The 14 Best Competitive Intelligence Tools for Go-To-Market Teams

All businesses have competitors. Knowing what they are doing is definitely a good idea.

And, if you’re here, you’re probably already doing some sort of competitive intelligence program. Maybe in a fragmented way, with each team tasked to do their siloed bit “when they have time.”

If that’s the case, more than likely, you haven’t found great value in competitive intelligence so far, but you still need to get actionable insights about your competitors.

This is where competitive intelligence tools come in–a helping hand in streamlining and automating the process of gathering, analyzing, and acting upon competitive data.

In this article, we will look closer at the 14 best competitive intelligence tools you can use to understand your market landscape and competitors better.

What is Competitive Intelligence All About?

Competitive intelligence refers to gathering, analyzing, and taking action on information about your competitors to gain a competitive advantage in your industry.

With a competitive intelligence program, you will understand your competitors’ strategies, strengths, weaknesses, and overall market position. You can then use this knowledge to inform decision-making and drive business growth.

While most of the competitive intelligence tools in this article can be used for both competitive intelligence and market intelligence, there is a fundamental difference: CI specifically focuses on your competitors rather than the broader market as market intelligence does.

What are Competitive Intelligence Tools, and How do You Choose the Right One?

Competitive intelligence tools help you set up your competitive intelligence program by gathering, analyzing, and presenting you all the info you need about your competitors.

Many CI tools are available on the market, each with unique features and capabilities.

So, how do you choose the right one for your business? Here are some factors to consider:

1. Your business needs. Get clear about what you need to track and your CI program’s goal. You may just need to monitor social media performance. Or, more likely, you’re also looking at tracking pricing strategies, traffic data, keyword research, and more.
2. Your budget. Most competitive intelligence tools range from free versions with limited features to expensive options with advanced data visualization and customized reports. Determine how much you can spend on a CI tool, and then look for options within that budget.
3. Product features. Popular competitive intelligence tools offer features such as competitive analysis, market trend monitoring, website competitor tracking, and social media monitoring. Evaluate which features are essential for your business and compare them across different tools.
4. Ease of use. A competitive intelligence tool should provide valuable insights and be user-friendly even if you’re tracking multiple competitors. Look for a tool that is easy to navigate and can give you clear insights, as this will save you time and frustration in the long run.
5. Integrations. Many businesses use multiple tools and platforms to track their online presence. Choosing a CI tool that integrates seamlessly with your existing systems is important.
6. Reviews and testimonials. Before making a decision, make sure to read reviews and testimonials from other users of the CI tool you are considering. This will give you an idea of their experiences and satisfaction levels with the tool.
7. Support. As with any software or service, it is essential to have reliable customer support if you encounter any issues or questions. Look into the level of customer support offered by different CI tools before making your final choice.

Best Competitive Intelligence Tools

Unkover

I know what you’re thinking. Here comes the sales pitch.

Truth is, we’re a new player in the space, and if you’re looking for an all-in-one competitive intelligence tool, then you’ll probably need to come back here in a little while.

But before you go, if you recognize yourself when I say that you:

• are already doing some sort of CI in a very fragmented way
• don’t have the time to set up a fully-fledged competitive insights system (and to actually look at a myriad of insights, having to decide which ones are the most important)
• just need to monitor key information on your already busy work life
• are ready to grow with us as we develop more features based on your needs

… then we are a good fit. 😉

All good, but what does Unkover do right now?

1. Integrates with Slack so all the information gathered is available to you (and your team) directly where you can see them.
2. Identifies the websites of all your competitors and the specific pages you want to track (not sure? We’ll give you some suggestions)
3. Shows your competitors’ email marketing flows
4. Starts sending you competitive insights instantly

And this is just the start, as our team is already hard at work with new features. If you’re curious, we have a public roadmap you can check with a feature request form, and if you can’t wait to see it, below there’s a sneak peek of what’s coming (yes, we’re in the lorem ipsum stage, but we’re moving fast!)

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Klue

Klue is one of the big guys in competitive intelligence, offering a competitive enablement platform powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning specifically designed to assist all teams, from sales to product marketers, in collecting intel from external sourcing and curating, prioritizing, and disseminating actionable competitor insights across every department of your org.

For example, making sure that sales teams are equipped with the information they need to close a deal, optimizing sales strategies, and boosting sales team overall performance.

Key features: AI-powered CI system, giving you curated information that is prioritized based on their algorithm and categorized from important to dismissable and allowing you to create battle cards and share information for your team.

Segment: Enterprise.

Pricing: Not disclosed. The demo is available only after qualification.

Cons: It requires a big team (and probably big money as well), and most companies probably don't even qualify for the demo.

Crayon

Crayon is a top competitive intelligence software with a focus on enterprise businesses, and it’s been around since 2014.

Betting big on AI and ML, Crayon aims to be the central hub for competitive intelligence by collecting data from 100+ sources like reviews, SEC filings, and patents and sharing it with the team via battle cards, Slack integration, and more.

Key features: +100 sources for the data analysis and collection, AI and ML-driven but with a human touch (each customer is assigned a dedicated analyst,) and has a long list of integrations.

Segment: Enterprise.

Pricing: Not disclosed; no trial available.

Cons: Their website suggests the marketing intelligence section might be lacking, with only social media strategy clearly outlined.

