The Best Competitive Intelligence Software for 2024
What does it mean to have all your ducks in a row as a product marketer?
Apart from knowing your customer’s needs and what key metrics to improve, you also need to keep an eye on your competition, i.e. what changes do they make in terms of their messaging, design, pricing, and so on.
Believe it or not, some of them revamp their brand every 2–3 months, making it hard to manually monitor and update competitor insights inside a colored spreadsheet 😵
The answer to this never ending hustle?
Competitive intelligence software.
This type of tool aggregates mountains of data from various sources so you can make informed decisions about what your competitors are doing and how to gain an edge over them — whether this is increasing your sign-up numbers or winning more competitive deals.
Most of them incorporate an AI that surfaces this information and automatically tags it on your behalf, which is why they cater to enterprise clients that have medium-to-high budgets (starting at $1000/user) to support the development of this type of technology. The high price tag is also due in part to the salaries for market analysts/account managers, who churn through numbers to deliver personal reports side-by-side with the AI.
Because of this, the majority don’t offer a free trial of the full version , but require you to ask for a demo. Which can drive you crazy as you have to go through endless sales reps that might not even bother with you if they find out you’re a small-to-medium company. Happened to me.
To save you precious time, I’m going to put head-to-head the following competitive intelligence platforms with regard to their onboarding (where applicable), core features, pricing, and setup — basically everything you need to know to make the right decision:
Why is competitive intelligence software important?
You can’t expect to win if you don’t even know who you’re up against.
So if you still have your own doubts about the utility of a competitive intelligence software, remember that it will support not only you — the product marketer — in analyzing how your competition positions themselves, but also the:
- Executives — With data about the latest rounds of investments and the challenges your competition faces, either from an operational or legal standpoint
- Product team — To see which features have been added, removed, or pushed forward to the detriment of others
- Sales team— To uncover your competition’s strengths and weaknesses, as well as what others have to say about them outside, on review platforms
- HR — Who can gauge into another company’s culture from a distance and see whether key employees have joined or left recently
At the end of the day, competitive intelligence software should help you and your team act upon the analyzed competitive insights.
And cure the self-induced myopia of being left behind, caused by paid press releases of your competitor’s features that fly into you Slack channel without context.
Let’s dive in!
1. Ahrefs
Ahrefs is often overlooked as a competitive intelligence platform, mainly because it’s primarily an SEO toolset for marketers.
But take into acccount that it offers an in-depth look at any website’s: organic and paid traffic, backlink profile, and site structure — and you’ve got yourself a powerful tool that goes beyond SEO.
Onboarding
When you sign-up, you’ll be greeted by an in-app banner that reviews the latest launched features, so you can peek into what’s new.
The dashboard is empty, but it comes to live as soon as you add your first “project “, i.e. your own website, a client’s, or even better: your competitor’s. Give it a bit of time though, as the metrics that fill it up are pulled from a bunch of different core tools.
After the setup is complete, you can click on any of these metrics to get to a more detailed report. Ahrefs will also show you how you’re faring up against your organic competitors (already mapped out in the project setup) under the “Show Competitors” dropdown.
Top 3 features
Ahrefs is an enormous toolset, totaling 7 core tools. I’ll focus here on Site Explorer — the platform’s flaghsip competitive analysis tool — and its key features.
- Performance chart — Check the growth of a website’s metrics over time, like impressions, organic traffic, backlinks, and even crawled pages. Either for your own website or in parallel with up to 10 competitors. This chart is particularly useful for corelations, as you can see how Google Algorithm updates and content changes affect spikes and dips. Tip: choose the “daily” setting to catch changes the same day they happen.
- Page Inspect — Ever used WaybackMachine? Ahrefs’ got their own version, which monitors HTML and content changes on a webpage in a calendar format. The bigger the changes, the greener the date. Once you pick one, you’ll see exactly what has been added or removed from a page (vs. its last update). This feature should be useful for both techies and marketers.
- Portfolios — Acting like meta-projects, portfolios allow you to group several pages or websites under a portfolio to monitor its overall performance. This versatility unlocks a wide range of use cases, like: analyzing the competition as an industry, evaluating your content team’s performance on an author basis, and monitoring the growth of regional markets, among others.
