and PPC research tool known as Kombat. Kombat tells you how your top keywords are performing as compared to your competitor’s keywords. It alerts you if there is any overlap between the two parties.
SpyFu also comes with an innovative dashboard that handles all of your essential metrics which include monthly clicks, cost per click, and click-through rate.
Features:
- Keyword research
- Site auditing
- Change tracking
- SERP Rank tracking
- Competitor analysis
- Data visualization
Verdict: SpyFu is very easy to use, and also has videos to explain its features to you in a very comprehensive manner. Although it makes for a great keyword research tool, its competitor analysis abilities are very impressive.
Price: $39/ month, $99/month, $299/month.
Website: SpyFu
#4) Moat
Best for displaying competitor’s Digital creative history, Mid-size businesses.
Intelligence isn’t the only thing that will help you surpass your competition. You also need to be creative. Thankfully, Moat is just the tool to help you with that. It lets you view your competitor’s digital creative history which includes advertisements, press releases, etc.
This information can prove to be a huge boon for your company to create creative content inspired by your competitor’s old work. It allows you to travel up to three years in the past to review your competitor’s campaign ads.
Moat is like a muse to your business’s creative team. It inspires them to create winning creative content that has the power to engage your audience. Moat puts audience engagement front and center and paves a path for you to achieve it. It also offers some cool automated features to alert you when your competitors put up a new ad.
Features:
- Real-time market analytics
- Get competitor creative content from up to 3 years in the past
- Real-time API
- Easy to use
- Data unification
Verdict: In a world dominated by content, Moat seems like a good idea to overcome your competitors. It is a must for companies that deal with creative endeavors.
Price: A custom quote is delivered upon request, with a free demo.
Website: Moat
#5) Owletter
Best for monitoring competitor’s performance, Small and Medium enterprises.
Owletter is one of those tools that lets you monitor all of your monitors from one universal dashboard. It offers users a competitor analytics feature to know what your competitors are doing.
You can learn whether they have a great spam reputation, do they send on specific days and how does their email sending frequency changes seasonally. By learning about your competitor’s email strategy, you can learn of opportunities in which you can send your emails.
The emails captured by Owletter are stored forever and can be used by your team anytime they want.
Features:
- Monitor all your competitors from one place.
- Use email to learn what your competitors are doing.
- Capture and store email forever.
Verdict: Owletter gives you a detailed insight into what is working about your competitor’s email campaigns and what needs for working. This allows you to create winning email campaigns that are lucrative in the long run.
Price: $19, $39, $79/month, with a 14-day free trial.
Website: Owletter
#6) Wappalyzer
Best for identifying tools being used on the competitor’s website.
Wappalyzer only performs one task, but it executes it with unprecedented panache. The tool’s primary role is to identify what tool and technology are being used by the website you may be viewing currently on your browser.
The extension is fairly easy to use and the knowledge it provides can seldom be found by any other business intelligence tool. For example, Wappalyzer may tell you that your competitors are using Yoast plugins to optimize their pages or that your competitor is sending automated emails with the help of software like Mailchimp.
This allows you to implement those technologies in your operations which are working wonders for your competitors.
Features:
- Find out what websites are built with.
- Access to techno-graphic data.
- Create a list of websites with similar technology.
- Bulk lookup.
Verdict: Wappalyzer is a perfect tool to identify other tools that form the backbone of your competitor’s website. It is very easy to use and is a completely free competitive analysis tool as an extension to Chrome, Firefox, and Edge.
Price: Free browser extension.
Website: Wappalyzer
#7) SimilarWeb
Best for comparing website traffic, Funnel visualization.
SimilarWeb bequeaths its users with a strong analytics tool that can help your management identify new emerging competitors and understand what strategies they are implementing to thrive in the industry.
It is probably one of the best analytics tools out there to compare website traffic. Apart from monitoring your performance, you can also check how your metrics are aligning with that of your competitors. This helps you get a better understanding of where you are compared to your competition.
It shows you where your business stands regarding overall engagement, referral traffic, marketing channels, etc. It also gives you strong insight as to your audience and what niche they are coming from. You can compare this metric with that of your competitors to better understand audience segmentation between you and your competition.
Features:
- SEO auditing
- Change tracking
- Configure and accurately measure the engagement
- Determine entry and exit pages
- Standard and custom event tracking
- Measure bounce rate
- Funnel visualization
Verdict: SimilarWeb has a strong analytics program with a feature as unique and efficient as funnel visualization. It helps you understand how you are driving conversions and whether you are more successful than your competitors.
