Top 14 competitor analysis tools

Start comparing now!

Are you laggin behind your competitors? Franticallly trying to achieve the same success rate?

Look and learn...

Competitor analysis tools will help you track, analyze, and learn from your competitors' strategies. Then, you can use that information to fire up your marketing campaigns and win big!

Okay, I realize there are hundreds of competitor analysis tools to choose from, and knowing which is going to work best for you and your brand, can be a pain.

No probs, I've got you covered. I've done all the resarch for you and listed my top 12 competitor analysis tools. At this point, let me save you some time while I reveal my personal favorite. Yes, I am absolutely and totally biased. Quick Search - it has the numerous features of the other tools, in one package.

Doesn't get any better than that!

Quick Search - Coca-Cola v RedBull - compare audience interests.

compare your brand with your competitors'!

Keep reading for more information. I'm giving you the what and why, then the tools. Ease of use and a deep dive into the key features.

What is competitor analysis?

Easy one.

Identifying and evaluating your competitors. Their strengths and weaknesses. How they compare to your business.

What level of brand awareness do your competitors have in your market? More or less than your brand? Find their prices, earnings reports, share prices, customer care best practices, company cuture, distribution, and a whole lot more.

Use these insights to fine-tune your brand's marketing stragey. To outsmart your competitors.

If you'd like more info, I suggest you read How to conduct a competitor analysis. Recommended by experts, it's a comprehensive guide explaining the what, why, and how of competitor analysis.

Why do competitor analysis?

I've already said that you'll be able to boost your own marketing strategy. You'll also find openings in the market that competitors have missed. You'll find new areas of opportunity that are proving successful to your competitors, that you've missed. For instance, countries you should be targeting that are working for them.

Okay... enough.

If you'd like to learn more, take a look at How to conduct a competitor analysis. It's a comprehensive guide explaining the what, why, and how of competitor analysis.

Now let's look at some tools...

Best competitor analysis tools

Using competitor analysis tools – software or apps - will help you find information about your competition’s marketing strategies and the secrets to their success within your shared market. Competitor analysis tools like the 12 I've found below will save you time, while identifying data you may normally miss

The cool thing? While these tools will help you understand your competitors, they’ll also monitor your own web performance and find the data on your company that you need to continuously improve.

1. Quick Search

I'm kicking off with my personal favorite.

Talkwalker's powerful social media search engine - Quick Search - gives you an instant overview of your brand online. Brining extensive coverage of social networks, news sites, blogs, and forums. You’ll be able to monitor the conversations surrounding your brand, the influencers talking about you, and the trends in your industry.

Working in real-time, you can enter multiple brands - your competitors - and compare sentiment, with 90% accuracy. Also, discover audience demographics, gender, location, mentions, and more. Using filters, you can dig deep into trends and topics and find the stories that are currently impacting.

Quick Search - enter the brands you want to compare, for instant insights.

Boom! You know how your competitors are performing. Areas you're missing out on. Ideas for content creation that are going to resonate with consumers.

Quick Search - Nike v Reebok v Adidas - compare share of countries.

2. Wappalyzer

This add-on is one of the most interesting competitor analysis tools in the game because of how it operates. It runs as a Firefox add-on and only does one thing – but boy oh boy, does it do that one thing well.

Wappalyzer is a cross-platform utility that reveals technologies that are used on different websites. Layman’s terms? Wappalyzer acts as an add-on to your browser and can identify the types of software running on a specific website. You can click on your competition’s websites and get a quick scan of what software they’re using. Now, that's awesome!

This is an essential tool for understanding the success behind your competitors’ websites. Yes, a skilled web service company could hide this information. But, it’s more likely that your competitors haven't paid for this. Go take a look!

The best part? Wappalyzer is free!

Competitor analysis tool revealing what tech The New York Times website uses.

3. BuiltWith

Described as a business intelligence and competitive analysis tool, BuiltWith provides profiles of websites, lead generation, sales and business intelligence, eCommerce data, and competitive analysis. Impressive, no?

Using BuiltWith in your competitive analysis will identify key market segments that your brand may be missing out on. Track your competitors and build a list of prospects.

Web technology information profiler tool that will identify competitors and prospects.

