Win the Market in 2024 with These 14 Best Competitor Analysis Tools

“Keep your friends close and your enemies closer” isn’t just a battle strategy; it’s a cornerstone of smart business. Far from being spying, competitor analysis is a vital and entirely legal practice that all the biggest brands rely on. 

In today’s fast-paced market, knowing what your competitors are up to is essential. From social media to SEO, understanding their moves gives you a competitive edge. With the right competitor analysis tools, staying ahead has never been easier.

Competitor analysis tools gather and analyze information about your industry rivals. These tools can track multiple business areas, such as your competitor domains, marketing strategies, product developments, and pricing updates. Such software helps identify industry trends, benchmark your performance, and position yourself in the market.

Do you ever feel overwhelmed trying to monitor your competitors? Does tracking all their marketing channels drive you to despair?

I totally get it! 

Competitive analysis is an all-encompassing project. 

Picture this: you walk into the office in the morning, only to find your boss boiling with anger.

A shiver runs down your spine—you missed a competitor’s strategic move, and now the company’s stock prices are falling.

Worried investors are blowing up the company’s phone.

You don’t know what to do, you don’t know what to say, you don’t know how this could have happened.

Without a dedicated competitive intelligence tool, you’re always playing catch-up.

There are countless KPIs to track: social media presence, brand awareness, SEO metrics like domain score and keyword rankings… The list goes on.

Remember, competition can make or break your brand. 

The 14 best competitor analysis tools

The more you know about your industry, the better decisions you can make. 

That’s why you must conduct thorough competitor research before engaging in marketing activities or product development.

I’m here to help. 

Check out my ranking of the 14 best competitor analysis tools, and never struggle with competitive analysis again.

01 Brand24 for media monitoring

Companies like H&M, Carlsberg, Uber, Ikea, and Vichy trusted Brand24 for competitive analysis.
Try a 14-day free trial and change your competitive intelligence for good.

There’s one crucial, highly competitive area we all are in. That’s digital marketing, of course. 

All content creators and social media marketers will definitely agree.

There, we fight not only against competitor strategies but also users’ short attention spans and many other adversities.

Fortunately, social media monitoring is there to save the day.

With a specialized tool like Brand24, you can see all your and your competitors’ mentions, metrics, and insights in one place.

Let’s say you are a marketer working for Burger King. You should definitely be interested in your competitors’ strategies: McDonald’s and KFC. 

How do you use Brand24 to your advantage?

You set up 3 media monitoring projects, one per company. First, choose the keyword(s) to track competitors. Definitely include the company name, but you can also add:

• Their product and service name (e.g., McMuffin, Crispy strips bucket)
• Hashtags they use (e.g., #imlovinit, #burgerking)
• The name of the marketing campaign (e.g., Raise Your Arches, You Rule)
• Their CEO’s name 
• Any competitors’ keywords relevant to your industry

As you can see, Brand24’s Mentions & Reach graph includes some mysterious exclamation marks. They are fruits of the AI Anomaly Detector. 

This feature acts like a brand guard.

It identifies unusual patterns in your project, like sudden spikes in negative mentions volume.

Then, it researches your mentions to find the causes of the anomaly.

It presents its conclusions in the form of interactive exclamation marks. Click on one to see a short note summarizing the anomaly and its cause.

This way, you can track both your and your competitors’ anomalies in performance.

It gives you the power to make data-driven decisions and swiftly navigate the realm of competitors’ strategies.

Another key feature for competitive analysis is Project Comparison.

It allows you to compare crucial brand metrics, providing valuable insights into your online performance.

As you can see, McDonald’s leaves its competitors far behind. 

It has the most online mentions, the best sentiment, the broadest reach, the best presence score, the highest AVE, and a tremendous amount of user-generated content. 

While KFC and Burger King have metrics on a similar level, there’s one exception to the rule.

KFC has significantly fewer negative mentions than Burger King, a 10% difference that gives KFC a visible advantage in customer sentiments.

Now, you need to learn why Burger King struggles with its sentiment.

There are two ways of doing this. You can browse their mentions and set the filter to negative or save time using Topic Analysis. 

Let’s see what it looks like for the Burger King project.