Pricing
Ahrefs does have a free plan (called AWT), which aims to be a complementary tool to Google Search Console. It’s limited though to two of its seven core tools (Site Explorer and Site Audit), has no historical data, and works only for your own verified projects.
If you want to spy on your competition lightly, the Starter plan has 1 month of historical data and allows you to add 1 non-verified project (a.k.a. your competition).
And if you want to go all-in, there are 4 extensive pricing plans. The lowest starts at $129/month and allows you to add 5 non-verified projects.
2. Kompyte
Besides the classic keywords comparison, Kompyte is encompassing enough to track web changes, content engagement, even ads effectiveness that your competitors are A/B testing on several channels. So you don’t make the same mistakes as them.
This competitive intelligence platform is also the only one that offers a 14 day free trial. A hands-on experience that is a big bonus, given that most of these tools don’t offer one — an opportunity I believe they’re missing on.
Onboarding
Kompyte looks and feels like a SaaS tool. All the modules reside on the sidebar menu for quick access, with a guided tutorial that walks me through them as I first log in.
They also take the time to organize the competitor list for me, including their URLs, keywords, social media channels, and blog feeds. Apart from this, I also like the pencil tool in the bottom right corner that allows me to take screenshots of particular summary insights to be further tagged and saved inside a competitor’s panel or a report.
Top 3 features
Every module is Kompyte is customizable enough so you get only the right data. Because of this, it can be used for different purposes, but I’m going to focus on its most important features:
- Web Tracking — Allows you to take a look at your competitors’ webpage changes in a before & after view, highlighting the changes so it’s easier to pinpoint them. The feature also tells you how the wording has changed in the main CTAs, header, body, and footer, as well as offer a time machine to monitor how the webpage has evolved over time— useful, for example, in the case of a pricing page.
- Search Marketing — Get intel on how your competitors run paid ads to improve your search strategy. This translates into ad performance over the past 30 days, A/B tests (if any), and targeted keywords. Speaking of keywords, this module comes with a dashboard that tracks each one of your keywords’ SERP rank, SEO competitiveness, CPC, search volume, and competition so you get a broad view of where to focus your SEO efforts more.
- Reports — These reports are super customizable and can be broken down by competitor, insight summary tag, timeline, etc. Or you can go for one of their ready-available report templates to get a head start. These can be downloaded as a PDF, which come in handy if you want to share them with the team. Or you’re in your last day of trial and want to take the data with you before committing financially.
Pricing
There are three pricing plans, with the top one being listed the first one from right (cool positioning strategy, btw): Enterprise, Pro, and Lite. I’ve tested the Pro one, which allows me to track 30 competitors, more than decent even with someone who’s active in a red ocean industry like the one I’m in (work management software).
There are no prices displayed though, which means you’ll have to contact their sales to find out what is the price tag for the features and add-ons you want to use.
3. Klue
Klue is an AI powered competitive intelligence platform with a clear focus on helping enterprise sales team win more competitive deals, shorten their sales cycles, and ultimately increase their retention rates.
Yes, the focus is solely on sales enablement both for marketers (the curators) who build competitive materials, and sales reps (the consumers) who use and incorporate the competitive materials into their sales process.
Onboarding
Because it caters to larger sales teams that have dedicated resources to keep tabs open on competitors, Klue doesn’t offer a free trial.
Even if you’re a small team, you can still get in touch with one of their account managers who will gladly sign you up for an introductory webinar. Which I did (thank you, Nick Ross, a true professional 🙌).
From what I could see, the platform introduces you to a dashboard of competitors that can be organized into primary, secondary, etc. or by industry.
Once you click on them, you have access to detailed competitor profiles that consist of cards — the building blocks — which can be either custom (like strengths, weaknesses, discovery questions) or automated (like Salesforce insights or website changes).
Top 3 features
Klue rests on three big pillars, each one supported by several features. Together, they form an autonomous competitive intelligence workflow as follows:
- Collect — First, Klue’s AI scores for data externally in terms of articles, posts, and reviews, then displays only the most relevant ones in the form of alerts. Your team is also empowered to contribute to this documenting process. They can either install the Google Chrome extension to take a screenshot of a competitor’s web page and add it to a battlecard along with a few remarks. Or, directly email a dedicated email address where sales reps can send competitive intel available for the whole team.
