What Are The Best Competitor Analysis Tools You Must Know?

Let’s begin with something that can be a little uncomfortable for some marketers.

Competition.

It doesn’t matter what industry, business is all about competing for attention. There are many marketing channels today and the competition is fierce.

Think about this: When was your last competitor analysis?

You are missing vital intelligence that could lead to your brand’s growth if you don’t know or aren’t sure.

There are many tools available that will do the hard work of competitor analysis. These 18+ platforms will allow you to learn all you need about your competitors.

For easier navigation, we’ve divided the list into four categories. To jump to a specific section, you can click on any of the links.

What is competitor analysis?

Competitor analysis is where you research your competitors’ products, sales strategies, and marketing strategies. This will allow you to create solid business strategies that can improve the performance of your competitors.

The purpose of competitor analysis is to collect intelligence that will allow you to identify a line-of-attack and create your go-to market strategy. You can spend less time trying to find out about your competitors and more on marketing if you have the right tools.

Why would you need a competitor analysis tool to help you understand your competitors?

An analysis tool for competitors can help you understand the workings of your competition and pinpoint potential opportunities to outsmart them. You can also keep up to date with industry trends and ensure your product/service meets or exceeds industry standards.

Let’s look closer at some of the other benefits of using a competitor analysis software.

This tool will help you to identify the unique value proposition for your product or service, and what makes it stand out from its competitors. It can also be used to inform future marketing efforts.

This allows you to see what your competitors are doing right. This information is crucial for keeping your products relevant and making sure that your marketing campaigns outperform industry standards.

This tool helps you see where your competitors are failing. It also allows you to identify opportunities in the market and test new marketing strategies that they haven’t tried.

You can learn from customer reviews what’s missing in the product of a competitor and how you can add features to your product/service to address those needs.

It serves as a benchmark to help you evaluate your own growth.

Convinced, yet? Let’s now look at the 18+ top competitor analysis tools that can help you achieve these advantages.

The best competitor analysis tools for SEO

1. SEMRush

SEMRush has been a popular SEO tool, but it is also known for its competitor analysis features. This tool can be used to find out the backlinks of your competitors and track changes in their ranking.

SEMRush has more than 30 tools that can analyze over 3.7 billion keywords and 4 trillion backlinks. Amazing!

This tool is useful for SEO purposes. Similar to the previous example, you can directly influence your content strategy by highlighting keywords that are being targeted by competitors. SEMRush is a comprehensive toolbox that contains everything you need:

Find new organic competitors

Compare the top keywords used by competitors

Compare the budgets and strategies of your competitors

Analyze keywords and ad copy of competitors to find out what they are doing with display ads.

Compare your website traffic metrics with those of competitors

Search for new competitors in AdWords or Bing ads

Compare the most successful product listing ads from your competitors

Pricing plans:

Pro Plan: $99.95/ month
Guru Plan: $199.95/ month
Business plan: $399.95/month

2. Ahrefs

Ahrefs has a reputation for being an expert on SEO elements, but it also offers an outstanding Keywords Explorer tool which is among the best.

Keywords Explorer uses a top-page analysis to identify keywords relevant to a blog or article’s topic.

You can also use a large number of competitor research tools to strengthen your SEO muscles. This mega-toolbox contains keyword information, data on CPC, traffic gained (currently or historically), keyword suggestion and search result volume.

Ahrefs provides the best in the industry with relevant keywords and backlink data. This is compiled from a robot that crawls 4 billion pages per 15 minutes.

Ahrefs, in general, is a powerful SEO tool that includes:

Backlink audit – Get the information you need about your current link profile

Find link opportunities – Monitor your competitors’ links to find yours and grab your site

Keyword research – Find keywords and ideas for content

Monitor organic visibility and leverage total organic keywords

Create alerts for keywords to help with brand management and relationship building

Pricing plans:

Lite Plan: $99/month
Standard Plan: $179/month
Advanced Plan: $399/month
Agency Plan: $999/month

3. MozBar

Moz’s powerful browser extension gives a quick overview of the authority of a website in Google’s eyes.

