Top 10 Competitive Intelligence Tools to Use in 2025

Competitive intelligence is like watching your grandma bake a cake. You’re not stealing the recipe but learning how to do it from the best in the business. And that’s what companies do! In fact, even 90% of Fortune 500 companies rely on competitive intelligence to stay ahead of the game. So, if you didn’t start yet, it’s about time. Let me present to you the top 10 competitive intelligence tools that will make this process as easy as pie.

Competitive intelligence tools provide a 360-degree view of the business environment surrounding your brand.

They help you measure your performance against industry rivals, benchmark media presence, track technologies used by competitors, and identify untapped opportunities to leverage competitive advantages.

What is competitive intelligence?

Competitive intelligence (CI) is the process of systematic gathering and analyzing information about:

• competitors,
• customers,
• products,
• market niche,
• and other aspects of the business environment

to make reasonable & data-driven business decisions.

In other words, competitive intelligence is understanding and learning as much as possible about what is going on in the world outside your brand or company to increase your competitiveness.

It’s worth underlining that competitive intelligence involves collecting information exclusively from ethical and legal sources.

These include publicly available data such as competitors’ websites, press releases, financial reports, industry publications, social media activity, customer reviews, etc.

It also leverages market research, surveys, and publicly accessible databases to understand trends and consumer preferences.

So, competitive intelligence avoids espionage or unethical practices, focusing instead on openly accessible and transparent data.

This ensures that insights gained are not only actionable but also follow legal and professional standards.

What are competitive intelligence tools?

Now that we understand what competitive intelligence really is, it’s time to define competitive intelligence software.

So, competitive intelligence tools or software are specialized platforms designed to help businesses efficiently gather, analyze, and act on data related to their competitive landscape.

These tools offer advanced search capabilities and automate the process of tracking competitors, customers, emerging market trends, and industry insights, saving time and providing factual intelligence.

In practice, such solutions allow businesses to monitor competitors’ marketing strategies, product launches, pricing changes, customer sentiment, and even the technologies they use.

Competitive intelligence tools can also provide insights into customer preferences, identify gaps in the market, and suggest ways to improve your market position.

In the fast-paced world of 2025, competitive intelligence tools are absolutely necessary for staying ahead of the competition and ensuring your business remains agile and informed.

So, let’s dive into the top 10 tools that can empower your CI strategy this year and beyond!

Best Competitive Intelligence Tools:

01 Brand24 for reputation benchmarking

Free 14-day trial.

Let’s start our list of the best competitive intelligence tools with Brand24.

This media monitoring platform aims to track and analyze your online mentions & manage your and your competitors’ brand reputation in real-time.

Brand24 has some significant advantages compared to other media monitoring tools.

First of all, it collects mentions from an impressive range of online sources:

• Social media, like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X (Twitter), YouTube, Reddit, LinkedIn, Quora, Telegram, and Twitch;
• Websites, blogs, video platforms, podcasts, forums & other sites;
• Review sites and newsletters.

Secondly, Brand24 offers many incredibly useful AI-powered features, such as AI Insights, AI Brand Assistant, AI Trends Analysis, and much more!

How does it look in practice? Let’s do a quick example! Imagine you’re a representative of Qatar Airways, one of the best airlines in the world.

Mentions & sentiment analysis

First, let’s do the brief overview of Qatar Airways performance when it comes to online mentions and their sentiment.

The Brand24 Mentions tab allows you to see all your brand mentions. You can filter results by dates, sources, sentiment, influence score, and many other categories.

As you can see below, the central point is the chart presenting your mentions volume (blue line) and reach (green line) trends.

With a single click, you can change the view to the chart presenting your sentiment analysis. The green line indicates positive brand mentions, while red presents the negative ones.

If you wonder what are these exclamation marks on the first chart – this is the so-called AI Anomaly Detector.

In short, this Brand24 AI-powered feature identifies unusual behavior in your tracked project (i.e., a sudden spike in mentions). Moreover, it crawls through the web to find out the most possible cause for that anomaly.

You might have noticed that on December 18th, Qatar Airways experienced a significant rise in negative brand mentions.

According to the AI Anomaly Detector it was caused by some phishing activities by fake Qatar Airways customer service accounts.

Compare Projects & Periods

If you want to benchmark your business or brand, you must have a reference point.

It can be your performance relative to your competitor or relative to another period. Brand24 is equipped with both comparison types.

The “Compare Projects” feature allows you to benchmark your business performance with other brands.

