competitor analysis research template

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9 competitor analysis templates (with example data)

Last updated: March 2024

Is competition always a good thing? It can certainly be a motivating factor — pushing you to think more creatively, stretch your limits, and keep growing. This is especially true for product managers . You are constantly working to differentiate your offering from others in the market and deliver greater customer value.

Gaining a deep understanding of your competitors is vital for product success and innovation. Strong competitive research and analysis can help you identify exciting opportunities and safeguard against potential threats. It also informs how you define your product strategy and address customer needs in a better way than competitors.

But understanding your competition takes real effort. A meaningful competitor analysis goes beyond listing out basic offerings and pricing structures — it requires a firm grasp of your market, the competitive landscape within it, and the one-of-a-kind value your product provides.

Done well, competitive research will become an integral piece of your product planning process . But it is important to note that competitors should only help inform your product's trajectory, not dictate it. Instead of making decisions about your product based only on getting ahead of the competition, use your research in conjunction with what you know is best for your customers and your company. What your customers want and need is your top priority — this is what will ultimately help you deliver a lovable product .

There is no way around it — your competitors are a consideration. But this is just one data point to use when you set your own strategy and roadmap. Brian de Haaff Aha! co-founder and CEO

The free Excel and PowerPoint competitive analysis templates in this guide make it easy to organize and communicate your competitive research . They are a huge time-saver. That said, Excel and PowerPoint templates require manual updates and are often disconnected from your daily product work. If you want to quickly capture and share competitive information, use a lightweight whiteboard template from the Aha! template library. If you are ready to go deeper, building product roadmaps , defining go-to-market strategies , and feature prioritization, try Aha! Roadmaps .

Use the template below — with a free trial .

Jump ahead to any section below:

What is a competitor analysis?

What are the types of competitor analysis, how to perform a competitive analysis, whiteboard template, aha roadmaps competitive analysis template, competitive landscape template, competitor profile template, competitor scorecard template, competitor overview template, capability analysis.

Feature analysis template

Imitability analysis template

Competitive differentiation analysis template

A competitor analysis is a useful tool to understand the market landscape. This helps you identify alternative ways prospective customers can solve their problems. It is also a great way to evaluate other vendors' strategies so you can assess their strengths and weaknesses . This gives you important insights into how other companies are trying to provide value to your target buyers.

Your competitive analysis should answer these core questions:

Who are the other companies vying for customers in your market?

What products and services do they offer?

What is each competitor’s market share?

What are their strengths and weaknesses?

How do your own products and services compare?

How can you differentiate your products and services?

Product and marketing teams use these findings to inform their strategic plans and determine what will make their product a success. It allows you to formulate an approach that considers the strengths and weaknesses of your own offering relative to the competition.

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50+ guided templates for product teams

There are many different types of competitor analysis. When considering which template to use, it is important to think about the factors you want to analyze and how you will share your findings.

Listed below are the pre-built examples included in this guide.

Surpass your competition by using these carefully selected templates to see where your product fits in the market.

Conducting a competitive analysis pushes you to consider all options available to your prospective customers. Through this research, you can ensure product differentiation and establish a sustainable competitive advantage.

Before we dig into the templates you can use to display these valuable findings, here are the basic steps involved in performing a competitive analysis .

Establish a list of direct and indirect competitors

Direct competitors offer a similar type of product within the same market. Indirect competitors offer a different type of product that serves the same need.

Research your identified competitors

Compile information by exploring the company's website, customer and product reviews, social media, financial information, sales collateral, videos, and press releases.

Test the product yourself

Sign up for a free trial or tour of the product. Experiment with the functionality and test run the features.

Document the user experience

Study the product's UX and empathize with the customer. Go through the steps and identify usability pros and cons.

Identify your competitor's vision and positioning

What do your competitors aim to achieve? Why does their product exist? How do they describe their offering in the market?

Define the differentiators

What distinguishes their product in the market? How do they stand out? Where do they fall short?

Create a competitor analysis report

The templates below provide a great starting point. Share your report with the product, sales, and marketing teams.

Maintain & update report

Make this process part of your strategic product planning. Assign a point person to keep the report updated throughout the year.

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This whiteboard template in Aha! software lets you conduct a detailed competitor analysis in a streamlined view — so you organize key observations about multiple competitors in one space. Use sticky notes and sliding scorecards to help uncover opportunities to make your product stand out. Plus, since it is a whiteboard template, this one is great for collaborating live with your team.

Start using this template now

Use the Aha! Roadmaps competitive analysis template to track key competitors across your workspace hierarchy. Quickly capture important information including revenue, workforce, and product positioning. Then create a competitor chart — showing exactly how your products stack up — and share competitor profiles in an Aha! Roadmaps presentation . Maintaining competitor profiles in the same tool you use for roadmapping helps integrate strategic thinking into your planning process.

This PowerPoint template makes it easy to visualize your competitors in a single view. It is the perfect way to position the key players in the market and how they relate to each other. It is useful, for example, when you need to provide an overview of your competition to executives or advisory boards. You can easily customize the titles for each quadrant and change the values on the x and y axis to align with how your company assesses the market.

This Excel template makes it easy to build a detailed profile for each of your main competitors. It is great for capturing a wide range of information about their organization, customers, and products.

A well-defined competitor profile gives internal teams — such as marketing and sales — a better understanding of who they are up against. It provides insights into the strengths and weaknesses of each competitor so the team can position their own offering as the better solution to prospective customers.

Create a competitor scorecard to rank your competitors and measure the threats they represent to your business. It is a great way to assess your competitors using a consistent set of scoring metrics.

You decide which attributes you want to score. For example, you can assess organizational attributes, such as market awareness or ability to execute. Or you can rank product attributes, such as ease of use, unique features, and quality. This Excel template also provides a weighted scoring approach so you can rank the relative importance of each attribute from the customer's perspective.

Use this worksheet to gather important information about all of your competitors in one place. It allows you to capture details about each company, product, and their go-to-market strategies .

This Excel template is a useful tool to organize your research so you can easily find and access the information you need. It serves as the foundation of your competitive analysis and provides a consistent way to collect and analyze key data.

A capability analysis allows you to assess how your product and team compares to a competitor's. It is a great way to analyze the collective skills, abilities, expertise, and even how product features match up. This Excel template helps you define what your organization is good at and where you can improve. It also lets you rank the relative importance of each capability to customers. This keeps you focused on how effectively you are solving the customer's problem .

Features analysis template

Use this features analysis PowerPoint template to create a detailed comparison of the features that each product includes. It allows you to conduct a thorough assessment of competitive products so you can see how your own offering stacks up.

This helps you identify features that are unique to your product as well as any gaps in relation to what your competitors offer. A common approach is to use Harvey Balls to show the degree to which each feature is complete. This makes it easy for internal teams to understand the relative strengths and weaknesses of their product from the customer's perspective.

Imitability ladder template

The imitability ladder PowerPoint template helps you determine the uniqueness of your offering. It is a great tool to help you assess how easily your tangible resources (financial, physical, technological, and organizational) and intangible resources (human, innovation, creativity, and reputation) can be imitated. This helps you understand your competitive advantage and identify existing and potential weaknesses in your business strategy.

This PowerPoint template helps you define a product strategy that will set your company apart from the competition. It is perfect for identifying the basic, expected, augmented, and potential benefits of your product.

This makes it clear where you need to add value to your solution so you can create customer delight and lasting competitive advantage. You can include functional features and non-functional features (such as design or branding) that differentiate your product from competing solutions.

Staying informed on what options your current and prospective customers have will help inform your long-term product strategy. Remember to regularly update your competitive analysis and corresponding business models. This will help you identify changes in the market and respond quickly to new challenges and opportunities.

By integrating competitive research with a deep understanding of your goals and customers' needs, you will be in a strong position to make your offering a success.

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Competitive analysis template

Capture and share high-level observations about competitors in your space.

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Free Competitive Analysis Templates: Learn about Customers and Competitors to Grow Your Business

By Joe Weller | March 19, 2018

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When engaging in competitive analysis, you can use a template to consider and capture details of the marketing landscape in which your business exists in order to improve your marketing decisions. More importantly, these templates help you focus on gathering information on your competitive landscape and deducing business lessons from that data, rather than mulling over which factors you should study.

In this article, we cover what competitive analysis is, what a competitive analysis template should include, and where to look for information in your analysis. We also offer free, downloadable templates in Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Google Docs formats — all of these templates are customizable so you can include the particular information that’s relevant to your organization and analysis exercise. Find templates for the web, social media, small and general business analysis, and the presentation of your findings.

Competitive Analysis Templates for Web and Social Media Analysis

Competitive analysis report.

If you are reviewing websites to understand usability and structure, you want to know what content sites have in common, what content is unique and interesting, and what common navigational features appear. Use this report to capture features of competitor websites, or adapt it to perform competitive analyses on other aspects of businesses.This template proves space to record details of search functionality and any other pertinent features.

‌ Download Competitive Analysis Report - WORD

Online Social Media Analysis Template

To study social media strategy, you want a template that allows you to look for all the social media channels you and your competitors are engaged with. This template also helps you see how many followers each competitor garners, and prompts you to consider who the product target market includes and what the product branding entails.

Download Online Strategy Competitive Analysis Template

Excel  |  PDF

Competitive Analysis Template for Small Business

Small business competitive analysis template.

When creating a competitive analysis for your small business, you want to conduct a thorough review of all facets of marketing. Start by determining who your competitors are, what you think you already know about them, and what you know about your own business. Next, describe target markets, products and pricing, media strategies, and perform a SWOT analysis.

Download Small Business Competitive Analysis Template

Word  |  PDF

Competitive Analysis Landscape Template

In addition to the usual queries about business factors, you may also want a template that reminds you why you are conducting the analysis. Complete this template for your own company and then for your competitors.

Download Competitive Analysis Landscape Template

Excel  |  Word  |  PDF

Competitive Analysis Template for Evaluating Results vs. Unique Value Propositions

By grading competitors on value proposition, content strategy, and funnel efficiency, you can derive an idea of how successful companies are in their marketing strategies. Use Excel formulas and your scores will automatically total and appear on a heat graph.

‌ Download Value Proposition Comparative Analysis

Approaches to the Presentation of Competitive Analysis Template Data

Particularly if you must present your findings to stakeholders throughout your company, certain additions can expedite conveying your message:

• Define Your Target Audience for the Analysis Presentation: You can also create multiple presentations aimed at different audiences, such as a summary for executives and a PowerPoint for marketing, sales, and development.
• Add Each Competitor’s Logo: This helps to differentiate among companies in the document and can convey significant information about each brand.
• Show the Product: If you can, add images of the competitor’s products or images that convey the nature of their services.
• Use High-Resolution Graphics: They heighten impact.
• Consider the Company Description: Include the tagline, slogan, mission statement, and value proposition. In addition, discuss how companies position and describe themselves.
• Keep Information Consistent: All competitors should be described with the same type of information and level of detail to avoid bias.
• Look at the Good They Do: When reviewing competitor strengths and weaknesses, don’t just consider the weaknesses; think about what makes their customers happy.

