Top 10 Competitive Intelligence Tools to Use in 2024

If you really want to succeed in business, you should follow the example of the best. And what do they do? Well, as much as 90% of Fortune 500 companies practice competitive intelligence. So, if you didn’t start yet, it’s about time. Here, you’ll learn about the top competitive intelligence tools to use in 2024.

Competitive intelligence tools streamline understanding the whole business environment surrounding your brand.

They measure your performance compared to your industry rivals, benchmark your social media presence, track technologies used by brand competitors, and help in endless other ways to identify & use possible competitive advantages in your favor.

Competitive intelligence (CI), contrary to what its name may suggest, is much more than just knowing your competitors. It’s the process of defining, collecting, and analyzing as much information as possible about your marketplace, target customers, and competitors.

But, as it’s so comprehensive, competitive intelligence must be very complicated, expensive, and reserved only for global corporations. Right?

Fortunately – not! There are so many amazing competitive intelligence tools on the market today. With them, literally any company can gain priceless knowledge about its business environment.

The right question is: which competitive intelligence tools should you use?

Without further ado, let me guide you through the jungle of CI tools!

Best Competitive Intelligence Tools:

1. Brand24 for reputation benchmarking
2. Similarweb for traffic comparison
3. Google Trends for market demand identification
4. Semrush for website traffic comparison
5. Contify for understanding your business environment
6. Wappalyzer for competitors’ tech stock tracking
7. Owletter for email strategy inspirations
8. G2 for knowing your brand niche
9. VisualPing for spotting your rivals’ website updates
10. ChatGPT for intel support

01 Brand24 for reputation benchmarking

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Let’s start our list of the best competitive intelligence tools with Brand24. It is a media monitoring and social listening platform that allows you to analyze & manage your business reputation in real time.

Brand24 gathers mentions from multiple sources: websites, videos, podcasts, forums, review sites, and – most importantly – social media platforms. Namely, this social listening tool monitors Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X (Twitter), YouTube, Reddit, LinkedIn, Quora, Telegram, and Twitch.

Now, what superpowers regarding competitive intelligence does Brand24 offer?

Social media presence

Measuring social media performance is one of the critical CI and marketing efforts. Knowing what people think (and write) about you and your business rivals is crucial to evaluating your communications strategy, discovering possible product update ideas, preventing reputation crises, and many more.

To discover what the attitude towards your brand is, you must “listen to” what others say. And that’s the primary Brand24’s power – that tool allows you to track the volume & reach of your brand mentions.

When opening the Mentions tab, you can see the chart presenting the fluctuations of your brand mentions in the case of volume (green line) and reach (blue line) in a given period.

Here is the chart for Etihad Airways – a worldwide-known airline from the United Arab Emirates.

When you switch to the Sentiment view, you can check how your brand mentions translate to the feelings towards your brand.

It’s evident that in the case of Etihad Airways, something significant must have happened on February 8th. You can discover the reason for the sudden spike manually or trust Brand24’s AI Anomaly Detector. Let’s go back to the Mentions & Reach chart.

You’ll see the conclusion by artificial intelligence when you click on the exclamation mark.

It seems that Etihad Airways made a smart move. Becoming a new sponsor of one of the most popular cricket teams in the world met with a very positive reception.

Okay, but how might this knowledge be helpful from a competitive intelligence perspective?

Brand24 allows you to monitor not only your brand but also your competitors. That’s how you can discover interesting competitor strategies and inspire yourself. On the other hand, competitive analysis can help you learn from someone else’s mistakes and avoid them.

Let’s imagine you’re a Qatar Airways representative. Knowing that your direct competitor (Etihad Airways) has had significant PR success by sponsoring a cricket team, you might consider doing the same to the company’s business operations team.

Online Presence & Reputation metrics

Another Brand24’s competitive intelligence feature is the Presence Score. In fact, it is a performance metric that visualizes your online exposure and helps you understand the online popularity of your brand or company.

Here is the Presence Score of a gaming company, Rockstar Games. Their brand awareness level is relatively high and remains stable.

The second interesting metric giving you a brief overview is the Reputation Score – an indicator reflecting your overall online reputation.

By monitoring it, you can gain insights into how your brand is perceived compared to your competitors. Also, you can use this information to improve your marketing and communication strategies.

Below, you can see the Rockstar Games’s Reputation Score. Due to various lawsuits and leaks of the details about their upcoming game, their online reception continuously worsens. Hey, Rockstar Games! You should seriously consider changing your PR strategy!

Comparison tab

If you want to benchmark your business or brand, you must have a point of reference. It can be your performance in relation to your competitor or relation 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).

“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:

• Competitor analysis
• Mentions volume & reach
• Sentiment analysis
• AI Anomaly Detector
• Presence Score
• Reputation Score
• Compare Projects
• Compare Periods
• Share of Voice

02 Similarweb for traffic comparison

Similarweb is a competitive intelligence tool providing detailed website traffic 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.

Similarweb helps to identify key niche rivals, perform detailed competitor research, analyze traffic data (both paid and organic), and check the traffic’s geographical distribution.

The tool collects all the data directly and aggregates those from public online sources. That enables you to track and compare detailed information, such as visits, pageviews, bounce rates, average visit duration, and traffic sources.

With such a data set, you can draw actionable conclusions, be inspired by your competitors’ actions, and make many informed business decisions.

Key features:

• Website traffic analysis
• Audience geographical distribution
• Competitive benchmarking
• Competitor detecting

03 Google Trends for market demand identification

Surprised? You shouldn’t be!

Besides its marketing potential, Google Trends can be a powerful competitive intelligence tool and irreplaceable help in market research.

Google Trends enables you to analyze the popularity of search queries related to your niche services or products and, thus, extract precious insights into market demand. Primarily since you operate on Google’s own reliable data.

The data you’ll get might help you plan how to improve your products, decide on pricing, and market them effectively. And that’s a real competitive edge!

Key features:

• Search query analysis
• Comparison tool
• Regional insights
• Related queries and topics

04 Semrush for website traffic comparison

Most people perceive Semrush as an SEO analysis tool. And while this is true, it is also a huge underestimate. In fact, Semrush is a platform offering over 30 marketing intelligence tools.

When it comes to competitive intelligence itself, there are:

1. Semrush Market Explorer is a tool that provides you with an overview of the market’s competitive landscape. It gives you the list of organic competitors, the market size, and market shares among competitors.
2. Semrush Traffic Analytics allows you to analyze the most important metrics of your competitors regarding their website traffic.

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

Any downsides? Well, many users complain about the complicated pricing structure and generally quite expensive packages.

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

As you surely know, technology can be a game-changing competitive advantage for businesses. Knowing the tech solutions of your competitors 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. This is probably the most effective and insightful competitive data visualization I’ve seen among all the intelligence tools. It 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 and social listening 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.

You need to wisely adjust competitive intelligence tools to your needs and empower your brand with actionable insights to achieve success.

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!)
• Competitive intelligence tools are at your fingertips. You don’t need to pay hundreds of dollars monthly to understand your competitive environment.

Begin exploring various competitive intelligence tools now and unlock the benefits they can bring to your business. Start a free trial!