- Curate — Once the competitive insights have been gathered, it’s time to organize them. Klue integrates with Salesforce to deliver insights on who was the top performer, their win/loss ratio, and so on. This can also work the other way around, in the sense that you can ask for the reps’ best practices to model future battlecards after them — battlecards which will show up in Salesforce. Competitive insights can be further organized in a digestible, newsletter-like feed, so your team has a summary about the latest updates made to one or a set of battlecards and their goal.
- Consume — The last step boils down to the battlecards, which are by far the most comprehensive ones among the analyzed platforms. They consist of 8 smaller cards that contain bite-sized information like pain points/persona, pricing, major objections, landmines to lay, etc. But what truly makes them stand our is the ease with which you can find them. Just type in app.klue in your Chrome bar followed by the battle card name and it will show up in a glimpse — perfect for sales reps who are requested info on the spot. Other than this trick, they can also use emails, the mobile app, or Salesforce to access battlecards and give out accurate answers.
Pricing
Klue’s pricing is not publicly available, but I’m told that depending on a few factors plans start at $1000/user.
Again, this reflects the enterprise character of the product, since I assume it also offers dedicated market analysts along their services too.
4. Visualping
With 1.5 million users, Visualping is the world’s largest website change monitoring tool. I wouldn’t necessarily call it a competitive intelligence platform; nevertheless, it’s still worth looking at it since it tracks competitor web changes on a visual, text, and element levels. Social media presence too.
Onboarding
I expected to create an account for it, but it was much simpler than I imagined.
All you have to do is paste the URL of the website that you wish to monitor, select the focus area, frequency checks (every 6 hours, 12 hours, day, week), and add your email address. After you confirm it, you’ll be able to add more than one search.
The thing with Visualping is that you can add as many searches as you want but can only run a limited number of them depending on your number of refills. Frequency checks will also vary according to the chosen pricing plan.
Top 3 features
Even though it looks like a feature rather than a product, Visualping boasts a few capabilities that product marketers will enjoy using. Among them, you can find:
- Compare type & alerts — Work like a granular webpage tracker. You can choose whether to monitor a visual area, text, or webpage element and the magnitude of the changes (1%, 10%, 25%, 50%) as compared to the present moment. The text comparison goes one step further, allowing you to get alerts when specific keywords have been added or deleted. Ideal for when you want to keep a close eye on a landing page that consistently ranks, despite suffering alterations regularly.
- Perform actions — Simply put, bots perform actions on your behalf to capture fine details that might slip otherwise. Actions include clicking, selecting, scrolling, refreshing, or waiting on a page, and can be configured to act in a particular order. For example, if you want to access a password-protected website, you need to instruct the bot to type in the credentials first, then hit the Login button.
- Adjustments — Think of them as parameters to fine-tune a webpage comparison search, just like software testing. You can mention the country from where you’re crawling the data, disable JavaScript after several seconds, or load the page as if it was opened on a desktop or mobile.
Pricing
Visualping is free to use or up to 2 checks a day. This means you can check one page 2 times/day or two different pages 1 time/day each.
You have 4 paid plans to choose from for more search checks, which start at $13/month for 40 cheks/day. The good part is that you can schedule at which hours of the day you can run them, so you don’t waste any.
5. Competitors App
Competitors App offers website changes monitoring, email, social media, reviews, ads and keywords. There is no AI, just raw data of competitors’ actions.
Onboarding
While the design could use some improvements (it’s 2022), the onboarding process is straightforward: add your domain, check if all the auto-detected fields are correct, add the competitors (also check if auto-detected fields are correct) and wait. They don’t show you any data during the first 24 hours.
Top 3 features
As simple as the design (& product) may look
- Plethora of marketing channels — As I previously mentioned, they monitor vairous channels, including YouTube keyword changes and the like. That’s pretty awesome for a product that’s targeting SMBs.
- Notifications — There’s no need to go to the website and check if anything is discovered. You will get notifications via email (by default), Slack, Zapier, and webhooks.
- Multi-user — Compettiors App allows each user to customize their notifications based on the monitored channels and competitors. For example, one may choose to monitor social media; another may want to watch out SEO or how certain ads are performing.
Pricing
It looks like Competitors App is primarly targeting SMBs, as their pricing plans start at $9.90/competitor/month. The app is available for free under a 14-day trial and the support is quite responsive, which might be a valid sales point if you consider it.