Competitive Analysis Presentation Template

Try the following PowerPoint template for company presentations. The template provides tips for explaining the purpose of an analysis to non-marketing team members and leaves room to discuss factors in the competitive landscape, environmental pressures, and much more.

‌ Download Competitive Analysis Presentation Template

Why Use Competitive Analysis?

Competitive analysis (CA) — sometimes called competitor analysis — is a vital process to help businesses stay on the cutting edge and anticipate market changes that they can use to their advantage. Competitive analyses, which should be conducted periodically, can help you strategize and plan for company growth by discovering opportunities and threats. From a media strategy perspective, the analysis of competitor collateral is essential for launching effective SEO-driven campaigns. SEO analysis reveals what keywords and approaches work, both for you and your competitors, and which campaigns should receive focus. Analyses also offer you a view into your company’s position in the competitive landscape.

Although in the context of marketing, the word “competitive” suggests focus on “the other” (i.e., the rival), many marketing gurus believe that the heart of any marketing activity begins with the customer. An analysis of competitors helps you to better serve customers. By understanding what customers think competitors do well, you can craft a value proposition for your own company that allows you to shine in the marketplace.

Jeffrey Wilke is the CEO of Worldwide Consumer at Amazon.com Inc. He  advocates , “First of all, I’m focused on customers and not competitors. Competitors’ strategy changes all the time. We don’t want to distract ourselves from customers by obsessing over what competitors are doing or not doing.”

Competitive analysis puts a spotlight on the strengths and weaknesses of competing organizations as well as your own. A detailed review helps uncover potential opportunities. Most significantly, though, you must actually use the collected data in your new campaign to reap the benefits. Otherwise, competitive analysis is just an exercise.

To summarize, competitive analysis enables your organization to do the following:

• Reveal your company’s and your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses
• Identify the path to opportunities for increased competitive advantage
• Help the entire company to understand the competitive landscape
• Contribute to defining your value proposition (that is, help you differentiate from competitors)
• Inform strategic planning

The Parts of a Competitive Analysis Template

• A competitive analysis template helps ensure that you store captured information. It can also ensure that analysis is consistent from year to year. Above all, using a template guarantees that your primary efforts are put toward gathering and evaluating information, not into deciding what criteria to study and how to format notes.

Templates may have a specific focus. For example, for online and social media strategy, a template may list all social media platforms and each company’s number of followers. CA templates generally include the following sections:

1. Company Information:

• The overview and profile provide general information about your company and its competitors.
• Profiled competitors are usually direct competitors: those who offer a comparable product or service in the same area. A review of indirect competitors (those who offer a slightly different product or service that could substitute for yours) provides clues to potential direct competition or new opportunities for your business.
• Background information on a competitor may include the location of their head office, the number of employees, recent acquisitions, Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings, and the names of key staff members.
• This section also includes the company’s mission statement, slogan, tagline, and main value proposition.

2. Product Information:

• The product and service portion of this section describes the products and services offered.
• Pricing details include list prices for key products and services.
• Distribution channel details include information about affiliates, retailers, and wholesalers.

3. Market Information:

The target market (personas) area of this section looks at collateral and social media to determine the competitor’s target audience. You can combine this information into customer personas . Target audience information prepares you for when customers leave your competitors.

• Reviewing online presence is key today. Note all of your competitors’ social media channels and web pages. Also, document any other web pages where competitors are referenced.
• Understanding the context of social media channels can help you grasp the essence of a target market. For example, LinkedIn is aimed at professionals.
• Consider the brand messaging and tone on social media. Cultivate your company’s own voice.
• Market share is expressed as a percentage of the business that the company owns. Some marketing specialists think that knowing competitor market share is unnecessary. They believe you should focus on your own market share.

4. SWOT Analysis :

• SWOT stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Perform a SWOT analysis to identify what competitors are doing right, and what customers are complaining about. Also, you can assess how well a competitor is achieving their goals based on their apparent positioning. Use a competitor’s weaknesses to understand how you can fill gaps to make their customers your customers.

5. Competitive Advantage:

• Competitive advantage boils down to why a customer likes them better. In other words, what’s unique about the product or service that draws customers?

How to Find Market Information to Complete Competitive Analysis Templates

Today’s digital world makes much of competitive analysis easier. Nevertheless, don’t discount the value of other paths to help you learn about your industry and niche. Visit competitor locations, talk to their customers, look at printed collateral (such as brochures, form mailers, trade shows, newsletters, and bulletins), and talk to your competitors. The following list includes some of the main methods for finding company information:

• Google: Search with pertinent keywords.
• LinkedIn: This site offers information on company size, locations, hiring, and key personnel.
• Yahoo Finance: Check this for financial background on organizations.
• AngelList: This resource lists startups, investors, and job openings at startups.
• Crunchbase : This outlines new products and companies and their investments.
• Alexa, SimilarWeb, and Other Online Tools: Use web search tools to find the traffic on keywords, backlinks, and more.
• Hoover and Manta: Find organization financial and structural information.
• SEC Filings: Peruse SEC corporate filings for key information about a company’s financial endeavors and financial health.
• Purchased Data: Buy database collections of consumer and corporate data.
• Website , YouTube, and Facebook Comments: Discover what users and customers really think about your products and services as well as those of your competitors.

Social Media and Web Research

Very few, if any, businesses can excel today without some social media presence. Consider these tips when reviewing social media strategy:

• Brick-and-mortar establishments may be different from online competition.
• Backlinks are pages that link to other businesses’ pages, but not yours. Backlink analysis helps you gain links to your page from important sites.
• Keyword gap analysis highlights keywords you don’t currently have on your site that rank well for other competitors.
• Consider the brand story, and note which social media channels the site supports.
• Keep in mind that your actual product or service competitors may differ from your SEO competitors because of paid ads. It’s possible that the brick-and-mortar competitor is less important than the online competitor. For SEO research, survey domain authority, the keywords that attract traffic, and the amount of traffic for each of those keywords.

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Blog Marketing How to Create a Competitor Analysis Report (with Examples)

How to Create a Competitor Analysis Report (with Examples)

Written by: Midori Nediger Nov 09, 2023

Your business will always have competition.

And if you don’t know what that competition is up to, you could be missing out on huge opportunities.

That’s why a competitive analysis is so crucial to your success as a business. It gives you the tools to quickly adapt to any changes in the competitive landscape and potentially capitalize on industry trends that your competitors haven’t even noticed.

So let’s get some basics out of the way…

What is a competitive analysis report?

A competitive analysis report outlines the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors compared to those of your own business.

Typically, a competitive analysis report will contain:

• A description of your business’s target market
• Details about the features of your product compared to your competitors’ products
• A breakdown of current and projected market share, sales, and revenues
• Comparisons of pricing models
• An analysis of marketing strategy and social media strategy
• A description of customer ratings of the features of each competitor

Whether you’re a startup trying to break into the marketplace , a consultant trying to get results for your client, or an established company looking to cement your foothold against the competition, a well-researched competitive analysis gives you the tools you need to make strategic decisions.

Your competitive analysis should inform your marketing plan , your business plan , your consultant report and every part of your high-level business strategy.

But how do you actually create a competitive analysis report?

How to make competitor analysis report :

• Start with a competitor overview
• Conduct market research to uncover customer personas and industry trends
• Compare product features in a feature comparison matrix
• Summarize your strengths and weaknesses with a SWOT analysis
• Show where you fit in the competitive landscape
• Use a competitor analysis template for a professional look and feel

The level of detail you include in each section of your competitive analysis report will vary depending on the stage of your business growth and your goals. For example, a startup might create a report that focuses on market research, while an established business might dive into detail on an emerging competitor.

But let’s talk about the parts of a competitive analysis that every report should include.

1. Start with a competitor overview

A strong report shows exactly what a company must out-compete to be successful.

Meaning you must audit any product or service that currently solves the problem your business is trying to solve for customers and write a quick profile for each competitor.

Like the template below, each competitor profile might include:

• The company’s revenue and market share
• The company’s size and information about their management team
• A broad description of the company’s strengths and weaknesses
• An overview of how the company is perceived by customers

This overview will help your readers get a big-picture view of the market landscape.

2. Conduct market research to uncover customer personas and industry trends

You can’t create a competitive analysis report without doing extensive market research , which is all about gathering information to understand your customers, identify opportunities to grow, and recognize trends in the industry.

This research can help you put together the customer personas that will guide business and marketing decisions down the line, and allow you to plan for any shifts that might disrupt the marketplace.

You can conduct primary market research, with:

• Customer interviews
• Online surveys or questionnaires
• In-person focus groups
• Purchasing a competitor product to study packaging and delivery experience

Or secondary market research, by:

• Reading company records
• Examining the current economic conditions
• Researching relevant technological developments

When assembling your market research you may just want provide a high-level summary of the industry trends, like this competitor analysis example shows:

Or you may want to dive into detail on the demographics of a particular consumer segment, like this:

But if you’re a consultant or advisor struggling to get buy-in from skeptical stakeholders, the report below would be ideal. Covering everything from market forecasts to consumer profiles, it can help you get clients and decision-makers on board.

3. Compare product features in a feature comparison matrix

The feature comparison is arguably the most important part of the competitive analysis. Breaking down your product and your competitors’ products feature-by-feature will allow you to see what really sets everyone apart.

In addition to specific product features, here are some attributes that you might include in a feature comparison matrix:

• Product quality
• Number of features
• Ease of use
• Customer support
• Brand/style/image

The most common format for a features analysis is a simple matrix with you and your competitors along one side and all of the relevant features along the other. You can check off or rate how you perform in each area:

But these tables can get pretty long. Another approach is to focus on the things that provide the most value to the user, like in this competitor analysis example from Mint. It only includes ease of use, costs, and benefits:

If you want to visualize your comparisons in an engaging way, you could use a comparison infographic . 

Great resources for this section of your competitive analysis report are product rating sites like Capterra and G2Crowd . They’ll give you an unbiased view of your company and your competitors.

And as with any market research, it’s critical that you speak with real people who use your product and your competitors’ products. That’s the only way to get an accurate picture of how your target customers rate the competition .

4. Summarize your strengths and weaknesses in a SWOT analysis

When you’re conducting research for your competitive analysis, it’s going to be messy. You’ll have a lot of data and it’ll be hard for an outsider to understand.

That’s what makes the SWOT analysis so essential.

A SWOT analysis is a framework for evaluating your competitive position by listing your key strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.

It can act like a short summary of the rest of your competitive analysis report for anyone who doesn’t have time to dig into the details.

Click the template above to enter our online SWOT analysis maker tool. Customize the template to your liking–no design no-how required.

Here are some questions to kickstart your SWOT analysis:

• Strengths: What are we doing really well (in terms of marketing, products, sales, branding, technology, etc.)?
• Weaknesses: What are we struggling with? What’s holding us back?
• Opportunities: What’s the weakest area for our biggest competitor? Are there any gaps in the market that aren’t current being addressed? What has recently changed in our business or the market?
• Threats: What is our biggest competitor doing much better than us? What new products/features are they working on? What problems aren’t we currently addressing?