Price: Free basic plan, a custom quote is delivered once your needs and requirements are noted by SimilarWeb’s team.
Website: SimilarWeb
#8) BuzzSumo
Best for content-oriented competitor analysis.
BuzzSumo is a tool that lets you know what exactly your audience wants from you about blogs, leads, and more. The tool can be used to find new competitors and learn what they are up to.
BuzzSumo offers you an opportunity to know how long your competitor’s blog posts are, what type of mediums are they using to disseminate their content, and finally assess the best performing content in your industry. Since content is like a honeypot that tells you exactly how your customers are feeling, the tool becomes even more valuable.
Features:
- Content research
- Content discovery
- Browse influencers
- API
- Content monitoring
Verdict: BuzzSumo provides you with an opportunity to better understand your competitors through the content they create. As content forms the backbone of today’s digital world, this tool is extremely valuable.
Price: $99/month, with a 7-day free trial.
Website: BuzzSumo
#9) Alexa
Best for audience research and competitor performance comparison.
Alexa is a pretty powerful tool coming from the house of Amazon. Its audience research function is probably its best USP, and why not you should give this tool a try. It is super-fast to use, and will quickly show you results on all of your site searches and how they hold up according to commonly accepted industry standards.
It tells you about the site’s bounce-back rate, traffic, linking, and ranking with precise detail. The tool also harbors an audience overlap feature, which lets you find new competitors that would have normally blindsided you.
Alexa also helps you generate new ideas for content by providing tons of healthy keyword information. You know precisely which keyword is diverting traffic to which site, thus helping you create innovative content strategies.
Features:
- Exhaustive keyword information
- Audience overlap
- Content and topic analysis
- Competitive analysis
Verdict: Alexa’s audience research tool is a good enough reason to buy this tool for effective competitor analysis. The data you will get from this feature is way too profound than the data gathered from other tools.
Price: $149/month, with a 14-day free trial.
Website: Alexa
#10) TrackMaven
Best for mid-size and large-size businesses.
TrackMaven is a fascinating tool that gathers data for the benefit of your business. It promises to improve your marketing ROI with the help of its advanced technology. The tool makes it easier to track and analyze data across multiple channels with great ease.
It gives you all the insight you need about your competitors such as their ad post-performance, consumer response to their new product, the website traffic, and bounce back rate, and so much more.
Features
- Competitor analysis
- Website analytics
- Social listening
- SEO and PPC
- Content creation
- Influencer marketing
Verdict: TrackMaven is a great tool for businesses that seek to improve their marketing ROI by leveraging competitor information. The platform is user friendly and has a phenomenal customer support system.
Price: A custom quote is delivered upon request.
Website: TrackMaven
#11) Visualping
Visualping – Best for tracking changes on competitor websites, pricing changes, product offers, team, and job announcements, social media updates, and marketing campaign releases.
Visualping is an easy-to-use online tool that tracks website changes, helping businesses save time and stay on top of all their competitors´ moves. It is used by more than 1.5M users, including 83% of Fortune 500 companies.
To start tracking a competitor, you need to introduce the URL of the page you want to track, select the area you are interested in monitoring, type your email address, select the frequency of checks, and use the advance settings to personalize the monitoring to your needs.
You can track changes on visual or text elements and perform actions such as clicking on buttons, typing, or scrolling, among many others. You will receive an email notification where you can see how the page looked before and after the changes.
Features:
- Website change monitoring
- Website tracking
- SERP changes tracking
- Easy to use
- Email notifications
- Free and paid options
Verdict: Visualping is the world´s best website change monitoring tool and ideal to automate the process of monitoring the competition. You can also use Visualping to complement other competitive monitoring tools such as Moat, SimilarWeb, or Alexa. Using these tools to harvest the data, and Visualping to track changes to the data.
Price: $13, $24, $58, $97/month and free option of 65 checks/month.
Conclusion
Competitive intelligence tools have made the idea of competitor analysis fairly simple and impervious to hassles. Now every company and competitor differ in their approach. As such different companies will require different tools depending on their businesses. Try to understand the value each tool holds regarding its unique features.
If you are looking for an all-in-one comprehensive competitive intelligence software, then opt for Crayon. If your business is more content-driven, then Moat is a tool you must try to conjure creative content inspired by your competitor’s past creative work.
Research Process:
- We spent 10 hours researching and writing this article so you can have summarized and insightful information on what competitive intelligence tool will best suit you.
- Total tools researched – 25
- Total tools shortlisted – 12