6. Crayon
Crayon is a full-featured competitive intelligence platform, gathering 100+ data types across 300m+ sources to map out your competition’s entire digital footprint, both on and off site. Which is perhaps the largest data “fishnet” among these platforms.
Onboarding
Quite simple and to the point. All I need to do is choose at least 4 competitors that are most relevant to my line of business, even add my own company for benchmarking purposes. Couldn’t find Paymo though, which is a bummer.
Once the setup is complete, I have access to the Intel Free plan that supports only 5 data types (blog post, YouTube video, page design update, SlideShare presentation, pricing change) and displays them in descending order.
For a taste of the full featured tool, click on Get more intel (top right) to request a demo for the Intel Pro plan and a sales rep will get in touch with you in approximately 9 days. At least that was my case.
They will want to go through a discovery call, then walk you through the actual platform. Unfortunately, the sales rep I was in contact with kind of ghosted me, even after following up twice after the initial discovery call. Hence, the following features are based off their features page as I couldn’t experience them first-hand.
Top 3 features
As already mentioned, Crayon’s core feature is the ability to aggregate several intel formats from different sources and train itself the more you use it. Leaving the foundation behind, the specific functionalities bring you:
- Sales battlecards — Help your sales team win more deals with self-feeding battlecards that nudge you whenever new intel is up. They also show the number of times they’ve been accessed and allow sales reps to comment on them, in case they have suggestions. A really important feature given how easy it is to replicate product features overnight.
- Email digest and alerts— Similar to Google Alerts, you can set custom alerts for certain events like pricing changes or new customer reviews. Here’s the gist: a dedicated market analyst will compile a weekly report with the most relevant competitive insights, so you can share them with your team.
- Crayon Inspire — A time machine of landing pages to take inspiration from, as well as see how they looked in the past. I was even able to find a design of our homepage from 5 years ago, so great relevance. But the design is not so user friendly, which limits its adoption.
Pricing
Although a bit hidden, Crayon offers three pricing plans: Starter, Silver, Gold. Each of them come with a minimum number of users (3, 5, and 5), with differences in the form of integrations, user persmissions, and add-ons.
There are no publicly available price tags, which leaves you no option but to contact a sales reps or account manager again.
7. Sharpr
Sharpr dubbs themselves as a knowledge management tool that centralizes trends, news, and other relevant business information about your competition, then delivers them dynamically in different formats and channels to the most important stakeholders (execs, sales team, clients).
Think of it as an automated pull and push system — the “pull” part represents the input (data) and the “push” part represents the output (newsletters, analytics, data feeds, stories, etc.).
Note that this competitive intelligence platform doesn’t track web design changes or feature releases on your competition’s websites or forums, but rather acts as a directory of business information. Reminds me of CrunchBase a bit, on steroids.
Onboarding
Sharpr doesn’t offer a free trial, but were very quick to answer me right before Thanksgiving and deliver a personal demo (thanks a bunch, Regan Wieneke🤗).
Since I can’t talk about the onboarding, I’ll focus on the structure. The platform consists of hubs —similar to workspaces— that are accessible only to specific teams or people. Hubs are then broken down into categories on a keyword or product, for which their AI (called Sam) gathers relevant information with automated tags and summaries.
What I like about it is that it allows you to export category elements in three different views depending on the level of details that you need.
Top 3 features
Even though Sharpr doesn’t track product updates posted on your competitors’ websites, product marketers can benefit from:
- Rich summaries — These represent snippets of knowledge about a specific piece of news and why is it relevant. You can comment, download, even preview them in a separate window where notes are available in case you want to highlight remarks for your team. The best part is that you decide which summaries do you wish to subscribe to and how often to receive notifications.
- Simple knowledge transfer — If say, you’ve downloaded a report from one of your competitors, you can paste it inside a category through a drag and drop action. Sam, their AI, runs a virus scan first, then automatically generates a tag with a relevance score in terms of how the content matches the tag. A handy documenting feature, especially if you don’t like manually typing in data.