In your report, you could arrange your SWOT analysis in a simple list, but it can be helpful to use color-coded quadrants, like the competitor analysis example below. Note how each quadrant is paired with an icon:

5. Show where you fit in the competitive landscape

After summarizing your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, it’s time to look at the bigger picture. It’s time to figure out where every major competitor currently fits into the competitive landscape.

The most popular way of doing this is to identify the two dimensions that are most important for being competitive in your industry and plot them on a matrix, like this one from the Boston Consulting Group:

And this one from G2 Crowd (which looks at market presence and customer satisfaction):

You may want to focus on where you fit in the market landscape based on your own biggest strengths and weaknesses, or the biggest threats and opportunities you identified in the SWOT analysis.

Or, it may be enough just to summarize in words the features and benefits that set your apart from your competitors (which is a great way to end your report on a high note).

Competitor analysis examples for strategic planning

Let’s delve into some competitor analysis examples that can empower your organization to navigate the market effectively.

1. Competitor analysis example for marketing specialists

Imagine this: You are a Marketing Specialist and your goal is to establish a strong online presence and attract a diverse user base. However, you face stiff competition from established players in the market. Here are some things you should look into when doing your competitor analysis:

Competitor analysis focus:

• SEO strategies: Analyze competitors’ websites to understand their SEO strategies. Identify high-ranking keywords, backlink strategies, and content optimization techniques . Alternatively, if you’re running a local business, you might want to analyze and scrape Google Maps listings to better assess how companies are optimizing Google My Business to generate leads.
• Social media engagement: Examine competitors’ social media presence. Evaluate the type of content that garners engagement, the frequency of posts, and audience interactions.
• Online advertising: Investigate competitors’ online advertising campaigns. Are they leveraging Google Ads, social media ads, or other platforms? Assess the messaging, visuals, and targeting criteria.
• Content marketing: Scrutinize competitors’ content marketing efforts. Identify the topics that resonate with their audience, the formats they use (blogs, videos, infographics), and the platforms they prioritize.

Here’s a SWOT analysis template to help you get started:

2. Competitor analysis example for SME business development managers

Imagine this: As the business development manager for a medium sized start up, you are tasked with expanding the client base. The market is crowded with similar service providers, and differentiation is key. When doing your competitor analysis report, look into:

• Client testimonials and case studies: Explore competitors’ websites for client testimonials and case studies. Identify success stories and areas where clients express satisfaction or dissatisfaction.
• Service offerings: Analyze the range of services offered by competitors. Identify gaps in their offerings or areas where you can provide additional value to clients.
• Pricing models: Investigate competitors’ pricing structures. Are they offering packages, subscription models, or customized solutions? Determine whether there’s room for a more competitive pricing strategy .
• Partnerships and collaborations: Explore potential partnerships or collaborations that competitors have formed. This can provide insights into untapped markets or innovative service delivery methods.

Here’s a competitor analysis comparison chart template that you could use:

3. Competitor analysis example for product managers

Imagine this: You are a Product Manager for a consumer electronics company tasked with improving your company’s products and services. The market is buzzing with innovation, and staying ahead requires a deep understanding of competitor products.

• Feature comparison: Conduct a detailed feature-by-feature comparison of your product with competitors. Identify unique features that set your product apart and areas where you can enhance or differentiate.
• User experience (UX): Evaluate the user experience of competitors’ products. Analyze customer reviews, app ratings, and usability feedback to understand pain points and areas for improvement.
• Technological advancements: Investigate the technological capabilities of competitors. Are they integrating AI, IoT, or other cutting-edge technologies? Assess whether there are emerging technologies you can leverage.
• Product lifecycle management: Examine competitors’ product release cycles. Identify patterns in their product launches and assess whether there are opportunities for strategic timing or gap exploitation.

To help you get started, use this competitive analysis report template to identify the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of the product or service

How to present a competitor analysis

Presenting a competitor analysis effectively involves organizing and communicating information about your competitors in a clear and concise manner. Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to present a competitor analysis:

• Introduction: Start with a brief introduction to set the stage. Outline the purpose of the competitor analysis and its significance in the current market context.
• Competitor identification: Clearly list and identify the main competitors. Include both direct and indirect competitors. Briefly describe each competitor’s core business and market presence.
• Key metrics and performance: Present key metrics and performance indicators for each competitor. This may include market share, revenue, growth rate, and any other relevant quantitative data.
• SWOT analysis: Conduct a concise SWOT analysis for each competitor. Summarize their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Use a simple visual representation if possible.
• Market positioning: Discuss how each competitor is positioned in the market. This could include their target audience, unique selling propositions, and any specific market niches they occupy. Also, focus on finding keywords , as your competitor’s targeted keywords are the main source of information on their online market performance.
• Strategic moves: Highlight recent strategic moves made by your competitors. This could include product launches, partnerships, mergers, acquisitions, or changes in pricing strategy. Discuss how these moves impact the competitive landscape.
• Recommendations and implications: Based on the analysis, provide recommendations and implications for your company. Identify opportunities to capitalize on competitors’ weaknesses and outline potential threats that need to be addressed. Discuss any adjustments to your own strategy that may be necessary in response to the competitive landscape.

3 tips to improve your competitive analysis report design

How you design your competitive analysis report can have a significant impact on your business success. The right report design can inspire stakeholders to take action based on your findings, while a mediocre design may reflect poorly on your hard work.

Here are a few report design best practices to keep in mind when designing your competitive analysis report:

• Start with a competitive analysis report template
• Keep core design elements like colors and fonts consistent
• Use visuals to summarize important information and keep your audience engaged

1. Start with a competitor analysis template

The quickest way to lose the confidence of your stakeholders is to present a messy, amateur report design. Besides distracting from the content of the report, it might even put your credibility at risk.

Starting with a pre-designed competitor analysis template, like the one below, takes almost all of the design work out of the mix so you can focus on the content (while still impressing your stakeholders).

And if you’re a consultant competing for a project, a pre-designed template may just give you the edge you need to land that client.

Click on any of our templates; you’ll enter our online drag and drop report maker tool. No design know-how required.

2. Keep core design elements like colors and fonts consistent

If you take a look at the competitor analysis template below, you might notice that the designer has switched up the layout from page to page, but many of the other design elements are kept consistent.

That consistency helps the report design feel cohesive while making it easier for readers to quickly skim for key pieces of information.

Here are a few quick guidelines for keeping important design elements consistent:

• Use the same color scheme throughout your report (with one highlight color to draw attention to key takeaways and important numbers)
• Use the same font styles for your headers, subheaders, and body text (with no more than 2-3 font styles per report)
• Use the same style of visuals throughout your report (like flat icons or illustrated icons… but not both)

3. Use visuals to summarize important information and keep your audience engaged

The challenge with a competitive analysis report is that you collect heaps of background research, and you have to condense it into a brief report that your client will actually read.

And written summaries will only get you so far.

Visuals like charts and tables are a much better way to communicate a lot of research quickly and concisely, as seen in the market research summary below.

Even lists can be made more engaging and informative by spacing out list items and giving more emphasis to headers:

The more you can replace descriptive paragraphs and long lists with thoughtful visuals, the more your readers will thank you.

A competitive analysis will allow you to think up effective strategies to battle your competition and establish yourself in your target market.

And a report that communicates the findings of your competitive analysis will ensure stakeholders are on board and in the know.

Now that you know how to design a competitive analysis report, you’re ready to get started:

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FigJam Research your rivals’ winning strategies with a competitor analysis template

Whether you’re comparing price points, pain points, or user pathways, FigJam’s collaborative competitor analysis tools can help you learn from—and surpass—your competition.

Competitor analysis template

Work with your collaborators and product managers to study your competitors in an interactive, easy-to-master setting.

Crush the competition

Lay out your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses next to yours with a competitor analysis tool, then take what works and leave what doesn’t.

Gain 360º of insight: Update and improve your strategies for sales, marketing, products, and more.

Make sense of the market: Understand what’s out there through a competitive analysis report in order to stand out.

Seize opportunities: Use tools for competitor analysis to see what’s working—and what isn’t—and apply your learnings to your products and services.

FigJam Winning teams work as teams

If you want to outperform your competitive landscape, you have to work together. With a collaborative whiteboard from FigJam, you can chat with teammates via text or audio, express yourself with sticky notes and emotes, and encourage a little friendly competition when you need a break with in-browser games.

Come out on top

Don’t start from scratch—learn all you can from your competitors strengths first. Stand out in a crowded field with more helpful tools and templates from the FigJam Community.

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Sharpen your competitive edge with more templates from FigJam.

How do you do competitor analysis?

To begin your competitor analysis, you’ll need to draw a table with your company name placed next to your main competitor, or multiple competitors you’ve identified. When selecting your competition, seek out businesses with similar offerings, identities, and values. Three to four competitors is usually enough.

From there, you’ll research the competitors product(s) and services offered and slot them into your table. With all of the information listed out, you should be able to see where you have a competitive edge with your target audience and where you’re falling behind.

When using a tool for competitor analysis, your goal is to be as thorough and unbiased as possible. If your comparison shows that one competitor outshines you in most categories, that’s okay! You’re looking for ways to improve yourself, not boast about how amazing your business already is.

What to include in competitor analysis?

Most competitor analysis templates will include some or all of the following categories:

• Competitive advantage/disadvantage
• Similar capabilities
• Product quality
• Strengths and weaknesses
• Customer support
• Promotions and marketing
• User experience

Depending on your industry, you may also want to compare more specific features, such as “Delivery options,” “Employees,” or “Location.” Ask yourself, “What is competitor analysis helping me uncover?” and you’ll know which areas to examine.

Why are competitor analyses important?

As much as we like to think our businesses occupy a unique niche in the market, the reality is that most teams have direct competitors. Competitor analysis is valuable because it acknowledges those other businesses. It highlights the fact that there’s always something to learn—even from your “opponents.”

Filling out a template for competitor analysis also keeps you up to date on market trends, helping you stay ahead rather than fall behind. What’s more, an analysis can save you time and money in the long run. Rather than wasting resources on ideas you think might work, you can find out if your competition has tried anything similar and see how it went.

Wondering how to present competitor analysis once it’s done? With FigJam, your working document is presentable as-is. With out-of-the-box shapes and branded content available throughout, even your competitor analysis example will outshine the competition.

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Competitive Analysis Template

Get a leading edge over the competition by using the competitor analysis template. Identify the other companies you're competing with and how your product or service compares.

Trusted by 65M+ users and leading companies

About the Competitive Analysis Template

The competitive analysis template is where you will analyze and evaluate the competitive landscape for products, services, and companies. 

With a simple competitive analysis template, you will be able to answer these questions: 

Who are the other companies you’re competing with? 

How does your product or service compare? 

What makes you stand out? 

What are your competitors doing well that you can learn from? 

The benefits of the competitive analysis template

When you use a competitive landscape template, you will gain knowledge that can inform your product, marketing, sales strategies, and potentially your business strategy for the future.

By conducting a competitor analysis, you can learn about the market, what’s working and not working for your customers or potential customers, and where there are areas of opportunity for your company.

When you use Miro’s competitive analysis template, you will be able to see everything in one shared space, where you can easily make notes, add stickies, and invite your team to collaborate in real-time or asynchronously.  