This detailed analysis shows you specific areas for improvement. It empowers you to speak up on topics that ruin your business reputation.

At the same time, it highlights your strengths and your audience’s interests.

You can easily assess the importance of each topic thanks to the nearby metrics. 

More details can be found after clicking on a topic.

Now, let’s look at the big picture. The Metrics Analysis offers a comprehensive overview of your project. 

This tab has a concise summary of your performance metrics. It provides further insight into the negative Burger King sentiment. 

Now we know that:

1. Disgust is the primary negative emotion of the Burger King mentions.
2. Most disgusted comments come from X (Twitter).

With that information, Burger King could start developing a complex online reputation repair strategy…

Or simply ask our AI Brand Assistant!

Let’s see what it says.

And how is it better than Chat GPT, you may ask. 

It bases all its answers on the collected data, ensuring high accuracy and low hallucination risks.

Here are some other examples of how you can use Brand24 for competitor insights:

• By monitoring influential sources that mention your competitors, you discover authors, blogs, and websites likely to be interested in your business.
• You see that your competitor’s customers complain online about something. It so happens that your business is way better at it. You reach out to your competitor’s disappointed customers and show them what you have to offer.
• Your competitor launched a hashtag marketing campaign to promote something new. You monitor its social media engagement metrics to see how it spreads and what the response of its audience is.

Key competitor analysis features:

• Mentions monitoring
• AI Anomaly Detector
• Sentiment analysis
• Presence Score
• Project comparison 
• AI Insights
• Topic Analysis
• Emotion Analysis
• AI Brand Assistant
• Metrics Analysis

02 Semrush for SEO analysis

You say SEO. You think Semrush.

Semrush is a great keyword research tool for SEO competitor research, particularly if you want to compete for users in Google search. 

Search engine optimization is a fundamental part of marketing efforts.

The quality of your website’s content and technical performance determine its visibility in search engines for potential customers. 

It’s an arms race to win organic users and organically promote your brand.

Semrush is the right tool to screen your competitor’s website’s SEO performance and to manage your search engine performance.

Top organic keywords are among the most valuable pieces of data about your competitor you can get from Semrush.

Here, you can see the keywords your competitor ranks for particular URLs.

In backlinks, you can see all sites that link to your competitors’ websites:

How you can use this knowledge?

For example, you can contact sites linking to your competitor’s websites and ask them to mention your site as well.

Backlinks give a massive boost to SEO and increase online visibility.

Moreover, the data from Semrush can inform your SEO strategy.

Based on these insights, you can conduct a content analysis and develop a keyword planner for your content distribution.

Build a robust domain that ranks high in any browser with Semrush.

Key insights:

• Traffic volume and sources
• Organic keywords
• Backlinks
• New and lost keywords
• External links
• Increases and decreases in rankings
• Best performing sites 
• Paid keywords
• Keyword trends

03 Similarweb for website traffic analysis

Similarweb is a go-to tool for search traffic analysis and more in the paid version. 

With its help, you can gain the following insights:

• Volume of traffic: estimation of how much traffic your competitors get
• Sources of website traffic: where your competitors’ traffic comes from – paid acquisition, referral, or organic traffic
• Ad display: what ads and where they display

To compare the performance of your website to your competitor’s, enter your site address first.

Next, paste your competitor’s web address:

In the free version of the tool, you can see global, country, and category rank:

Also, the free version of Similar Web offers a traffic overview and site traffic sources.

With this feature, you can see the differences between you and your competitors based on traffic sources. This way, you can make informed strategy decisions.

For example, if your competitor performs well in organic traffic, you can concentrate your marketing efforts on social traffic.

How?

By addressing your audience’s needs and creating highly shareable content.

At the same time, it will boost your referral traffic, grow brand awareness, and build your expert authority.

In the long run, it will also improve your SEO reputation, as Google bots like content that engages readers.

Key metrics in the free version:

• Referrals
• Traffic volume and sources
• Ad display insights

04 BuzzSumo for social media analytics

BuzzSumo is one of the social media analytics tools. It handles influencer marketing, content marketing, and PR performance.