MozBar assigns websites a DA score based on their likely rank in search engines. The better the DA score is, the more valuable.

MozBar can be found at the top of your browser and is useful for assessing a site’s search performance. You can also compare the performance of competing sites by using a Google query.

The tool also allows you to conduct a passive competitive analysis by examining competing websites to determine how long they’ve been around and if they are winning backlinks.

Pricing plans: MozBar can be used for free. However, if you wish to have full access to the Moz Suite, you will need to select one of these plans.

Standard Plan: $99/month
Medium Plan: $149/ month
Large plan: $249 per month
Premium Plan: $599/ month

4. SpyFu

Originally called GoogSpy , SpyFu allows you to view all keywords of competitors in both organic and paid search – and even more relevant keywords. You can then add keywords from competitors to get a complete view of their strategy.

SpyFu collects all its data via web scraping. SpyFu also refreshes its data monthly. This will give you an overview of your competitors’ digital marketing campaigns. You can access all information, including their Google rankings and keyword strategies.

You can also use the SEO reports for a better understanding of your competitors. This will help you stay ahead of your competition so that you can always produce the most relevant content.

Pricing plans:

Basic Plan: $39/month
Professional Plan: $79 per month
Team Plan: $299/month

5. Serpstat

Serpstat is a “growth hacking tool” for content marketing and SEO analysis.

The tool provides keyword research for your competitors, analyzes their backlink strategy and tracks their position in SERPs. The tool also gives you a complete site audit of your competitors, giving you an overview of where you stand.

Some of the most important features are:

Keyword research – Compare keywords, find semantic variations, and identify long-tail keywords

Backlink analysis – Track your competitors’ backlinks and score referring domains

Search Analytics – Track keyword and domain rankings to find the posts that generate the most traffic

Market intelligence – Monitor industry leaders to increase your PPC or SEO efforts

Pricing plans:

Lite Plan: $69 per month
Standard Plan: $149/month
Advanced Plan: $299/month
Enterprise Plan: $499/ month

It would be a mistake to lump Sprout Social with competitor analysis tools. It is more than a snooping tool. It is a comprehensive social media management tool that can be used to increase engagement.

Sprout Social also has tools to monitor competitor activities. It offers a range of competitive reports that can be used to evaluate and optimize your social media strategy using rich data points from Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.

It doesn’t matter if your goal is to see what your competitors are posting, or compare your growth with the average of all the profiles being compared. All you need to do is click away.

You can also use the Advanced Listening tool to quickly determine how customers feel about products and services of your competitors, as well examine your share of voice within your industry.

Pricing plans:

Standard Plan: $99/user/month
Professional Plan: $149/user/month
Advanced Plan: $249/user/month

7. Hootsuite

Hootsuite provides a comprehensive tool for monitoring, analyzing, and responding to social media. Hootsuite makes it easy to track buzzing posts and focus on competitor’s activities with one dashboard.

The tool allows you to track your competitors’ social media activity, search for keywords and hashtags, and then see what their customers think.

Hootsuite Insights can also spot important online conversations and gauge brand sentiment against top competitors. It even allows you to see your products through the eyes of your customers. To stay informed, you can turn on alerts. Hootsuite can also be used to plan, create, and publish content for social media. Make sure you explore all of the features!

Pricing plans:

Professional Plan: $19/month (billed annually).
Team Plan: $99/month (billed annually).
Business Plan: $599/month (billed annually).
Pricing for Enterprise Plans:

8. Sociality.io

Sociality.io allows you to analyze the presence of your competitors on all social media channels from every angle.

You will see how your performance compares to others through detailed charts. In just a few seconds, all the important metrics, including engagement, interactions, growth of fans, will be available.

You can compare up to 15 pages of competitor pages simultaneously and download custom reports with charts, graphs and your logo. These reports can be used for both client and in-house analytics.

Pricing plans:

Personal Plan: $18/month
Team Plan $72/month
Business plan: $216/month
Pricing for Enterprise Plans: Custom pricing

9. Phlanx

Sometimes, you just want to follow the simplest route possible. That’s perfectly fine. Phlanx serves this purpose.