How to use the competitive analysis template

There are many different competitive analysis examples, and you may want to perform one for each use case. For instance, you can do one for your digital marketing strategy, one for your website, and one for in-person events, to name just a few.  

You may want to make adjustments to the competitive analysis template depending on the specific use case, but here are a few common elements you will have in all of them:

Step 1: Start by filling out your company information. 

You may wish to include some high-level information about your company, such as your mission, values, value proposition, etc., as well as an overview of your main competitors. 

The competitors you list here will often be your direct competitors who offer a comparable product or service. 

Step 2: Describe your product/service information. 

This can include various price points of your main offerings and your channels to acquire new customers. If you know this information about your competitors, you can list it here, too.

Step 3: Gather information about the market. 

This may include your percentage of market share (and the respective percentages of the competitors you’ve listed), your competitors’ social media and web presence, and how your company is positioned in the market. 

Step 4: Perform a SWOT analysis .

Determine your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats in comparison with the competitors you’ve identified. 

Step 5: Define your competitive advantage.

With all the information you’ve gathered in the previous steps, you can now define your competitive advantage. 

What areas separate you from the competition, and how can you continue to make the most of them?

Can I customize the template to include additional competitors or specific criteria?

The template can be tailored to your specific needs by allowing you to add more competitors or criteria relevant to your industry or market. This customization feature enables you to create a highly valuable competitor analysis report that is relevant to your business needs.

How frequently should I update the competitive analysis using this template?

To stay competitive in your industry, it is crucial to continuously monitor your competition. The competitive analysis process should be ongoing, and your template should be updated regularly to ensure you have the most accurate and up-to-date information. At a minimum, you should aim to update the competitive landscape template once a year, but it's important to also update it when there are any significant changes in your industry or market. By doing so, you can identify emerging trends or threats and make informed decisions to stay ahead of the competition.

Is there a recommended format for presenting the information within the template?

There is no specific format for presenting the information within the template. However, presenting the information clearly and concisely is always good practice, using headings and subheadings wherever necessary. Consider using bullet points or numbered lists to make the information more readable. Ultimately, the format you choose will depend on the type of information you're presenting and the intended audience.

Get started with this template right now.

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What is competitive analysis? Template, examples, and how-to

In this comprehensive guide, we’ll define what a competitive analysis is, describe the benefits product teams stand to gain from conducting one, and walk through the steps of how to do a competitive analysis.

Through the tutorial, we’ll refer to examples to demonstrate how each step of a competitive analysis works in practice. We’ll also provide a list of customizable, free competitive analysis templates for you to use when completing these steps on your own.

Complete guide to competitive analysis

Picture this: you just came up with the next disruptive, game changing, AI-powered e-commerce marketplace. The objective is to connect buyers with sellers to fulfill their tailored and customized product needs.

You’re confident your product will take on Etsy and other big players in the market. You did some market and user research and have a good idea of your ideal customer and their (underserved) needs. Based on this data, you believe your marketplace can reach product-market fit quickly.

It’s now time for you to dust off your copy of Sun Tzu’s  T he Art of War . Why is that, you ask?

The Art of War is an ancient Chinese military textbook that, although dated somewhere between ~500–400 B.C., is one of the most influential management books out there to this day. It provides great strategic and tactical advice. Moreover, it provides guidance to help you assess yourself and your competition to gain an advantage.

Maintaining a competitive advantage is the goal. Even if you have the best product in the world and you know there is a market for it, if you don’t understand your competition, you‘re bound to fail. That’s why you need to perform a competitive analysis.

As the band Rage Against the Machine would say, know your enemy .

What is competitive analysis?

Competitive analysis (sometimes called a competitor analysis or competition analysis) is exactly what it sounds like: a structured approach to identifying and analyzing your competitors. More concretely, it’s an assessment of your competition’s offerings, strategy, strengths, and weaknesses.

A competitive analysis helps you answer questions such as:

• Which other companies are providing a solution similar to ours?
• What are the ideal customer’s minimum expectations?
• What are they currently not getting from our product with regard to those expectations?
• What barriers do competitors in the market fce?
• What should we avoid introducing in our product?
• What price are customers willing to pay for our product?
• What value do we need to provide to make our product stand out in the market?
• What trends are happening and how might they change the playing field?

When conducted thoroughly and regularly, a competitive analysis provides you with tons of information that can be used to improve and optimize your product. The end result is a holistic overview of your competitor landscape.

Why do a competitive analysis?

Competitive analysis is a fundamental product management instrument. It helps PMs learn what works and what doesn’t when trying to acquire market share, identify market trends, and locate gaps in their product offering.

Competitive analysis exists to help you avoid making mistakes and empower you to beat competitors to the punch in the pursuit of product growth and success.

Knowing your competition will bring you great rewards. Conducting a competitive analysis will help you more effectively:

• Create benchmarks
• Identify opportunities to better serve customers
• Make strategic decisions
• Determine your pricing strategy
• Identify market gaps
• Determine distribution and marketing strategies

Typically, the first time you create a competitor analysis is when doing your market research. This helps you get an idea of the product-market fit , which will evolve along your journey.

As a product manager, your role is not to analyze how well your competitors are able to showcase themselves. It is your job to make the product what the customer needs it to be. Understanding your competitor’s capabilities, pricing, and product positioning helps you in this.

Keep in mind that your competitors will likely showcase themselves to appear better than they probably are. You’ll be able to acquire tons of information about them, but you should take that information with a pinch of salt.

How to do a competitive analysis

There is no a single way to do a competitive analysis. In general, a competitive analysis is made up of three fundamental components:

• A shortlist of competitors
• A competitor deep dive
• A holistic overview and strategy

To demonstrate how to do a competitor analysis, we’ll refer back to the example outlined in the introduction.

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Remember, in our example, we’re looking to disrupt the market with an AI-powered e-commerce marketplace app that helps buyers and sellers connect to fulfill highly customized orders. Let’s call our innovative new product AGORA.

1. Create a shortlist of your competitors

There are three types of competitors:

• Direct — Competitors that offer the same product and target the same ideal customer; you are battling direct competitors heads-on
• Indirect — Competitors that either offer a somewhat similar product or target the same ideal customer
• Replacement — Competitors that offer a different product but target the same ideal customer

For a competitive analysis, you need to identify at least your direct and indirect competitors. So how do you do that? By looking inward and researching obsessively .

Look inward

To figure out who your direct and indirect competitors are, you need to look inward first to understand your product positioning: who are you servicing and what is the offering you are providing?

You can answer these questions by doing a self-assessment using the product canvas . Originally introduced by Roman Pichler, the product canvas has since tbeen tweaked and refined.

In its core, the product canvas covers:

• The name of the product
• Objectives and key metrics for success
• The ideal customer
• A high-level overview of what’s required to meet the customer’s needs
• Just enough product details about short-term goals

For our example product, the competitive analysis might look something like this:

Research obsessively

A simple Google search using keywords from your self-assessment can get you pretty far. Other resources that can help you identify your competitors include tools such as Crunchbase, Similarweb, Statista, etc.

As the old saying goes, the customer knows best. If you don’t have many customers yet, review sites such G2, Capterra, Trustpilot, and Google Reviews can help you.

If you do have customers, go ask them. Most customers try and evaluate several products before deciding on the right product to buy. Nothing is stopping you from asking them which other brands they considered and why they ultimately chose yours.

Once you have established who your competitors are, you might find yourself in a market with many direct and indirect competitors. If that is the case, select about seven of the most relevant competitors to include in your competitor deep dive.

2. Do a deep dive on each competitor

From your a shortlist of competitors, choose about seven of your most important and dig up all the relevant information on each one.

The research conducted during the previous step will help you capture the most relevant information about your competitors for the following categories:

Company profile

Ideal customer profile, product information, market approach, swot analysis.

Start by creating a company profile for each of your competitors to gain a better understanding of who they are. Include the following information:

• Name   —  What is the name of your competitor?
• Founding date  —  When was the company founded? How long has it been in the market?
• Company size  —  How many employees does the company have? Are they equipped to service the market and innovate?
• Market share  — The portion of the market controlled by the competitor’s product
• Revenue   —  The income the competitor generates from its product
• Reputation   —  What do customers think of your competitor’s product on a scale from one to five?

Let’s apply this framework to our AGORA competitive analysis example:

It’s important to understand who your competitors are serving and who is buying the product. This not only to reconfirm that the competitor is indeed a direct (or indirect) competitor, but also to understand what customers like and dislike about the competitor’s product.

The information you’re looking for includes:

• Ideal customer   —  Who is the competitor’s target customer and what defines them?
• Motivations   —  What does the customer enjoy about your competitor’s product?
• Frustrations   —  What does the customer hate about the product?
• Primary buyer  —  Who is the primary buyer of the product? Is it the as the ideal customer, or is it a different persona?

Let’s see what this would look like following our AGORA example. Below is an example ideal customer profile for Etsy. First, for the buyer:

And the ideal customer profile for Etsy sellers:

Not to be captain obvious, but you want to capture more details about the product your competitor is offering and its positioning.

The information we’re looking for at this step includes:

• The product   —  What is the tagline your competitor is using to market its product?
• Positioning   —  Based on the quality and price of the product, place the product into a one of several buckets. For example, Economy (low quality, low price), Skimming (low quality, high price), Penetration (high quality, low price), and Premium (high quality, high price)
• Product features   —  What are the key features being marketed and promoted?

Referring to our example AGORA app, the product information associated with Etsy on a competitor analysis might look as follows:

Next, seek to understand how your competitors are bringing the product to market .

List the following information:

• Pricing — What does the product costs? If there is a tiered pricing model, what does it look like?
• Distribution channels — Through which channels is your competitor selling the product?
• Marketing channels — Through which channels is the product being promoted?

In our AGORA competitor analysis example, this section would look something like:

With all the information you’ve collected, you’ll find yourself in a good place to do a SWOT analysis . This is one of the most common and popular competitive analysis frameworks.

SWOT stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats:

• Strengths  —  What is going well for the competitor?
• Weaknesses   —  What is not going well? What obvious flaws are there?
• Opportunities   —  What could give your competitor an advantage?
• Threats  —  What might harm your competitor’s product?

For AGORA, our example competitive analysis might include a SWOT analysis that looks like this:

3. Develop a holistic overview and strategy

Now that you have a better view of your competitors, it’s time to determine how you want to approach them in the market: do you want to avoid your competitors or attack them?

Two extremely useful tools that can help you make this assessment are the competitive matrix and battle cards .

Competitive matrix

One way to operationalize the data you gathered during your competitive analysis is to plot out a four-quadrant competitive matrix.

Define key factors for the and x and y axes and plot yourself and your competition accordingly to see how you stack up. This approach is also known as perceptual mapping.

A competitive matrix for our example would look like this:

Battle cards

You can use the four-quadrant competitive matrix and competitor insights to create battle cards for each of your competitors.

Battle cards are a visual aid that help you compare your product against those of your competitors at a glance. It’s a quick and easy way to see how you stack up in key areas of performance and value. It’s also a neat way to help sales in their conversations with customers.

