Launching your brand requires a lot of time and effort since you have to do a thorough research of the market, niche and industry.
Looking at your competitors is not only necessary, but also mandatory to learn how to outperfom them while using their tactics as a starting point.
Competitive analysis tools help you learn how to attract the right audience and spread your brand’s message and values far and wide.
In what follows, we’ll be looking at an extensive list of competitor analysis tools to get more insights and build a better strategy.
16 Competitive analysis tools marketers should check out
What are competitive analysis tools?
Why use a competitor analysis tool?
Best tools for competitive analysis:
What are competitive analysis tools?
Competitive analysis tools are apps that help evaluate your competitor's performance across different areas, identifying their strengths and weaknesses and discovering how they compare against your business.
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Why use a competitor analysis tool?
By leveraging a tool for competitive analysis, you can gain insights into how to improve your marketing strategy to gain a competitive advantage and also simplify your performance analysis reports by quickly gaining access to the data.
A competitor analysis tool can offer industry benchmarks that help marketers identify best practices for content creation, social media reputation management, ads optimization, and many more.
16 Best tools for competitive analysis
In this big sea of apps, each with its unique set of features and offerings, it's hard to name some overall best competitor analysis tools. However, depending on your needs, there might be some platforms that fit like a glove.
We've curated a list of the best competitive analysis tools for different marketing areas to help you find your helper in competitor research.
Let's explore them together!
Social media competitor analysis tools
With the right tools for competitor analysis, you're gonna be spending less time manually searching through benchmarks, trying to extract the right insights, and more time building a bulletproof strategy that works for your brand.
#1. Socialinsider
Socialinsider is a powerful social media competitor analysis tool that enables you to instantly tap into industry benchmarks and competitive insights to put your data into context and understand how effective is your social media strategy against your competitor's.
The app comes with a lot of cool features built in, but the Benchmarks feature is where it really shines.
Within this social media competitive analysis tool you can see key metrics for all brands in the same dashboard and in unified charts to better spot the difference in their performance.
For extra clarity, you have charts that map out each brand's evolution in terms of posting frequency, engagement, or other important metrics.
Having access to all this data about your competitors helps you see exactly where you should put in more effort in order to grow your brand’s value and metrics.
Use the data you get about your competitors to learn from their mistakes. Analyze their posts’ performance and look at the metrics that are fluctuating.
Price: The plans starts from $99 per month.
#2. Rival IQ
Enabling positioning monitoring and KPIs benchmarking, RivalIQ's social media competitive analysis tools streamline the brand's market research process and strategy optimization.
Among its main functionalities are its alerts, which allow quick competitor posting patterns tracking, and its head-to-head social performance comparison.
Price: It starts from $239 per month.
SEO competitor analysis tools
#3. Semrush
SEMrush is one of the top SEO competitor analysis tools available on the market.
Using this platform, you can track your competitors' keyword ranking, run an SEO audit of their blog and compare performance, look for backlinking opportunities, and lots more.
Price: For SEMRush, the starting plan is priced at $129/ month.
#4. Ahrefs
As an SEO competitive analysis tool, Ahrefs enables you to analyze your site's backlinks profile and the websites of your competitors. Also, you can explore the most profitable keywords for organic and paid searches in your niche.
You'll be notified of new & lost backlinks, web mentions, and keywords rankings.
With Ahrefs, you'll be able to see the exact keywords that your competitors are ranking for in organic search results and how much traffic this brings them.
Price: For this SEO competitor analysis tool, the starting price is $99/ month.
#5. Moz
Moz is a competitor analysis tool for SEO that offers all the SEO insights marketers need to get more traffic and outrank their competition.
With Moz, you can compare your keyword strategy with competitors, discover their best-performing content, and compare their link profiles with your links.
Price: For Moz, the starting price is $99/ month.
Competitor analysis tools for brand monitoring
#6. Mention
Mention is one of the best tools for competitor analysis when it comes to brand monitoring.
With this competitive analysis software, marketers can measure the share of voice of their brands and their competitors and understand which business has the greatest brand awareness.
Enabling web and social media monitoring, this platform is very helpful for gaining competitive insights that can be used to gain a competitive advantage - starting from customer care to new products development.
Price: Mention has a starting price of $49/ month.