With BuzzSumo’s help, you can discover your competitors’ social shares insights, including:

• Networks that share their content
• How your content compares
• Most effective content types
• Engagement metrics
• Most shared content analytics

Highly shareable content in social media has a few advantages:

• It increases brand awareness and recognition.
• It signals that the content is valuable as it sparks interest among readers and encourages them to share the value with others. This motivates the social platform and Google to boost your content’s online visibility.

With BuzzSumo’s help, you can easily detect the parameters of shareable content in your niche.

Additionally, BuzzSumo offers a Facebook Page Analyzer. This tool provides detailed insights into your competitor’s Facebook performance, including:

• Engagement metrics (likes, shares, and comments by post type)
• Posts length
• Time published
• Facebook Reactions analysis
• Competitors detection

Thus, if you target Facebook, BuzzSumo is a great option for you.

BuzzSumo is also a sort of media monitoring tool because you can receive alerts whenever your competitor is mentioned online.

Useful features:

• Social media monitoring and analytics 
• PR performance monitoring
• Influencer marketing
• Competitors content analytics
• Facebook Page Analyzer

05 Sprout Social for content analysis

It is one of the competitive analysis tools for collecting marketing data about your competitors online. 

It’s a bit similar to Brand24 because it tracks online conversations and sentiment metrics.

With Sprout Social, you can track the following metrics for your competitor websites:

• Share of Voice
• Engagement
• Impressions
• Unique Authors
• Positive sentiment

So, what is the difference between Brand24 and Sprout Social?

While Brand24 analyzes your competitors’ performance holistically, Sprout Social focuses mostly on your competitors’ content and offers limited audience reception insights.

Sprout Social falls behind because of a limited number of metrics and an absence of AI-powered insights.

Because of this, it may lack the depth of understanding as it works on raw data without calculating complex metrics, detecting correlations, and finding patterns.

Another area where Brand24 has a competitive advantage is G2 ratings. According to users, Brand24 is better than Sprout Social in all rated categories.

But let’s be fair.

Sprout Social has a few features that Brand24 doesn’t cover. 

These are traffic analysis (paid vs organic) and team collaboration functions like case assignment.

Key features:

• Engagement metrics
• Competitor’s clients’ demographic data
• Conversations monitoring
• Sentiment analysis
• Traffic analysis
• Team collaboration features

06 Ahrefs for SEO analysis

Ahrefs is one of the competitive analysis tools for SEO strategy analysis. 

You can use it to compare your positioning with your competitors. There are several metrics to keep an eye on: 

• Search volume
• Keyword difficulty
• CPC
• Position
• Traffic volume
• Domain Rate

So, how do you identify SEO competitors?

1. Go to Site Explorer
2. Paste your domain URL
3. Enter the Organic Competitors tab

With the simple visual representation, you can easily discover your biggest competitors and compare your performance over time.

Additionally, you can use Ahrefs for:

• Your competitors’ traffic sources and locations investigation
• Content gap detection
• Identification of your competitors’ featured snippets in Google search
• Finding backlink gaps

The good news is that some of the Ahrefs’s features are free of charge.

Key metrics:

• Traffic share by domains
• Keyword research and detailed metrics
• Best ranking keywords insights
• Websites’ insights and comparison
• Backlink and content gaps detection

07 Kompyte for competitive intelligence

Kompyte offers real-time competitive intelligence at scale. 

It’s one of the competitor analysis tools you can use to track your competitors’:

• Websites
• Reviews
• Content
• Social media presence
• Ads
• Job postings

Their unique feature is battle cards. 

These are competitive analysis dashboards that facilitate comparison. They include pricing, strengths, kill points, and other valuable insights.

This competitor research tool ensures an all-encompassing approach to your analysis. Thanks to AI, it can ignore all the spammy buzz, focusing on the most important insights.

Some of the best Kompyte features include automated workflows and analytics with market research tools. They guarantee in-depth insights and a complex approach to competitor analysis.

While Kompyte is a dedicated competitor analysis tool with AI-powered features, it has one shortcoming. It doesn’t collect mentions.

Because of this, it misses out on first-hand insights from your customers and your competitors’ customers. 