An online marketing platform with an Engagement Calculator that works for all social media channels. This tool was created for influencers. However, it can also be used to check the authenticity of your competitors’ audiences.

The engagement ratio of Phlanx is calculated by subtracting the number of comments and likes that a post gets from an account’s followers. Although there is no standard number for what an influencer brand’s engagement rate should look like, a range of 3% to 3% is a good starting point.

Phlanx is a useful tool for identifying fake followers and determining whether an influencer’s posts receive legitimate engagement. Phlanx can also be used to track the engagement of your competitors.

Pricing plans:

Basic Plan: $35/month
Premium Plan: $50/ month
Business Plan: $70 per month

Social Searcher monitors your mentions on major platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. It is a great tool to find out what people are discussing and share on social media.

It will track and measure mentions and then display the results in an intuitive dashboard. The tool allows you to discover feedback from customers and then respond in real time. Social Searcher also provides actionable social analytics that help in assessing how social media content is performing.

Social Searcher makes it easy to navigate. Search the topic or competitor you want to research and the platform will do the rest.

Pricing plans:

No Cost Plan
Basis Plan EUR3.49/month
Standard Plan: EUR8.49/month
Professional Plan: EUR19.49/month

The best competitor analysis tools for content

11. Buzzsumo

Buzzsumo allows you to find the best-performing content on relevant topics for your company and specific competitors. This tool examines the engagement of a piece on social media and its total shares across all platforms.

Buzzsumo will instantly pull up the most shared content from your competitor when you enter their domain. This allows you to quickly identify the best content types (titles and subject matter, as well as formatting). It is also possible to see which influencers are important in sharing your competitor’s content.

Buzzsumo not only helps you find the top industry content creators, but also allows you to identify hot topics that you can explore. Buzzsumo can help you find the right people in your industry, or a topic for your next blog post.

Pricing plans:

Pro Plan: $99/ month
Plus Plan: $179/ month
Large plan: $299 per month
Enterprise Plan: $499+/ month

12. Feedly

Feedly is the best way to monitor competitor content and not have to check their blog every day.

Feedly a comprehensive content aggregator stores and organizes all content published by others, even those of your competitors. This allows you to view hot topics that your competitors have covered on one page.

It also allows you to save and analyze the content of your competitors by subscribing to their RSS feed. You can also set up notifications when they publish new content.

Feedly works on all devices, including tablet, laptop and phone via apps or the cloud. The Feedly Browser Addon lets you grab and save content while you browse the internet or do your research.

Pricing plans:

Pro Plan $6/user/month (billed annually).
Pro+ Plan: $8/user/month (billed annually).
Business Plan: $18/user/month (billed annually).
Pricing for Enterprise Plans:

13. SimilarWeb

SimilarWeb can be used to analyze your competitors. It displays the source of most traffic to your competitor’s websites, along with similar pages visited. You can view the performance of each source by breaking down traffic into four sources: search, paid, social and search.

The tool also shows you which topics are popular and which ones don’t. This information can be used to help you find content ideas for your campaign.

Pricing plans:

No Cost Plan
Pricing for Enterprise Plans: Custom pricing

14. Ontolo

Ontolo can be used to analyze web traffic and track backlinks. It also collects content.

You can actually use the extensive features of the tool for SEO as well as content optimization. The tool’s competitor research tools are what make it stand out among other platforms. Ontolo searches the internet for competitor data, and saves it in a database so that it can be used later.

You can use Ontolo to:

Learn more about your competitors
Check out who is following you and engaging with you competitors
Find out what content your competitors are publishing

Ontolo makes it easy to get started. All you need is a list of keywords and URLs for your competitors. The tool will then do all the research for you.

Pricing plans:

Pro Plan: $97/ month
Agency Plan: $297 per month
Custom Plan: custom pricing

The best competitor analysis tools for ads and emails

15. WhatRunsWhere

It can be difficult to keep up with the latest trends in content marketing. Trends can change in a flash. You need to keep your fingers on the pulse in order to stay relevant. There is an app to help you do that: WhatRunsWhere.