You can track data for different market segments and find usage trends and market share information for the whole Internet. Alongside insights about competing technologies and how they're performing. Competitor comparison means you can find:

• If a technology is gaining or losing market share
• If a technology's competitors are increasing market share at a faster rate
• The rate of churn between technology competitors
• Sites that shifted from one competitor to another
  
  

The neat thing about BuiltWith is that it offers a free plan to use for individual site lookups, plus Basic, Pro, and Enterprise access. That way, if you only need a select few services, you’re not roped into paying a giant fee.

4. WooRank

WooRank is an SEO checker and digital marketing tool. It'll scan your website and give you an audit of its SEO. The reason I've included it in my list of competitor analysis tools is that you can look at your competition too.

The tool allows you to add three competitors, so you can perform a comparison of:

• Technical SEO
• Site performance and usability
• Keyword usage
• Backlink quality
• Social media engagement
  
  

WooRank's Keyword Tool measures and tracks keyword rankings and SEO impact. Your competitors are added automatically, meaning you'll receive insights into their marketing strategies, their goals, and their priorities. Not only does it monior your website's SEO performsnce, but the keyword ranking and landing pages of your competitors.

You can sign up for a 14-day free trial. Give it a go! If you're happy to pay, there are various price plans that won't break the bank, and could see your website out ranking those of your competitors and increasing traffic. ROI is a given!

Keyword Tool is WooRank's keyword research, tracking, and competitor analysis tool.

5. Google AdWords Keyword Planner

The tool is for finding new keywords - yep, the name kind of gives it away. With it, you can search your competitors' sites and the web for keywords that apply to your business and target market. It's a great tool for staying on top of keyword trends. To refine search campaigns and ensure that your content is relevant.

Enter a competitor landing page and Keyword Planner will ascertain relevant keywords.

6. SEMrush

This is the ultimate competitor analysis tool because it’s an all-in-one digital marketing suite that covers SEO, PPC, keyword research, competitive analysis, social media, PR, content, and even more. The SEMrush software contains over 30 tools with the ability to analyze 3.7 billion keywords as well as 4 trillion backlinks.

OMG!

SEMrush offers SEO audit, position tracking, competitive intelligence, and more.

You can build your own toolkit and shoose the ones that make the most sense for the projects you’re working on. There are specialty kits for SEO, advertising, social media, content marketing, and competitive research.

Features particular to competitor analysis include:

• Find competitors' best keywords
• Discover new organic competitors
• Find competitors' strategies and budgets
• Analyze competitors' ad copy, keywords, and display ads
• Find new competitors in AdWords and Bing ads
• Discover best-performing product listing ads of competitors
  
  

There are three price plans available - Pro, Guru, and Business. Each offering a different level of features, dependin on what you're business needs.

7. SpyFu

Originally named GoogSpy, SpyFu is a search analytics tool that shows users keywords that websites buy on Google AdWords. That means you can identify all the keywords that your competitors have bought, and every ad test they've run.

It also reveals the keywords that they're ranking for. You can then trace back and find the content and backlinks that are bringing them this ranking. Use this data to see how your competitors' backlinks are working, then hunt them down for your own website.

SpyFu reveals the search marketing strategies of your competitors.

SpyFu gets this data by webscraping, refreshing its data on a monthly basis. This gives you an overview of what's happening with larger trends in SEM and SEO rather than a real-time tracking engine.

This competitor analysis tool finds the keywords that are most relevant in your market as well as the core, niche keywords that your competitors are using.

Impressive! be inspired by their choices, and avoid their pitfalls.

Find your competitors' keywords and ad tests.

8. Owletter

This competitive analysis tool captures, stores, and analyzes email sent from a website. It means you can monitor your competitors’ email and discover what's working for them, and what's not.

Using Owletter gives you access to many insights, including:

• Whether your competitors have a spam reputation
• If they follow a schedule for sending email
• If they change their schedules according to season
• Trending topics
• Undiscovered opportunities
• And more
  
  

Owletter takes a screenshot of the email you receive - you need to be on your competitors’ mailing lists - store it, analyze it, and alert you if the system thinks there are important insights.

There's a 30-day free trial and if you do decide to sigh up, you only pay for what you want.

Monitor your competitors' email marketing newsletters.

9. SimilarWeb

Let’s talk about SimilarWeb. This competitive analysis tool will help you benchmark against your competition, monitor your industry, and reveal your competitors’ analytics and online strategy.

This tool can help you discover potential opportunities – partners or leads. Help you identify emerging trends, and even explain consumer intent and journey. SimilarWeb collects raw data, cleans and organizes it, processes it by learned algorithms, finalizing the statistics that you need, and bringing them right to you. Could ask for more.