Key features:

• Automated workflows
• Competitor analytics and research tools
• AI-powered features
• Battle cards
• SWOT analysis support
• Win/loss analysis
• Deal winning insights

08 Hootsuite for social media competitive analysis

It’s one of the most respected and recognized social media analytics tools in the game. 

It monitors the performance of business profiles on 35 social media platforms.

With this competitive intelligence tool, you can precisely track your competitors’ social media activities, draw unique conclusions, and make data-driven decisions regarding your own business strategy on social media.

You can see how your competitors engage their communities, what content they post, if they run any contests, and how their marketing campaigns resonate with their audience.

With this competitive analysis tool you get detailed insights both into your competitor’s posting strategy and their audience’s reception. 

This way, you know what works for their audience and can leverage this information building your own marketing strategy.

Hootsuite also offers hashtag and keyword research and tracking.

Lastly, you can easily create a comprehensive competitor benchmarking report. It can help share insights about competitors between different teams and stakeholders within your company.

Hootsuite is a partially free competitive analysis tool. You can test its premium features for 30 days for free. 

Key features:

• Detailed stats of your competitors’ posts and their reception like engagement, audience growth, posting frequency etc.
• Demographic data 
• Insights into your competitor’s best posts and hashtag use
• Hashtag and keyword tracking
• Your competitor’s marketing strategy analysis tools

09 Spyfu for paid traffic insights

Competition expands beyond organic traffic and online presence.

There’s also the paid search.

One of the ways to acquire search engine traffic is to use Google Ads and buy yourself exposure. 

Similarly to organic traffic, competition here is based on keywords. 

In this case, however, you pay to display your advertising in the top search results or elsewhere on Google. 

Spyfu is one of the competitor analysis tools that can help you gain insight into your competitors’ paid traffic.

The tool shows you what paid keywords your competitors currently rank for and ranked in the past. Spyfu also provides keyword research tools and keyword suggestions based on your target market.

Thanks to its CPC analyzer, you can easily find quick SEO wins and outperform your competitors in a flash. 

Additionally, Spyfu provides backlink insights and detection of linking opportunities. By leveraging this feature, you can also boost your position in organic search.

Key features:

• Recognizing threats 
• Tracking your competitors’ changes in ad spending
• Suggestions for keyword groups
• CPC analyzer
• Sorting keywords by cost per click to discover quick wins
• Market positioning analysis
• Keyword research tools
• Backlinks builder

10 SE Ranking for SEO analysis

Over 500,000 users chose the SE Ranking platform to get comprehensive SEO tools to audit and improve their websites’ performance.

Whether you want to start a new business or gain an advantage in your industry, competitor and keyword research is your starting point.

You can use SE Ranking’s competitive analysis tool to reveal your rivals’ organic and paid marketing strategies. 

For example, you can find competitors’ keywords that drive traffic, conduct backlinks monitoring, and spy on Google Ads marketing campaigns.

SE Ranking released a historical data update for those needing a more profound competitor analysis. It allows users to analyze domains and keywords from back to February 2020.

That’s an impressive collection of historical data.

You can check changes in website traffic, keywords, and backlinks by selecting a month and a year.

How can you get an advantage using this feature? 

By analyzing competitor performance in dynamics, you’ll get valuable insights about:

• Changes in the target market
• Traffic drops and the reasons behind them
• Effective practices of competitor’s promotion strategies
• PPC competitor research of best-performing keywords

Based on the comprehensive SEO competitor analysis with SE Ranking, you make more thoughtful SEO decisions, save the A/B testing budget, and promptly respond to market changes.

Features & metrics:

• Search results overview by country
• Domain and page trust
• Traffic cost and estimate
• Backlinks & referring domains
• Keyword rankings
• Distribution of organic and paid competitors
• CPC and number of advertisers
• SERP features

11 Owletter for email monitoring

Owletter lets you discover and understand your competitors’ email marketing activities.

This competitor analysis tool gets insights from email messages your competitors send. 

Here’s what you can learn about their email marketing:

• Email content strategy
• SPAM reputation
• Schedule
• Changes in frequency
• Trends
• Topics

This will help you develop your own email marketing plan and build an effective email marketing strategy.

You can either compete by providing better insights and more useful examples or take a completely different approach to stand out.

It’s up to you, but with Owletter, you make informed decisions.