With the overview tab, you can compare your social and non-social media mentions power, Presence Score, Advertising Value Equivalent (AVE), and the volume of the user-generated content (UGC).

Below, you can see a handy table comparing Qatar Airways’ performance to that of its direct competitor, Etihad Airways.

“Compare Periods” is the second feature in Brand24’s Comparison tab.

You surely guessed that it’s all about benchmarking your current brand performance with a similar period in the past. That gives you actionable insights about the results of your efforts.

Key features:

• Compare Projects
• Compare Periods
• Mentions volume & reach
• Sentiment analysis
• AI Anomaly Detector
• Presence Score
• Share of Voice
• AI Insights
• AI Brand Assistant
• AI Topic Analysis

02 Similarweb for website analysis & audience insights

Similarweb is a competitive intelligence tool providing detailed website analysis and audience behavior insights.

It allows you to discover new ways of increasing paid & organic traffic and uncover new opportunities for broadening your audience.

The tool offers strategic insights into your rivals’ website traffic, resembling simplified Google Analytics. In practice, you can track multiple metrics of your competitors’ websites, such as:

• Traffic sources,
• User engagement,
• Traffic geolocalisation,
• Top referring sites,
• Top organic & paid keyword,
• Pageviews,
• Bounce rates.

As for audience insights, Similarweb allows you to identify detailed audience interests, other websites they visit, their top topics, and their direct competitors.

The tool collects all the data directly and aggregates those from public online sources.

Key features:

• Website organic and paid traffic analysis
• Detailed audience analysis
• Competitive trackers
• Competitor detecting
• Consumer journey mapping
• Affiliate marketing tracking

03 Google Trends for market demand identification

As you might know, Trends is a free service offered by Google that analyzes the popularity of top search queries in Google Search across various languages and regions.

It’s also a competitive intelligence platform that enables businesses to identify market demand, spot trends, and understand consumer behavior over time.

By leveraging real-time and historical data, Google Trends provides insights into seasonal patterns, emerging topics, and regional variations in search interest.

This makes it invaluable for planning marketing campaigns, content calendars, and product launches.

Additionally, it allows users to benchmark their performance against competitors by comparing search trends for similar topics or brands.

The tool’s ability to uncover long-tail keywords and niche markets allows businesses to adjust their strategies for better audience targeting.

It can also be used for international market analysis, identifying regions with high demand,d and tailoring your future actions.

Key features:

• Real-time search data analysis
• Historical data for long-term trend identification
• Geographic segmentation of search trends
• Seasonal trend insights
• Comparison of multiple search queries
• Identification of related topics and search queries

04 Semrush for a comprehensive website traffic comparison

In the first blink of an eye, Semrush seems to be nothing more than an SEO analysis tool. What a miss!

In fact, Semrush is a comprehensive platform offering vast competitive intelligence capabilities.

Two of the most exciting tools from the Semrush toolkit that play a key role in evaluating market trends and giving you a competitive edge are:

• Semrush Market Explorer – this tool provides you with an overview of the market’s competitive landscape.
  
  By inputting a single domain, you receive a list of organic competitors along with their market share, overall market size, audience demography & geolocalisation, and more.

• Semrush Traffic Analytics – the tool that allows you to analyze your competitors’ most important metrics regarding their website traffic.
  
  Here, you can check the visits to your competitive domains, trends by device type, traffic sources, customer journey, distribution by country, etc.

As mentioned, Semrush offers more than thirty different digital marketing solutions. Such a toolkit makes it one of the most exciting competitive intelligence tools.

Key features:

• Advanced keyword research and SEO analysis
• Website audience insights
• Traffic sources and customer journey
• Market traffic trends
• Mapping the competitive landscape

05 Contify for understanding your business environment

Contify is a market and competitive intelligence platform that helps businesses track information on competitors, industries, and customers.

It scans the network to identify and process data from various sources: news, company, government & regulatory websites, job portals, and social media.

Contify uses its machine learning & NLP algorithms to extract competitive insights that are adjusted to your business objectives.

If needed, you can also narrow down the market research with advanced taxonomy and smart filter search.

You can utilize the power of this platform for in-depth competitor analysis.

In practice, you can track things like pricing information updates, growing industry trends, upcoming niche events, or new business partnerships established by your competitors.

Remember, though, that Contify is pretty difficult to learn due to its multiple features, average UX, and a bit outdated user interface.

Key features:

• Personalized Newsfeed
• Smart filters search
• Advanced taxonomy
• Email alerts
• Newsletter Manager

06 Wappalyzer for competitors’ tech stock tracking

There is no doubt that technology can be a game-changing competitive advantage for businesses. Knowing your competitors’ tech solutions can inspire you to optimize or update your present tech stack.