#7. Awario
Awario is a competitive brand monitoring tool that can help you easily track your competitors' mentions and the shares they receive.
This competitive analysis software enables fruitful partnership opportunities that can facilitate a competitive edge for your brand by highlighting the influencer's conversations around your competitors.
Price: For Awario, the starting price is $29/ month.
Competitor analysis tools for listening
#8. Meltwater
Meltwater stands among a series of competitive intelligence analysis tools that provide an extensive list of features that brands can leverage to gain a competitive advantage.
For example, this platform's listening module offers image recognition and analysis, which empowers brands to spy on their competitor's brand-related content while also enabling sentiment analysis.
Price: The starting price for Meltwater is not displayed; you need to book a demo to find out.
#9. Talkwalker
Talkwalker is a powerful listening tool that can be used to gather competitive insights.
While analyzing brand-related conversations and enabling sentiment monitoring, it also allows you to group them into different topic clusters and identify what your competitors are most associated with. This helps you understand if they have a positive or a negative brand image and identify the areas that help your brand shine brighter.
Price: For this competitive analysis tool, the price can be established after you set a demo.
Competitive analysis tools for content
#10. Similarweb
Similarweb is a digital marketing competitive analysis tool that offers performance data on any website's traffic and engagement.
With the KPIs offered by this platform, marketers can identify their competitors' strongest and weakest strategies and use the insights gathered to optimize their digital marketing strategies across different channels.
This benchmarking tool's main features include keyword research and PPC campaign analysis.
Price: For Similarweb, the starting price is $125/ month.
#11. BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo is a platform that can be used by marketers to gain content inspiration from their brand's competitors and discover trends within their niche.
With this competitive analysis tool for content, you can also identify backlinks of a particular domain, helping you understand the link-building strategies of your competitors.
Price: starts at $199.
PPC competitor analysis tools
#12. Spyfu
Spyfu is a great competitive analysis tool that will help you keep an eye on your competitor's ads strategies.
Using this software, you can uncover the keywords your competitors buy and the clicks they get form their ads.
By looking at your competitor's bidding history and analyzing their past campaigns, you can discover new keywords you can leverage and campaign opportunities that have the potential of exponentially increasing your sales.
Price: For Spyfu, the starting price is $39/ month.
#13. iSpionage
iSpionage is a competitor research software designed to provide ad insights.
What’s interesting about this tool is its ability to analyze ads from multiple perspectives - from targeted keywords to ads' copy and even landing pages.
Also, by using iSpionage, you can spy on your competitor's monthly ad budget, which may provide insights into what the optimal budget for your campaigns may be.
Price: For iSpionage, the starting price is $59/ month.
#14. Meta Ad Library
Meta Ad Library serves as a competitive analysis tool by showing you the ads across all apps and services provided by Meta.
What does it mean for your business? Well, this will be helpful for your future advertising campaigns, making your business life so much easier.
Moreover, this means that you can also search your competition’s ads. The Ad Library is available to everyone, and you are all able to look for any term, page, or name in the search bar.
AI tools for competitive analysis
#15. Determ
Determ is an AI-enhanced competitive analysis tool that provides an overview of competitors by covering competitor news, media exposure, and social media activities in one single dashboard.
It covers over 100 million sources 24/7, filtering through a billion monthly articles and posts to deliver relevant information. The tool tracks brand and competitor mentions, assisting businesses in measuring their share of voice.
Price: available through booking a demo.
#16. Opinly AI
Opinly AI is an AI competitor analysis tool designed for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).
Its key features include automated data collection, real-time pricing and feature comparison, user-friendly reports, and cost-effectiveness.
Opinly AI aims to save time allow decision-makers to make informed choices without extensive technical knowledge.
Price: starts at $24 per month.
Final thoughts
With the help of these tools, you will get a lot more data than you could ever get with the native analytics apps from every social media platform.
The best tools for competitive analysis will help you keep track of your top competitors to shape your strategy and define your communication guidelines.
FAQs about competitive analysis tools
Can competitive analysis tools help with the VRIO analysis?
Yes, various tools of competitive analysis can help you evaluate your competitors through the VRIO method (in other words, whether they are valuable, rare, inimitable or organized).
Are any competitive analysis tools using AI?
Yes, more and more tools for competitor analysis are channeling the power of AI, some of which I've included in the tools list above.