- Dynamic delivery — So far we’ve talked about the “pull” part, it’s time to talk about the “push”. Whenever you want to act upon the gathered information and push it forward, you can customize the hub with a protected URL and deliver it in different formats to your stakeholders: stories, email newsletters, analytics, etc. Sharpr will tell you how often they’re accessed so you know whether you should be more proactive or not in sending them out. What’s great is also the responsive design that is customizable and consistent among all channels — even mobile.
Pricing
Sharpr charges on a per user basis, which depends on the size of the team and the one-time setup fee (which I’m told it revolves around $2k, including support, dedicated onboarding, and data migration).
There are two types of users, those with full access that can edit summaries and those with view-only access that can view and download them. Clients, external stakeholders in this case, don’t count as paying seats as they only have view-only access.
I’ve still asked what the price tag would be for a team of 5 marketers, while Regan assured me that it would be less than $10k/year, implementation included.
7. Weavr.ai
Weavr.ai is a developer engagement platform focused on providing developers with actionable insights about APIs, SDKs, platforms and those who use them.
The reason why I’m featuring them here is because they’ve recently turned their focus to product marketers as well. Let’s see how they fare out.
Onboarding
Even though you can’t call it a competitive intelligence platform, Weavr.ai offers a 14 day free trial so I could get my hands on it.
Similar to the other competitive intelligence platforms, I’m asked to add my own company first. On through the usual steps of defining the team size and adding users, and I’m prompted to add my first project.
There are four types of projects (brand comparison, product comparison, find influencers, keyword comparison). But it doesn’t really matter which one you choose (for brand and product comparison at least), as you’ll be walked through the same process. I go for brand comparison, add the competitors, and quickly get prompted to a Share of Voice (SOV) area.
To my surprise, the companies chosen show up under the keywords field instead of the companies one, so I have to re-adjust them. With the competitors, key word, channels, and time interval in place, the share of voice provided is dense.
There’s a mentions trend chart, a content distribution pie chart over channels that can be clicked individually to surface the posts up, and a sentiment analysis chart to see how many were positive, negative, or neutral. Too bad I can’t click on them so I can jump in and engage.
Top 3 features
Weavr.ai is again, developer focused, but it can pack a punch for product marketers as well:
- Signals — Seems to be the core of this competitive intelligence platform, as it analyzes what others are saying about your brand across several communities (GitHub, StackOverflow, etc.). It’s obvious that the focus is still on developers with limited platforms to choose from. What’s useful though is the possibility to select a post and send it over to your colleagues (over Slack or email) to jump on it.
- Influencers — The influencers area allows you to filter after thought leaders by typing in a specific keyword. Their affiliations, roles, and stats on certain platforms (karmas on HackerNews, for example) are displayed as well, so you can narrow your research. However, the ones that you already follow will show up as well, which is a bit misleading.
- Dashboard — Reunites all the previous areas mentioned (SOV, Signals, Influencers) in a complete bird’s eye view. As a product marketer, you’ll particularly enjoy the top roles chart, which gives you an extra hand when it comes to researching the behavior of potential customer personas.
Pricing
Weavr.ai starts at $75/user/month under their Growth plan, which includes Signals, Dashboard, and 10 projects — but is limited to 1 user.
For a bigger team, you’re better off with the Professional ($100/user/month) and Enterprise ($125/user/month) plans, that each come with a minimum number of users (2 and 5) but more features like reports for 1 year and a dedicated account manager.
Verdict
Out of all the competitive intelligence platforms tested, my favorite one is Kompyte. In part due to its smooth design and self-highlighting web tracking feature that make the most sense to me, a product marketer within a small marketing team.
I definitely see how Klue’s and Crayon’s battlecards can translate into more competitive deals won for enterprise sales teams, while Visualping and Sharpr lean more on the investors side with bite-sized information delivered uniformly across different channels.Weavr.ai is a bit too developer focused, in my honest opinion, but something to keep an eye on.
These are only a few of the competitive intelligence platforms available out there. I’ve reached out to two other ones(won’t give names) who didn’t reply back once they found out I was part of a small marketing team, so beware how you play your cards.
Coming back to the topic. Yes, these competitive intelligence platforms have a complicated sales process, with a limited-to-inexistent trial, and a hefty price tag. But they sure give you the necessary pair of goggles to take informed decisions and deposition your competition.
After all, brands not features win company wars, right? 😉
If you’re serious about product marketing or know someone who’s just starting out on this career path:
- Clap this story 👏
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