And now, Wappalyzer enters the stage.

Wappalyzer is a small competitive intelligence tool designed to uncover the technologies used on competitors’ websites.

It detects which content management systems (CMS), web frameworks, server software, e-commerce platforms, analytics tools, and other tech stacks your competitors work on.

Wappalyzer runs as a browser extension, and as such, it’s very simple to use.

Key features:

• Technology & contact details lookup
• Browser extension
• Salesforce, HubSpot, and Pipedrive integrations
• APIs

07 Owletter for email strategy inspirations

Owletter is another task-specific competitive intelligence tool. It is specialized in tracking one of the most critical marketing channels – emails.

In short, the tool captures and saves all the emails that are being sent from your competitors’ domains.

Of course, Owletter’s value extends beyond mere data collection. Its true power lies in the tool’s analytical features.

Owletter provides you with actionable insights regarding when your competitors send their emails and newsletters or which words they use in their subject lines.

By monitoring multiple competitors, you can identify niche trends and potential communication frequency changes due to seasonality.

Such knowledge can help you discover what works well and adjust your email marketing strategy.

Key features:

• Competitors email analytics
• Summary email roundups
• Competitors email screenshots
• Email alerts

08 G2 for knowing your brand niche

G2 is not a typical competitive intelligence tool. In fact, it’s one of the largest peer-to-peer review sites and software marketplaces on the internet.

However, when you dig deeper, it turns out that you can use its market intelligence features for basic competitive research and benchmark your brand accurately.

Personally, I fell in love with the G2 Grid view. It is probably the most effective and insightful competitive data visualization among all intelligence tools.

Grid view allows you to benchmark all the software from a particular niche regarding market presence and customer satisfaction.

Besides, you can easily adjust the view to your needs by applying size and functionality filters. There’s also a “Trending” option underlining the momentum leaders.

G2 also allows you to juxtapose two, three, or even four tools directly.

Key features:

• Direct comparison and benchmarking
• Adjustable grid view
• Multiple filters

09 VisualPing for spotting your rivals’ website updates

VisualPing is a simple competitive intelligence solution aimed at monitoring website changes. After entering your competitor’s website URL, the tool will monitor it and notify you about any updates.

VisualPing is perfect for tracking competitors’ price updates, product launches, or new content.

You can define the frequency of updates and notifications, as well as if you’d like to track the whole page or just the selected area.

The tool is a wonderful add-on to other, more comprehensive competitive intelligence tools.

Key features:

• Automated website monitoring
• Instant change alerts
• Easy setup with URL entry
• Customizable monitoring frequency

10 ChatGPT for intel support

Wait, what? ChatGPT among competitive intelligence tools?

Of course! ChatGPT (and other advanced generative AI tools) can be an incredibly useful competitive intelligence assistant.

Some examples of how you can use ChatGPT for competitive intel purposes include examining market trends, creating industry reports, summarizing written intel, and testing market hypotheses.

Actually, how far you’ll go with that depends on your imagination, patience, and training skills.

The main problem with ChatGPT is its fallibility. You can’t entirely rely on its output and must have a double-check procedure.

Nevertheless, using ChatGPT to support other competitive intelligence tools can significantly boost your effectiveness.

Key features:

• Natural language understanding
• Large knowledge base
• Real-time information retrieval
• Customizable interaction models

Conclusion

By its nature, competitive intelligence is a complex and diverse process, and so are competitive intelligence tools.

From the deep insights of media monitoring platforms like Brand24 to the technical audits by Wappalyzer, each tool offers a unique feature. The true power lies in combining these tools to cover all bases.

To succeed, you need to wisely adjust competitive intelligence tools to your needs and empower your brand with actionable insights.

Final Thoughts:

• You shouldn’t rely on a single solution. Combining different types of competitive intelligence tools can provide a holistic view of your competitive landscape.
• But it’s good to have at least one powerful and comprehensive tool allowing you to monitor your brand media mentions, perform a competitive analysis, and understand the power of your online presence compared to your industry rivals.
• To make a wise choice, you must define your needs and the competitive intelligence scope you want to focus on.
• When considering a tool, pay attention to how extensive and varied the data sources are (generally speaking, the more, the better!)

Now is the time to begin your competitive intelligence journey!

Begin exploring various competitive intelligence tools now and unlock the benefits they can bring to your business. Start a Brand24 free 14-day trial, get valuable competitor insights, and grow like crazy!