Here’s what you should include on each battle card:

• Company name — Name of your competitor
• Powers  —  What makes this competitor stand out from the rest?
• How we win   —  What should we do to gain a competitive advantage over this competitor?
• Why we lose   —  What is this competitor better at? What should we avoid so we don’t lose market share?
• Pricing   —  How much of a threat is the competitor’s product to our market share (low, medium, or high)?
• Strategy   — Should we attack or avoid this competitor?

A battle card for our example competitive analysis might look as follows:

Alternative competitive analysis frameworks

If you‘ve followed the framework described above, you should have solid insight into your competitors, your product opportunities, and the best strategy to attack or avoid your competitors in the market.

If you want to dig deeper, you can follow up your competitive analysis by producing a Five Forces analysis and/or customer journey map .

The Five Forces model

You still might want to consider gaining more insights into the competitive structure of the market you are in — in other words, gain a better understanding of how easy it is to either enter or be replaced by a competitor in the market.

A great framework to use for this type of competitor analysis is the Five Forces model , originally conceived by Michael Porter.

According to the Five Forces model, you can assess the market you are in by looking at:

• Intensity of competitive rivalry
• Negotiation power of new buyers
• Negotiation power of suppliers
• Threat of new entrants
• Threat of substitutes

Customer journey map

Instead of zooming out, you can also zoom in on the journey ideal customers make when interacting with the product itself, the distribution, or marketing channels.

On a journey map, your touchpoints are the customer, the activity performed, how the customer experiences the activities, and their expectations.

Free competitive analysis templates

A competitive analysis is a continuously updated document packed with information about your most important competitors to help you determine how to approach them in your target market.

The competitive analysis model described in this article consists of three steps that are designed to produce the insights you need to rule the market once and for all.

Below are free, customizable competitive analysis templates for each step of the process described in this article:

• Competitive analysis template
• Product canvas template
• Competitive matrix template
• Battle card template
• Customer journey map template

NOTE : To use and customize the competitive analysis templates above, after opening, select File > Make a copy from the main menu.

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Template Highlights

• Download this competitive analysis template as an Excel spreadsheet, a Word document, or a PDF.
• Complete the top row with the names of your top competitors.
• Now, complete the second column by adding information about your company. Be honest about your weaknesses!
• Complete the column for each of your competitors, finding the information online, by calling a colleague, or through your personal experience in the market.
• By comparing across the columns, you can get a better sense of how your company compares to your competition.

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Competitive analysis template.

COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS

OUR COMPANY

COMPETING COMPANY 1

COMPETING COMPANY 2

COMPETING COMPANY 3

COMPETING COMPANY 4

COMPANY NAME

TARGET CUSTOMER

BRAND PERSONALITY

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10 Free Competitive Analysis Templates in Excel and ClickUp

Vivian Tejeda

ClickUp Contributor

February 13, 2024

The world moves fast. And chances are, so does your competition. 

What’s a team that wants to stay competitive to do? That’s right. You probably know what I’m about to say.

One of the best ways to know what your next best step should be is to work through a competitive analysis. This ensures that you are taking a holistic view of your market and the competitors in it.

To help you with this, check out the list of 10 free competitive analysis templates for Excel and ClickUp. These templates make it simple to track, compare, and learn from your competitors , giving you the edge you need to be the best. 🥇

But first, of course, let’s start with a clear definition.

What makes a good competitive analysis template?

1. clickup competitive analysis template, 2. clickup competitive analysis pricing template, 3. clickup competitive tracking template, 4. clickup competitive market analysis template, 5. clickup seo competitor analysis template, 6. clickup comparison matrix template, 7. clickup product features matrix template, 8. clickup comparative market template, 9. template.net competitive analysis template excel, 10. slideteam powerpoint competitive analysis template, benefits of using a detailed competitive analysis template.

What is a Competitive Analysis Template?

A competitive analysis template is a ready-to-use document, spreadsheet, slide deck, or task list that’s designed to help you gather and analyze information about your competitors.

By looking at the different aspects of another business—like products, funding, market share, pricing, and marketing strategies—a competitive analysis template lets you record insightful information. These templates provide board members, leadership teams, or individual contributors with a sortable and easy-to-digest report on your competitors.

This valuable knowledge then helps you make better decisions and plan your own business strategies around your competition.

A good competitive analysis template is clear, easy to use, and comprehensive. It should include relevant categories and fields that allow you to collect and compare information and gather the pros and cons of your competitors. 

A useful template should be adaptable to your specific industry and your target audience. It’s always a plus when your competitive analysis is visually appealing , though that’s not necessarily a requirement. 

You do want to make sure your analysis is organized and that’s where a template saves you tons of time. Ultimately, a high-quality competitive analysis template lets you gain valuable insights into your competition and supports informed decision-making for your business’s growth and success.

10 Free Competitive Analysis Templates

Competitive analysis is valuable for businesses looking to get ahead in their industry and learn about their direct competitors. By using these free Excel and ClickUp templates, you’ll be on your way to understanding your competition and making smarter decisions that boost your business.

Here’s a list of some of our best competitive analysis templates to start using today.

Try out ClickUp’s Competitive Analysis Whiteboard Template ! The elements can be freely added, modified, and positioned in this interactive view. Based on your set metric, each quadrant depicts how each element performs. It even includes a legend for each quadrant. 

Use this comprehensive template to stay informed about their competitors’ strengths, weaknesses, and strategies. It’s also possible to identify areas where teams excel and areas for improvement by tracking key metrics, such as market share and product offerings. 

For example, the marketing team could use this template to compare social media engagement between competitors.

With two statuses and one view, this analysis template helps you investigate your main competitors to learn more about their goods, sales, and marketing strategies as a way to gain market share. 

Use ClickUp’s Competitive Analysis Pricing Template to make data-driven decisions about your own pricing models, ensuring you remain competitive while maximizing profit. A retail business, for example, could monitor competitors’ discounts and promotions to optimize its own pricing strategy.

Track your competitor’s products! 

With ClickUp’s Competitive Tracking Template , teams monitor competitors’ activities and progress over time. By staying up-to-date on competitors’ product launches, marketing campaigns, and customer feedback, adapting their strategies to stay ahead becomes that much easier. 

Once you create it as a shared doc, the whole team is able to stay informed on what products are currently out there. For example, a software development team might track rival software updates to ensure their product is able to compete.

How well does your product measure up in the market? Try a competitor analysis complete with matrices that help you visualize where you stand in the market.

The Competitive Market Analysis Template is designed to help teams spot trends and use the information to come up with innovative products or services. A startup, for example, might use this template to identify an underserved customer segment and create a targeted offering. It’s also important to detail your direct and indirect competitors.

Organically ranking in search engine results pages is one of the most cost-effective ways to gather leads, build brand awareness, and grow your market share! 

Try ClickUp’s SEO Competitor Analysis Template out to improve your own SEO efforts and drive more organic traffic to your product website. A content marketing team could use this template to identify high-performing keywords and create engaging SEO-friendly content—giving you a competitive advantage.

This way, you ensure your keyword strategy is organized and you keep track of all of your content creation efforts in one place for all your SWOT analysis .

ClickUp’s Comparison Matrix Template enables teams to compare multiple competitors across various factors in a visually appealing matrix format for detailed SWOT analysis.

Maybe you need to compare multiple competitors across a handful of factors in a way that’s visually appealing and easy to digest. If so, the ClickUp Comparison Matrix is the perfect template for you. 

Make informed strategic decisions by identifying competitor weaknesses. For example, a sales team might use this template to identify areas where their product outshines the competition , allowing them to emphasize those features during sales pitches.

Check out these product comparison templates !

This Product Features Matrix Template by ClickUp helps teams compare their products or services with those of their competitors. By highlighting key features, benefits, and pricing, teams can better understand their position in the market and make necessary adjustments. 

A software company, for example, could use this template to compare the features and functionality of competing applications. This gives you a competitive advantage across your direct and indirect competitors so you better identify market trends.

If you’re looking for more examples, check out our list of the best Matrix templates !

ClickUp’s Comparative Market Analysis Template is designed to compare the performance of various products, services, or strategies against predetermined criteria for the ultimate competitor analysis.

Use this information to identify your competitive advantage and the most effective approaches and make data-driven decisions. A product development team could use this template to evaluate and compare prototype designs before selecting the final version.

Additionally, a Comparative Market Analysis (CMA) template is helpful for tasks like determining a house’s value using recently sold, comparable properties.

This Excel-based template from Template.net offers a familiar and easily customizable format for teams looking to analyze their competition. By tracking competitors’ data in Excel, teams use built-in features like charts and pivot tables to visualize and analyze their findings. 

A finance team might use this template to compare key financial metrics of competitors, such as revenue growth or profit margins. But that’s only one example— keep in mind that Excel is flexible . 

This PowerPoint competitive analysis template helps teams present their target market findings in a visually appealing and digestible format. 

By transforming raw data into engaging presentations, teams communicate their insights with much more clarity. A management team, for example, could use this template to showcase the competitive landscape during a strategic planning meeting without spending hours in front of a computer creating a presentation from scratch.

Related: Balanced Scorecard Templates

What’s so great about running a competitive analysis as part of your greater business strategy? 

You learn a lot more about your market

Competitor analysis helps teams understand their industry and target market better. This knowledge equips them with the information they need to come up with a strong plan of action. 

For example—through a competitive analysis—a software company might identify trends in customer preferences, helping them align their product with the demands of the market. 🎯

It uncovers better opportunities for your business

By examining competitors’ strengths and weaknesses, teams uncover potential opportunities for growth and expansion . This process may reveal gaps in competitors’ offerings , which means you’ve just uncovered a chance to introduce a unique solution. 

For instance, a fitness app developer could discover that rivals lack comprehensive nutrition tracking, thus deciding to incorporate this feature into their app and highlight it as a feature that sets them apart. 

It can drive the quality of your products or business strategies

Teams analyzing competitors’ products and services refine their own offerings and set themselves apart. Why is this? Studying competitors enables them to identify best practices and innovative features. From there, it’s just a question of adding them to your own products. 

 A clothing retailer, for example, might observe that a competitor offers personalized style recommendations through a style quiz and decides to implement a similar experience to enhance their customers’ experience. 

Knowing your competition’s strategies and tactics gives you an edge, no doubt. Gaining insights from competitive landscape templates allows teams to develop better strategies across multiple aspects of their business. 

By understanding the competitive landscape, teams make more informed decisions on marketing, product development, pricing, and customer engagement. Strategies around customer engagement, sales and distribution, and even marketing and advertising are all improvable with a thorough competitive analysis.

You create more informed goals and benchmarks

With a competitive analysis template in tow, teams have an easier time benchmarking their performance against current market standards. The comparative nature of a competitive analysis allows teams to set realistic goals and measure progress against those goals. 

As an example, a digital marketing agency could evaluate its competitors’ client retention rates and set targets to surpass them, ultimately driving business growth. 📈

Where is your brand positioning in relation to your competitors and your overall target audience? It’s a critical question that a competitive analysis helps you answer clearly. By understanding the unique selling points of competing brands, teams are able to emphasize their own strengths and develop a compelling brand identity. 