The best thing about this tool is that it not only captures your competitors’ emails but also analyzes them and provides actionable insights.

Key features:

• Email marketing strategies analysis
• Schedule analysis
• Email content analysis
• Email marketing campaigns monitoring and analysis

12 Majestic for backlink analysis

Majestic is one of the competitor analysis tools focusing on backlink data. It helps businesses understand and improve their online presence. 

By analyzing your website’s and competitors’ backlinks, Majestic provides insights into the quality and quantity of links, which are crucial factors in search engine ranking.

One of Majestic’s key uses is identifying the strength of a competitor’s backlink profile. It shows you where your competitors are getting their links from and the authority of these linking sites. 

This can reveal opportunities for building similar or better-quality links to improve your own search engine rankings.

Majestic also offers detailed metrics like Citation Flow and Trust Flow, which measure the influence and trustworthiness of your website’s backlinks.

Comparing these metrics with those of your competitors helps you understand where you stand regarding link quality and authority.

Additionally, Majestic’s backlink history feature shows how a competitor’s link profile has grown or declined over time.

This insight is valuable for identifying successful link-building strategies or spotting potential weaknesses in a competitor’s approach.

Key features:

• Comprehensive backlink data
• Metrics like Citation Flow and Trust Flow
• Tracking backlink growth over time

13 Google Analytics for user behavior analysis

Google Analytics is an essential tool for competitor analysis. It offers detailed insights into website performance and user behavior. 

Google Analytics helps businesses understand where their traffic comes from, such as organic search or social media, and compare this to industry benchmarks or competitor data to identify successful strategies.

The tool provides demographic information about users, such as age, location, and interests, allowing businesses to see how their audience compares to competitors. 

Additionally, Google Analytics tracks user behavior on a website, such as which pages are visited and where users exit. 

This data can reveal areas where a website may underperform compared to competitors, guiding optimization efforts.

Conversion tracking in Google Analytics is also crucial, as it shows how effectively a website turns visitors into customers, offering insights into the sales funnel’s strengths and weaknesses. 

Key features:

• Detailed traffic sources
• Demographic insights
• Behavioral data
• Conversion tracking

14 Google Trends for search behavior analysis

Google Trends is a powerful tool for competitor analysis, providing real-time and historical data on search behaviors. 

It allows you to compare the search volume of your brand against competitors, offering insights into relative brand awareness and market presence. 

The tool’s geographical insights help identify where competitors are strong or weak, guiding targeted marketing efforts.

Google Trends is also essential for spotting emerging trends by tracking rising or declining search terms, enabling businesses to stay ahead of market shifts. 

It reveals seasonal patterns in consumer interest, aiding in the timing of promotions. 

Additionally, the tool suggests related queries and topics, helping businesses understand shifts in consumer preferences and identify content gaps.

What is the best thing about Google Trends?

It’s one of the free competitor analysis tools!

If you ask me, it’s enough of a good reason to give it a go.

Key features:

• Compare multiple search terms
• Customizable time ranges for trend analysis
• Regional interest data
• The search volume index
• Related queries and topics suggestions

Conclusion

Competitive analysis is a must-have these days. 

What competitor analysis tool should you choose?

There is no one-size-fits-all solution. 

Competitive analysis will bring you marketing data about your rivals. It will help your business become an industry leader in many different fields, including

• Search rankings and keyword rankings
• Social media
• Content strategy
• Advertising
• Market trends
• Email marketing
• Overall business strategy
• and much more!

From the above, detect the most strategic areas for your business. Focus on closely monitoring them and gaining a competitive edge over your competitors in those areas.

Whether you want to become an industry leader, increase market share, or just check your competitive landscape, I strongly suggest using one of the tools to make the process easier and more effective! 

Key takeaways:

• Competitor analysis tools are your key to becoming a market leader. They track and analyze your performance and compare it with your competitors’. 
• Take a complex approach to competitor analysis. Remember that there are multiple areas to keep an eye on. Detect the strategic ones to monitor closely. 
• In today’s digitally oriented business world, it’s crucial to track your competitors’ online activities. Try Brand24, a professional media monitoring tool, to stay informed about your competitors’ online performance metrics and their audience’s reception.