Competitive intelligence tool providing customer and competitor insights.

10. Followerwonk by Moz

With Followerwonk, you can optimize your Twitter accounts to boost social growth. Using this tool allows you to find, analyze, and optimize your social growth by digging deeper into Twitter analytics.Find and connect with new influencers within your niche, use super-actionable visualizations to compare your social graphs to your competitors and easily share your reports with your company to get everyone on the same page.

Followerwonk lets you analyze any Twitter account - I'm talking competitors - so you can optimize your Twitter marketing strategy. You can compare your Twitter followers with two other Twitter accounts' followers. You can also compare who you follow, with other accounts - yes, competitors.

Compare your social graph with competitors, consumers, and industry leaders.

Find and connect with new influencers within your niche. Use super-actionable visualizations to compare your social graphs with those of your competitors, and easily share your reports throughout your company so everyone's on the same page.

Compare your Twitter account with competitors to find overlaps and new influencers.

11. Ahrefs

Ahrefs is a powerful SEO tool with features that include:

• Backlink audit - get the data you need about your existing link profile
• Find link prospects - monitor your competitors' links, and grab for your own site
• Validate keywords and analyze competitors
• Keyword research - find keywords and content ideas
• Track individual keywords
• Track organic visibility - leverage total organic keywords
• Brand management - set up alerts for keywords for relationship building and brand management
  
  

Find out why your competitors rank so high and what you need to do to outrank them. You’ll be able to see the exact keywords your competitors are ranking for in organic search results as well as understand how much traffic this brings them.

You’ll have a clear picture of the content your competitors are posting, to see what’s working for them and what you’re missing.

With relevant keywords, backlink data that’s developed from a 24-hour robot crawling 4 billion web pages every 15 minutes, add other forms of reports via the site explorer tool, Ahrefs brings you the best of the best.

Competitor research tool and SEO backlink checker.

12. Majestic

This competitive analysis tool surveys and maps out the Internet for you to create the largest commercial Link Intelligence database in the world.

What does this mean for you?

It means you'll get detailed analysis of external links and anchor text used by your competitors. You can analyze backlinks and domain link counts so you can see what competitors are doing to track performance. It means you'll have a deeper understanding of search ranking. Understanding your own link profiles, and empowering your data by monitoring your competitors’ websites and their search engine positioning.

Majestic scrapes their data from the internet and instead of searching with meta-searches, it acts as a search engine. It's developed software capable of crawling immense amounts of data.

Link intelligence tool for SEO, PR, marketing, and competitor analysis.

13. Serpstat

Serpstat is an all-in-one SEO platform that’ll analyze your website, and those of your competitors.

Search for your competitors’ keywords, analyze their pages and backlink strategy, and monitor their positions in SERPs.

Features include:

• Keyword research – compare keywords, find semantic variations, identify long-tail keywords
• Search analytics – track domain and keyword rankings, find which posts generate the most traffic
• Content marketing ideation – compare your content to better target your industry
• Competitor research – position your business against the competition
• Market intelligence – monitor industry leaders to improve your SEO and PPC efforts
• Backlink analysis – track competitors’ backlinks, score referring domains
  
  

This growth hacking tool offers a free trial, but queries are limited. For the amount of data that can be pulled out, it’s worth considering one of the paid plans.

Keyword research, backlink analysis, competitive analysis tool.

14. Netpeak Checker

Netpeak Checker is a desktop tool for SERP scraping and data aggregation from top SEO services to analyze and compare websites in bulk.

Designed for bulk SEO analysis, this tool allows you to research the backlink profile or websites, and evaluate the SEO of your competitors.

You can check:

• Check 1,200+ parameters of URLs.
• Compare URLs by parameters of well-known services: Ahrefs, Moz, Serpstat, Majestic, SEMrush, etc.
• Examine on-page SEO factors to optimize your website for search engines.
• Review domain age, expiration date, and availability for the purchase.
• Analyze a websites’ social media performance.

This research tool for bulk SEO analysis offers 14 days’ free trial.

Keeping an eye on the competition – it’s an essential business practice

When it comes to staying ahead of the game, you have to keep a close eye on your competition. Learning from your competitors can seem intimidating. But with the right competitor analysis tools, it's no biggie.

Take a look through my reviews, try some of the free trials, sign up for a Quick Search free demo. You can't afford not to monitor your competitors.