For example, an eco-friendly cosmetic company could highlight its sustainable practices and natural ingredients to differentiate itself from rivals after finding out that no one else in the cosmetic industry is using this angle. 

Anticipate Your Competitor’s Moves

Analyzing competitors helps teams anticipate their moves and stay ahead of the game. The thing about competitive analysis is that it helps teams uncover patterns and potential opportunities. 

This helps teams prepare for potential challenges that may lie ahead, or it may inform how they’ll run their marketing campaigns for Q4. The main benefit of a competitive analysis lies in the seemingly endless possibilities in terms of what you can do with the data you uncover. 

Let’s say you’re a marketing team at a beverage company. You notice a trend toward low-sugar alternatives and develop new product lines just in time for the holiday season, staying ahead of the competition. 

Identify potential partnerships and collaborations

Who doesn’t love mutually beneficial relationships? Competitor analysis templates may reveal opportunities for collaboration with other companies in your industry. 

A competitive analysis framework uncovers competitor strengths that complement your own. For instance, a tech startup specializing in AI-driven analytics could partner with a larger company offering complementary services like B2B data delivery, ultimately expanding its reach and improving its offerings. 🤝

Enhance The Customer Experience

By understanding the strengths and weaknesses of competitors, teams first have to identify areas of improvement to then be able to enhance the customer experience.  

For example, a product team for a subscription box service might learn that competitors have more efficient shipping processes, prompting them to streamline their own logistics to ensure timely deliveries and satisfied customers. 

Track Competitors with Competitive Analysis Templates

Competitive analysis is a crucial tool for any business looking to stay ahead of the game. By using one of these 10 templates, you get major insights into your competition and the market, allowing you to make more informed decisions about your own products and services.

There’s nothing more valuable than information about your direct competitors, so why not get tracking to get that competitive advantage?

Start identifying areas for improvement and growth, capitalize on new opportunities, and ultimately achieve greater success. So if you haven’t already, consider incorporating these competitive analysis templates into your business strategy—your bottom line will thank you.

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10 Competitive Analysis Templates

Free Resource

Track and analyze your competitors with these ten free planning templates.

Templates in this Offer Include:

• Two-Feature Competitive Landscape Chart
• Competitor Strategic Overview
• Content Marketing Analysis Template
• You vs. Competitor Side-By-Side
• Competitor Battle Card
• Multiple Competitor Feature Comparison
• Multiple Competitors Scoring Card
• SWOT Analysis Template
• Categorical Feature Comparison Template
• Review Tracker

Competitive Analysis is Key

To capture a sizable share of your market, it's necessary to know where you stand against your competitors. That's why competitive analysis is a key component of your organizational growth strategy. 

Whether you're analyzing a competitor's social media engagement, customer reviews, product features, or sales strategy – it's imperative to centralize your analysis in a single location.

That's why we've create ten competitive analysis templates. Download these templates to conduct a thorough analysis on one or many of the competitors in your landscape. 

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How To Conduct a Competitive Analysis as a UX Designer

Want to conduct an awesome competitive ux analysis download this  free template and follow our step-by-step guide below..

UX designers don’t design new user experiences in a vacuum. No matter how unique or special a product is, it will inevitably compete with something already on the market. That is why it’s valuable to conduct a competitive UX analysis at the start of a new project.

Through the analysis you will evaluate the user experiences of your client’s competitors from your expert perspective as a UX designer. This will help orient you, your client and other stakeholders to the competitive landscape and give you an idea of what user experiences are standard for the market you’re designing for.

A competitive UX analysis will also help you think creatively about where you might be able to innovate in your UX design, as well as features you might want to avoid.

When initially dreaming about the possibilities for their new project, many clients will take inspiration from products that already exist.

If you conduct a competitive UX analysis, it will give you evidence that will enable you and your client to get on the same page about what the market really looks like from a user experience perspective and what that means for your project.

In this article, we’ll delve into the details of competitive UX analysis with the following:

• Why is a competitive UX analysis useful?
• The benefits and limitations of a competitive UX analysis
• A guide to conducting a competitive UX analysis (Plus a free template)
• Key takeaways

We’ve also included a free, downloadable template—you’ll find it in section three.

1. Why is a competitive UX analysis useful?

When you start a new project as a UX designer, there are many research methods you can use to determine who your users are and decide what the best user experience for them will be. On the other hand, competitive UX analysis gives you the opportunity to look outside your project and take in the market as a whole.

Writing for UX Planet, UX consultant Matt Isherwood identifies four reasons to conduct a competitive UX analysis:

To determine standard practices in the market

Depending on the product you’re designing, users likely already have expectations for the user experience and features they might encounter.

For example, if you’re designing a website for a car manufacturer, users will expect that when they select a vehicle they will be able to see photos of both the interior and exterior in every color in which it’s available.

On the other hand, if you’re designing a weather app, users will expect to be able to see the current temperature in their location at the top of the screen along with forecast information below it.

To identify noteworthy user experiences

There will often be one or two competitors in your analysis that offer a particularly good user experience. This might be because they’ve figured out an innovative solution to a problem or they’re using a novel feature that enhances what users are able to do.

But this could also be something like an especially well-placed navigation element or smart use of nomenclature. No matter what it is, these noteworthy user experiences are worth learning from and considering for adaptation and inclusion in your project.

To identify features to avoid

While there will always be competitors doing an especially good job, there will also be competitors at the opposite end of the spectrum.

These competitors offer a poor user experience for any number of reasons, including confusing navigation, difficult to understand user interactions or outdated functionality. These examples will teach you what not to do for your project—such as these ten classic UX design fails .

To notice unique features

As you evaluate various competitors, you may find you notice unique features you may never have considered. For example, if you’re creating a grocery delivery app, perhaps while reviewing competitors you notice one has a feature that allows you to select the level of ripeness of bananas by using a series of photos that show bananas with peels ranging in color from green to brown.

While it may not ultimately apply to your project, it’s worth taking note of these unique features so you can understand where and how competitors are innovating.

2. The benefits and limitations of a competitive UX analysis

A competitive UX analysis will help you orient yourself to the competition and understand the market. After all, users are creatures of habit, and a user who has spent time with your competitors will come to your product with certain expectations based on those previous experiences. As a result, before you design something completely new and unique, you need to understand the standards for a product’s user experience, an evaluation that will greatly benefit the design process .

On the other hand, there are some limitations to a competitive UX analysis that you should keep in mind. First, there may be the temptation to copy the competition. This is not the purpose of competitive UX analysis, however. The purpose is to inform the design process by learning from what your competitors are doing. You should always review several competitors, exploring the strengths and weaknesses of all of them. This will enable you to take inspiration from several sources to create something tailor-made for your product.

Furthermore, a competitive UX analysis can’t tell you where innovation is needed, it can only tell you what already exists. This is why a competitive UX analysis is only one of several research methods you should employ when tackling a UX project.

3. How to do a competitive UX analysis (step by step)

Before we jump in: If you’re conducting your first competitive UX analysis, you may find our downloadable competitive analysis template useful.

1. Identify your objectives

The first thing you need to do when conducting a competitive UX analysis is determine what your objectives are. Make sure you know exactly what you want to learn from this analysis. When you start evaluating competitors you can quickly become overwhelmed by everything involved in a given app, website, or other product. Laying out your objectives beforehand will prevent this from happening.

For example, if you’re creating a new app where users can stream movies and TV shows, one of your objectives might be to understand how competitors draw users’ attention to new entertainment choices.

2. Identify your competitors

Before you get started, you have to settle on the competitors you’ll include in your analysis. One of the first things you should do is ask your client and other stakeholders who they feel are their three or four top competitors. These competitors should automatically be included in your analysis. You should also come up with your own suggestions, especially focusing on competitors that may be less obvious.

Make sure your analysis includes both direct competitors—those that are operating in exactly the same market space—and indirect competitors—those that draw a different audience, like a social network geared exclusively towards young children if you’re working on a social network for adults, or include a similar feature, like a shopping cart tool for a different product than the kind you’re working on.

Ideally you’ll want to include five to ten competitors, but this may be constrained by time or budget issues.

3. Screenshot, take notes, repeat

Now that you know your objectives and have your list of competitors, you’ll visit each competitors’ product and navigate the relevant parts like any user would. As you go, take screenshots and record notes about everything you observe.

The easiest way to do this is to create a folder for all of the screenshots and a spreadsheet for your notes.

The spreadsheet should list all the competitors as well as all the parts of the product you’re evaluating so you’re sure to capture notes for everything you need from every competitor.

Alternatively, you can use an awesome tool like Airtable , a tool that allows you to gather screebshots, notes, links and more, all in one place and ready for you as you start to design your product (or as you conduct a redesign )

4. Compile your findings into a presentation

After you’ve finished going through the competitors, use your screenshots and notes to put together a presentation. You won’t mention every single thing you observed in the presentation, but you should mention the most relevant and noteworthy things.

Most importantly, at the end of the presentation, you should be sure to present a list of recommendations in which you boil down what you learned and explain how it will be put into practice in your project’s UX design.

4. Key takeaways

You should now have a basic understanding of why you should conduct a competitive UX analysis and the basic steps you would take to do so. To sum up:

• When you begin a new UX project, a competitive analysis is a research method that can help you and your client understand what the market for their product currently looks like.
• A competitive UX analysis will help you understand what user experience standards exist in the market sector, and therefore, what users’ expectations of a product in this space might be. The analysis will also give you information about competitors’ strengths and weaknesses as well as unique features they might be using.
• A competitive analysis has the benefit of informing the design process, but it can only show you what already exists in the market, not where innovation may be needed.
• Make sure you have a clear understanding of your objectives for your competitive UX analysis.
•  A competitive UX analysis should include 5-10 competitors and include both direct and indirect examples.
• Ask your client or other stakeholders for recommendations of competitors to include in the analysis, but also come up with your own suggestions.
• For each competitor, take screenshots and notes as you navigate through the parts of the product you’re evaluating.
• Compile your screenshots and notes into a presentation where you highlight the most important information you learned.
• Make sure you include a list of recommendations at the end of your presentation that explain how your analysis will impact your project’s UX design.

Now that you know how to conduct a competitive UX analysis, you might want to learn more. If so, you’ll find the following articles useful:

• Usability testing: Everything you need to know
• What is a UX audit and why should you conduct one?
• How to be a better UX designer in 2020

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How to create a competitive analysis (with examples)

Competitive analysis involves identifying your direct and indirect competitors using research to reveal their strengths and weaknesses in relation to your own. In this guide, we’ll outline how to do a competitive analysis and explain how you can use this marketing strategy to improve your business.

Whether you’re running a business or playing in a football game, understanding your competition is crucial for success. While you may not be scoring touchdowns in the office, your goal is to score business deals with clients or win customers with your products. The method of preparation for athletes and business owners is similar—once you understand your strengths and weaknesses versus your competitors’, you can level up. 

What is a competitive analysis?

Competitive analysis involves identifying your direct and indirect competitors using research to reveal their strengths and weaknesses in relation to your own. 