This tool measures the effectiveness of your competitors’ ads. This tool helps you determine if your advertising strategy is similar to theirs or if you should learn from their mistakes.

It is also great for researching hot topics. This allows you to see what your competitors are discussing. This will allow you to determine if it is worth your time to get on top of trending content before it disappears from the news.

Pricing plans:

Basic Plan: $299 per month
Full coverage plan: $399/month
Pricing for Enterprise Plans:

16. Mailcharts

Email marketing is undoubtedly one of the most powerful channels for competitor analysis. Mailcharts Aggregates emails of competing campaigns to help you influence your own.

Mailcharts can pull data such as send frequency from your business and compare it to your campaigns to show where your emails stand. The tool also compares your campaigns with their vast library of marketing email templates to make sure you’re following best practices (e.g. timing, frequency, length of subject lines, etc.).

Mailcharts is a powerful competitor analysis tool. It also has a lot of examples on its website. You’ll be able to see the top-performing email campaigns today by looking at some of the most important ones.

Pricing plans:

No Cost Plan
Starter Plan: $99/ month
Business plan: $249/month
Enterprise plan: Starting at $999/month

17. iSpionage

iSpionage will help you to see your competitors’ paid ads. This tool allows you to analyze many aspects of PPC campaigns including the keywords that a brand is targeting via AdWords.

It is possible to see who else is advertising for PPC ads in a particular topic and how much their monthly budgets are. A tool such as iSpionage can be invaluable for businesses looking to invest in PPC.

Pricing plans:

Starter Plan: $59/ month
Professional Plan: $99/month
Advanced Plan: $299/month
Pricing for Enterprise Plans:

18. Owletter

Many marketers used to create fake email accounts in order to monitor the campaigns of their competitors before Owletter. Owletter allows you to see all emails that were sent from a website and added to their mailing lists.

It automatically collects email from competitors and organizes them in a user-friendly dashboard. Owletter’s analytics detects changes in the frequency of your competitors’ emails and also picks up on trends to help optimize when your emails should be sent.

Owletter allows you to see:

Check if your competitors have spam reputations
If they have a set schedule for email sending
They can change their schedules according the season
The most popular topics
Undiscovered opportunities

Pricing plans:

Starter Plan: $19/ month
Pro Plan: $39/ month
Unlimited Plan: $79/month

Here are some quick tips to conduct competitor analysis

Each of the above tools can help you analyze your competitors, but you need to know what happens after you run the numbers. Here’s a quick summary of how to get the most out of any competitor analysis tool.

Identify your real competitors

It’s not worth trying to lose weight. Local coffee shops with 1,000 followers should not be discouraged, since they aren’t as popular as Starbucks and Nescafe.

Context is everything. Take a look at the major players in your industry. When evaluating your competitors, you should first look at those that are most similar in size and target audience.

Prioritize metrics

It is easy to get distracted by the messaging of competitors when you are looking at them.

However, it is recommended that you first use a data-driven approach for analysis. Before you dig into the “why” behind their marketing, it is important to identify as many metrics as possible.

Ask yourself, “What is your goal?”

What number of times do your competitors post content?

How do you compare promotional and non-promotional postings?

Which are the most successful hashtags and keywords they use?

These questions can be as important as understanding the message of someone.

Transform analysis into action

Finally, ensure that the data you collect is able to be translated into action.

You might discover new keywords that you can target with your content. You might discover that your competitors have been more active than you are in pushing your content. You can make a difference!

Regardless of your motivation, competitor analysis can help you improve your marketing strategy. The more information you can get from your competitors the better.

More to you

Competitor analysis is an essential component in fine-tuning your marketing strategies. The tool makes it easy to quickly run your analysis and allows you to spend more time on other business operations.

How often do you spy on competitors? Do you have any essential tools for competitor analysis? Let us know your thoughts! We are always glad to hear from our customers!

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