Direct competitors market the same product to the same audience as you, while indirect competitors market the same product to a different audience. After identifying your competitors, you can use the information you gather to see where you stand in the market landscape. 

What to include in a competitive analysis

The purpose of this type of analysis is to get a competitive advantage in the market and improve your business strategy. Without a competitive analysis, it’s difficult to know what others are doing to win clients or customers in your target market. A competitive analysis report may include:

A description of your company’s target market

Details about your product or service versus the competitors’

Current and projected market share, sales, and revenues

Pricing comparison

Marketing and social media strategy analysis

Differences in customer ratings

You’ll compare each detail of your product or service versus the competition to assess strategy efficacy. By comparing success metrics across companies, you can make data-driven decisions.

How to do a competitive analysis

Follow these five steps to create your competitive analysis report and get a broad view of where you fit in the market. This process can help you analyze a handful of competitors at one time and better approach your target customers.

1. Create a competitor overview

In step one, select between five and 10 competitors to compare against your company. The competitors you choose should have similar product or service offerings and a similar business model to you. You should also choose a mix of both direct and indirect competitors so you can see how new markets might affect your company. Choosing both startup and seasoned competitors will further diversify your analysis.

Tip: To find competitors in your industry, use Google or Amazon to search for your product or service. The top results that emerge are likely your competitors. If you’re a startup or you serve a niche market, you may need to dive deeper into the rankings to find your direct competitors.

2. Conduct market research

Once you know the competitors you want to analyze, you’ll begin in-depth market research. This will be a mixture of primary and secondary research. Primary research comes directly from customers or the product itself, while secondary research is information that’s already compiled. Then, keep track of the data you collect in a user research template .

Primary market research may include: 

Purchasing competitors’ products or services

Interviewing customers

Conducting online surveys of customers 

Holding in-person focus groups

Secondary market research may include:

Examining competitors’ websites

Assessing the current economic situation

Identifying technological developments 

Reading company records

Tip: Search engine analysis tools like Ahrefs and SEMrush can help you examine competitors’ websites and obtain crucial SEO information such as the keywords they’re targeting, the number of backlinks they have, and the overall health of their website. 

3. Compare product features

The next step in your analysis involves a comparison of your product to your competitors’ products. This comparison should break down the products feature by feature. While every product has its own unique features, most products will likely include:

Service offered

Age of audience served

Number of features

Style and design

Ease of use

Type and number of warranties

Customer support offered

Product quality

Tip: If your features table gets too long, abbreviate this step by listing the features you believe are of most importance to your analysis. Important features may include cost, product benefits, and ease of use.

4. Compare product marketing

The next step in your analysis will look similar to the one before, except you’ll compare the marketing efforts of your competitors instead of the product features. Unlike the product features matrix you created, you’ll need to go deeper to unveil each company’s marketing plan . 

Areas you’ll want to analyze include:

Social media

Website copy

Press releases

Product copy

As you analyze the above, ask questions to dig deeper into each company’s marketing strategies. The questions you should ask will vary by industry, but may include:

What story are they trying to tell?

What value do they bring to their customers?

What’s their company mission?

What’s their brand voice?

Tip: You can identify your competitors’ target demographic in this step by referencing their customer base, either from their website or from testimonials. This information can help you build customer personas. When you can picture who your competitor actively targets, you can better understand their marketing tactics. 

5. Use a SWOT analysis

Competitive intelligence will make up a significant part of your competitor analysis framework, but once you’ve gathered your information, you can turn the focus back to your company. A SWOT analysis helps you identify your company’s strengths and weaknesses. It also helps turn weaknesses into opportunities and assess threats you face based on your competition.

During a SWOT analysis, ask yourself:

What do we do well?

What could we improve?

Are there market gaps in our services?

What new market trends are on the horizon?

Tip: Your research from the previous steps in the competitive analysis will help you answer these questions and fill in your SWOT analysis. You can visually present your findings in a SWOT matrix, which is a four-box chart divided by category.

6. Identify your place in the market landscape

The last step in your competitive analysis is to understand where you stand in the market landscape. To do this, you’ll create a graph with an X and Y axis. The two axes should represent the most important factors for being competitive in your market. 

For example, the X-axis may represent customer satisfaction, while the Y-axis may represent presence in the market. You’ll then plot each competitor on the graph according to their (x,y) coordinates. You’ll also plot your company on this chart, which will give you an idea of where you stand in relation to your competitors. 

This graph is included for informational purposes and does not represent Asana’s market landscape or any specific industry’s market landscape. 

Tip: In this example, you’ll see three companies that have a greater market presence and greater customer satisfaction than yours, while two companies have a similar market presence but higher customer satisfaction. This data should jumpstart the problem-solving process because you now know which competitors are the biggest threats and you can see where you fall short. 

Competitive analysis example

Imagine you work at a marketing startup that provides SEO for dentists, which is a niche industry and only has a few competitors. You decide to conduct a market analysis for your business. To do so, you would:

Step 1: Use Google to compile a list of your competitors. 

Steps 2, 3, and 4: Use your competitors’ websites, as well as SEO analysis tools like Ahrefs, to deep-dive into the service offerings and marketing strategies of each company. 

Step 5: Focusing back on your own company, you conduct a SWOT analysis to assess your own strategic goals and get a visual of your strengths and weaknesses. 

Step 6: Finally, you create a graph of the market landscape and conclude that there are two companies beating your company in customer satisfaction and market presence. 

After compiling this information into a table like the one below, you consider a unique strategy. To beat out your competitors, you can use localization. Instead of marketing to dentists nationwide like your competitors are doing, you decide to focus your marketing strategy on one region, state, or city. Once you’ve become the known SEO company for dentists in that city, you’ll branch out. 

You won’t know what conclusions you can draw from your competitive analysis until you do the work and see the results. Whether you decide on a new pricing strategy, a way to level up your marketing, or a revamp of your product, understanding your competition can provide significant insight.

Drawbacks of competitive analysis

There are some drawbacks to competitive analysis you should consider before moving forward with your report. While these drawbacks are minor, understanding them can make you an even better manager or business owner. 

Don’t forget to take action

You don’t just want to gather the information from your competitive analysis—you also want to take action on that information. The data itself will only show you where you fit into the market landscape. The key to competitive analysis is using it to problem solve and improve your company’s strategic plan .

Be wary of confirmation bias

Confirmation bias means interpreting information based on the beliefs you already hold. This is bad because it can cause you to hold on to false beliefs. To avoid bias, you should rely on all the data available to back up your decisions. In the example above, the business owner may believe they’re the best in the SEO dental market at social media. Because of this belief, when they do market research for social media, they may only collect enough information to confirm their own bias—even if their competitors are statistically better at social media. However, if they were to rely on all the data available, they could eliminate this bias.

Update your analysis regularly

A competitive analysis report represents a snapshot of the market landscape as it currently stands. This report can help you gain enough information to make changes to your company, but you shouldn’t refer to the document again unless you update the information regularly. Market trends are always changing, and although it’s tedious to update your report, doing so will ensure you get accurate insight into your competitors at all times. 

Boost your marketing strategy with competitive analysis

Learning your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses will make you a better marketer. If you don’t know the competition you’re up against, you can’t beat them. Using competitive analysis can boost your marketing strategy and allow you to capture your target audience faster.

Competitive analysis must lead to action, which means following up on your findings with clear business goals and a strong business plan. Once you do your competitive analysis, you can use the templates below to put your plan into action.

Related resources

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How to track utilization rate and drive team profitability

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Smooth product launches are simpler than you think

Social Media Competitor Analysis: Template + Guide for 2024

Social media competitor analysis will help you identify gaps in your strategy and stay one step ahead of everyone else.

Table of Contents

How do you stay ahead of the competition and win on social media? Start with a social media competitive analysis.

It will tell you how you stack up against others in your industry, and surface new opportunities as well as potential threats .

This guide will teach you how to analyze — and learn from — competitor performance. We’ll also list the best social media competitive analysis tools and give you a free template to help you get started.

More of a visual learner? Check out our video to find out how to perform a competitive analysis on social media in just three steps:

What is a social media competitor analysis?

A social media competitor analysis is an analysis  of your  competition on social media to find out what their strengths and weaknesses are, and how those strengths and weaknesses compare to your own.

It’s a process of benchmarking your own results against the heavy-hitters in your industry, so you can identify opportunities for growth as well as strategies that aren’t performing as well as they should.

A social media competitive analysis, specifically, will help you:

• Identify who your competitors are on social media
• Know which social media platforms they’re on
• Know how they’re using those platforms
• Understand how well their social and content strategies are working
• Benchmark your social results against the competition
• Identify social threats to your business
• Find gaps in your own social presence

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The benefits of running a competitor analysis on social media

Learning about your competitors is not the only reason to do a competitor analysis on social media. It will also give you deeper insights into your own business and your audience (which likely overlaps with your competitors’ audiences).

Here are some surprising insights a social media competitive analysis can give you:

• Performance benchmarks for your own business, such as average followers, engagement rates, and share of voice
• Ideas for the best times to post on social media (since your audience is likely online at a similar time)
• An understanding of the potential customer pain points
• New (and better) ideas for content that may resonate with your audience (or that, conversely, does NOT resonate with your audience, and which you might want to avoid)
• An understanding of how to communicate with your audience on certain platforms (i.e., casually or formally)
• Ideas for ways to differentiate your brand

Ultimately, a social media competitive analysis will give you as much as you put into it. You may choose to do a one-off social media competitor report or hire someone on your team whose sole job it would be to keep track of your competitors. Most businesses do something in-between: a quarterly or monthly competitor analysis report.

Whatever level of analysis you choose, the insights will be invaluable.

How to do a social media competitor analysis in 4 steps

Before you start, download this free social media competitor analysis template to keep track of your efforts.

Bonus: Get a free, customizable competitive analysis template to easily size up the competition and identify opportunities for your brand to pull ahead.

Step 1. Find your competitors

Identify your competitive keywords.

You probably already know some of the keywords your business is trying to rank for in the search engines. For example, if you work for a Manhattan-based hotel, you’re likely focused on keywords such as “New York hotels,” and “best places to stay in Manhattan.”

But if your property is a boutique hotel with evening wine tastings and local art, you’re not necessarily competing directly with the Holiday Inn. Having a thorough understanding of keywords relevant to your product offering will help you develop a clear picture of who you’re really competing against online.

The  Google Adwords Keyword Planner  is a great place to identify the keywords most relevant to your brand. Even if you don’t advertise with Google Adwords, this tool is free to use.

To start, use the tool to analyze your website. You’ll get a list of relevant keywords, along with the average monthly searches and estimated level of competition.

Or, you can enter your known target keywords into the tool. Again, you’ll get a list of related keywords with data on search volume and competition. Use these related keywords to help you narrow your definition of your competitors, so you can make sure you’re analyzing businesses that are truly competing with your own.

Check who’s ranking for those keywords in Google

Choose the top five or 10 keywords that have the most relevance to your business, and plug them into Google. You’ll soon get a sense of who your top competition is online.

Pay special attention to the brands in your industry that are paying for Google ads to get their names above the organic search results, as they’re putting their money where their marketing ambitions are. Even if they don’t have great organic search rankings (yet), it’s worth checking out how they’re performing on social media.

Click through to the websites of any brands that appear to be potential competitors. Most businesses link to their social channels in the header or the footer of their website. Enter the links to their social profiles in your competitive analysis spreadsheet.

Check who appears in social searches for those keywords

The brands that rank for your keywords in Google are not necessarily the same ones that rank well within the social networks themselves. Since this is a social media competitive analysis, you need to see who comes up tops in social search results, too.

For example, head to Instagram and enter your keyword in the search box. Then, browse the “For you” feed and take note of the brands that show up there.

You may have heard that TikTok has become Gen Z’s favorite search engine . So, if you’re trying to reach a younger audience, make sure to run a search there too.

For more tips on searching the various social networks, check out our post on the  best ways to research online .

Find out what similar brands your audience follows

Facebook Audience Insights and X (Twitter) Analytics can give you some good insights into which other brands your audience follows on these social networks. If these brands are similar to yours, it’s worth considering them as potential competitors.

To find which brands your audience follows on Facebook:

• Open  Facebook Audience Insights
• Scroll down to Top p ages 

You may find that none of the Pages identified are relevant to your industry, but if they are, add them to your list of competitors.

On X, rather than checking on your whole audience, you can check to see who your top followers are connected to.

• Open X Analytics.
• Scroll down to each of your  Top Followers  for the last several months
• Click  View profile  for each Top Follower
• Click  Following  on their profile to see the full list of accounts they’re following, or click  Tweets & replies  to see which accounts they interact with

Choose up to 5 competitors to focus on

By now you’ve got a huge list of potential direct and indirect competitors — far more than you could reasonably include in a thorough competitive analysis. It’s time to narrow down your list to the top three to five brands who you are most closely competing with on social media. Choose the brands that have the closest fit to your target markets.

Step 2. Gather intel

Now that you know who your competition is, you need to learn what they’re up to on social media.

Click through to the social networks of each of the brands you’ve identified as top competitors. As mentioned above, you can usually find these links in the header or footer of their website. In your social media competitive analysis template, make note of the following:

• What social networks are they on?
• How large is their following and how fast is it growing?
• Who are their top followers?
• How often do they post?
• What is their engagement rate?
• What is their social share of voice?
• What hashtags do they use most often?
• How many hashtags do they use?

You can find much of this information about your competitors just by clicking around their social profiles. For more streamlined data gathering, check out the analytics tools mentioned below.

Don’t forget to track all of these things for your own social channels as well. This will help you with your analysis in the next step.

Step 3. Do a SWOT analysis

Now that you’ve gathered all that data, it’s time to analyze it in a way that helps you understand where you stand compared to the competition. As part of this analysis, you’ll also look for potential ways to improve your social marketing strategy , and potential hazards to watch out for along the way.

A SWOT analysis is a great tool to help you think clearly about all of this information. In a SWOT analysis, you take a hard look at your business and the competition to identify: strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.

The important thing to know is that strengths and weaknesses involve factors internal to your brand. Basically, these are things you’re doing right, and areas where you could stand to improve.

Opportunities and threats are based on external factors: things happening in your competitive environment that you need to be aware of.

Here are some items to list in each quadrant of the SWOT template.

List metrics for which your numbers are higher than the competition. This is your competitive advantage!

List metrics for which your numbers are lagging behind the competition. These are areas you’ll want to focus on improving through  testing  and tweaks to your social media strategic plans.

Keep in mind that you could have both strengths and weaknesses for each social network. For example, maybe your Facebook follower count is higher than your competitors, but they have better follower growth. Or maybe you have fewer Instagram followers but higher engagement.

Get quite specific here, because these distinctions will help you identify your opportunities and threats.

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Opportunities

Now that you can see at a glance where you stand compared to the competition, you can identify potential opportunities to take advantage of.

These opportunities might be areas where you think you could improve compared to your competition based on information you’ve already gathered, or they could be based on anticipated or recent changes in the social media world.

Like opportunities, threats come from outside your organization. To get a keen sense of upcoming threats, take a good look at numbers related to growth, or anything that signifies change over time.

For example, a competitor that is small but has a high follower growth rate might present a bigger threat that a large competitor with stagnant growth.

This is another area where you need to keep an eye on the broader industry for upcoming changes that could affect your position compared to your competitors. The Hootsuite  State of Digital Reports  are a great source of industry information to consider.

Step 4. Set up s ocial media monitoring to track competitors on an ongoing basis

You’ll need to revisit your social media competitive analysis regularly to keep it current. Make this a regular part of your quarterly or annual reporting and review. That means you’ll need a constant supply of up-to-date information.

Putting a solid  social media monitoring strategy  in place will equip you with that real-time data to incorporate in your next analysis. This is an especially useful strategy for identifying potential opportunities and threats.

We’ll go over some tools you can use for social media monitoring below. Basically, it’s all about being aware of social conversations involving your brand (and product or service), your competitors, and your industry.

Record any important information or events you uncover through social media monitoring in the Notes column of your competitive analysis template, and incorporate them into your revised opportunities and threats during your next review.

8 top social media competitor analysis tools

In step 2, we talked about how to gather intelligence directly from the social networks. Here are some of the best social media competitive analysis tools that will do the digging for you.

Best social media competitor analysis tools

1. competitive analysis in hootsuite analytics.

Whether you’re running a full competitive analysis or just browsing for inspiration, look no further. Hootsuite Analytics does Instagram, Facebook, and X (formerly Twitter) competitive analysis for you. You can track up to 20 competitor profiles per network, and get a clear view of your strengths and weaknesses — plus actionable insights on the top posts, hashtags, and types of content in your niche.

Follow these 4 simple steps to analyze competitors with Hootsuite:

• Sign in to your Hootsuite account and pick Analytics from the main menu on the left side of the dashboard.
• Then, click on Competitive analysis in the Benchmarking section.
• At the top of the page, use the dropdown list of your social profiles to select the one you want to compare to competitors. 
• Then, pick the competitors you want to measure your social media performance against. To do that, go into the second dropdown list and check the boxes next to the competitors you want to view. To add competitors, click Manage competitors at the bottom of the dropdown box. 

Type the name of a competitor into the search bar and select the correct profile from the dropdown list. Depending on your Hootsuite plan, you can add between 2 and 20 social accounts per network (Facebook, Instagram, and X) to your watchlist.

And that’s it! Now you can browse several competitive reports, including:

Overview , where you can see the number of posts you and your competitors posted in the selected timeframe (that can be adjusted in the top right corner of the dashboard) as well as every account’s posting frequency, average engagement, number of followers, and audience growth rate.

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Post performance , where you can review your and your competitors’ top posts and sort results by likes, comments, and engagement — and quickly fetch inspiration for what to publish next.

Performance by post type , where you can find out what types of posts — photos, videos, carousels, or Reels — are most popular with each brand’s audience. Results can be sorted to show which post types get the most likes, comments, or engagement.

Post performance (by comments, likes, or estimated engagement) , where you can see how you and your competitors did every day within the specified timeframe — all in one easy-to-read graph. You can drill down results by post type, or stick to the overall view.

Trending hashtags … which speaks for itself.

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Post length , where you can find out how many characters and hashtags, on average, your competitors use in their posts.

Learn more about competitive analysis in Hootsuite Analytics . The feature is available in all paid plans.

2. Industry benchmarking in Hootsuite Analytics

If you want to see how your results shape up against your industry as a whole (rather than individual competitors), this is the perfect tool for you.

With Hootsuite’s social media benchmarking , you can find out how others in your industry are doing on social and compare your results with just a few clicks. 

To get industry benchmarks, follow these steps:

• Sign in to your Hootsuite dashboard and head to Analytics.
• In the menu on the left side of the screen, scroll to Benchmarking and click Industry .
• Pick an industry that best describes your business. 

That’s it! Now you can see how your results compare to average performance stats within your industry. You can set up custom timeframes, switch between networks — Instagram, Facebook, X, LinkedIn, and TikTok — and look up benchmarks for the following metrics:

• Profile impressions
• Profile reach
• Audience growth rate
• Engagement rate
• Video plays
• Posting frequency

… and more.

You will also find resources to improve your performance right in the summary section:

And, if you need to present your results to your team, boss, or other stakeholders, you can easily download your comparison report as a PDF file. 

3. Hootsuite Streams

Hootsuite Streams is a powerful tool that allows you to track keywords, competitors, and hashtags across every social network—all from one easy-to-use dashboard. The simplest use case? Add all your competitors accounts to one Stream and check on it whenever you want. But you can do much more than that.

4. Talkwalker

Talkwalker is primarily known as a social listening tool with a huge library of insights – competitive or otherwise – of over 150 million sources, including blogs, forums, videos, news, reviews, and social networks.

Use it if you want to spy on your competitors beyond just social media, and if you want to keep tabs on what the entire industry is saying in general. It’s great for high level overviews as well as detailed analyses.

5. Synapview

Ready to go beyond  social media  competitive analysis? Synapview is an app that lets you monitor competitors and hashtags on Reddit and blogs too.

6. Mentionlytics

Mentionlytics is a social media monitoring tool that is also great for doing a social media competitive analysis. You can discover everything that is being said about your brand, your competitors, or any keyword on X, Instagram, Facebook, Youtube, Pinterest and all web sources (news, blogs, etc.).

Plus, it has a handy “sentiment analysis” feature, so you can see not only  what  is being said about your competitors but  how  it is being said.

PS: Mentionlytics integrates with Hootsuite so you can see everything it pulls in your Streams.

7. Brandwatch

Brandwatch offers some powerful competitive analysis tools. One of the most important is its easy-to-understand graphic showing your brand’s social share of voice .

Social share of voice is a measure of how much people talk about your brand online compared to how much they talk about your competitors. This is one of the metrics you should track in your social media competitive analysis template.

8. Sprout Social

Sprout Social is a comprehensive social media management tool that offers some competitive analysis features. Sprout’s tools help users track and measure growth across competitors’ social accounts and easily check how those stats compare to their own. A word cloud solution that surfaces trending topics and keywords is also available.

Source: Sprout Social

Check out our detailed side-by-side comparison to see how Sprout Social stacks up against Hootsuite.

Free social media competitor analysis template

You could create your own spreadsheet to keep track of all the information you gather during your social media competitive analysis.

But if you’d rather get straight to work collecting data and putting it to use, download our free social media competitive analysis template and just start plugging in the information you collect. There’s a tab for your SWOT analysis, too.

Use Hootsuite to crush the competition on social media. From a single dashboard you can manage all your profiles, track competitors and relevant conversations, improve performance, and much more. Try it free today.

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Christina Newberry is an award-winning writer and editor whose greatest passions include food, travel, urban gardening, and the Oxford comma—not necessarily in that order.

Karolina Mikolajczyk is a Senior Inbound Marketing Strategist and associate editor of the Hootsuite blog. After completing her Master’s degree in English, Karolina launched her marketing career in 2014. Before joining Hootsuite in 2021, she worked with digital marketing agencies, SaaS startups, and international corporations, helping businesses and social media content creators grow their online presence and improve conversions through SEO and content marketing strategies.

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