Kompyte

Recently acquired by Semrush, Kompyte focuses on marketing intelligence, such as market research, advertising monitoring, keyword research and analysis, and the major marketing channels.

It can also track competitors’ page changes, such as pricing information, relevant news, and SEO analysis.

Key features: With solid marketing intelligence tools, it can track social media apps and platforms, search engines, and mobile app stores, analyze competitors' ad campaigns, and help with keyword research.

Segment: Enterprise.

Pricing: Not disclosed, no free version.

Cons: It only integrates with Hubspot, Salesforce, Slack, and Microsoft Teams.

Competitors App

Competitors App tracks a wide array of competitors’ online activities. You can keep an eye on changes to competitors’ websites, email marketing campaigns, social media presence, and more, all from a single, user-friendly dashboard.

On top of that, you can spy on ad campaigns and other competitive strategies such as media monitoring, market presence, and sentiment analysis.

Key features: Competitor analysis is focused on marketing intelligence and has everything you need to step up your marketing efforts.

Segment: SMB-focused.

Pricing: self-serve starts at $19.90/competitor/month and has an Enterprise plan.

Cons: While they offer discounts for quantity, prices can escalate quite quickly depending on the number of competitors and add-ons (i.e., LinkedIn monitoring.)

Contify

Contify has been around since 2009, and it’s a competitive intelligence tool that also does market research, so it’s more targeted towards C-levels and executives than operational teams.

Checking their website, it looks like Contify aggregates, curates, and disseminates public information about competitors, such as customers, industry trends, financial reports, business’s reputation, and market size, to name a few.

Key features: Focus on market intelligence and market research, with data sources like SEC filings, patent filings, and a brand new News API.

Segment: Enterprise

Pricing: Not disclosed; they offer a free trial.

Cons: Some features in the marketing intelligence set, like SEO analysis, are not mentioned.

Owletter

Owletter is a great tool for monitoring your competitors’ email marketing efforts. It shows you all email marketing workflows from your competition, allows you to share them with your own sales teams and provides analytics tools to decipher your competitor strategies.

Key features: Email marketing monitoring and analysis.

Segment: SMB and Enterprise.

Pricing: Starting from $19/mo for 10 websites monitored, free trial available.

Cons: It's not really a competitor intelligence tool, but it's a great tool for just one task where you need competitive data.

Compete Shark 

On the other hand, Compete Shark allows you to monitor website changes. A nice touch is that you can see the before-and-after of each change at a glance and then analyze each change in depth.

They do both competitive intel and market intelligence and have recently added AI to their offering (as have many of the competitive intelligence tools and AI tools we analyzed in this article).

Key features: Website change monitoring.

Segment: Enterprise.

Pricing: Not disclosed; free trial available.

Cons: Like Owletter, it's great for one task, but it's not an all-in-one competitive intelligence tool.

Other Competitive Intelligence Tools

SEMRush

SEMrush doesn’t really need introductions. But if I were to write what it is in three lines, it is a comprehensive SEO tool that offers a range of features for competitive intelligence and analytics to identify competitors’ online strategies, from keyword analysis and optimization to advertising efforts, providing a data-driven basis for refining your digital presence.

Some great tools I recommend are SEMrush traffic analytics and Market Explorer. In particular, Market Explorer is super useful as it compiles a list of players in your industry as well as organic traffic from competitors.

So far, we haven’t talked about target audiences. My bad. But I’m making up for it with One2Target, which is a great audience research solution, also by SEMRush. You can monitor your competitors’ audiences, how they overlap with yours, and the amount of potential audience you could get.

Hootsuite

As a Hootsuite alumnus myself, I may be biased, but this tool’s analytics and monitoring capabilities really do give critical insights into social trends, competitor performance, and consumer engagement.

This is crucial to adapting your strategies in real time and maintaining a competitive edge as social media management becomes increasingly competitive.

G2

You’ve probably used G2 before, either for your company or for checking reviews when buying software.

The good thing about this tool (and the reason why people come back to it to check customer feedback and customer satisfaction over and over) is their obsession with verified reviews and the historical data analysis it provides.

Wappalyzer

Wappalyzer does one very clever thing: it helps you identify the software stack of websites, offering valuable insights into the digital tools and technologies adopted by your competitors.

What can you do with this information? If you know where the technology trends are going, you can make informed decisions about your own tech investments.

Visualping

The one thing I love about Visualping is how easy it is to start: you just type in your competitor’s name, and there you go, you start tracking their website.

Other useful features are that you can choose what to monitor (visual, text, or element) and the percentage of change that triggers the email alert.

PriceShape

Something else you’d definitely need to track is your competitor’s pricing. PriceShape gives you that, and though it’s probably more geared for e-commerce, pricing is definitely one of the factors you need in your competitor analysis.

By delivering actionable insights on competitor pricing strategies, PriceShape empowers your marketing team to refine their digital marketing efforts for optimal performance.

HubSpot 

And wrapping up, you’d definitely need a place where you can store all your competitors’ details and see the bigger picture—how exactly these competitors stack up against your company and how these companies position themselves in the overall market. HubSpot’s tools probably need no introduction here, but the platform also offers a handy market research kit you can download for free. 

This particular kit includes various templates to help streamline the research process and display gathered data in a digestible format. Some of these include SWOT Analysis and Five Forces Industry Analysis frameworks. Plus, you get access to a detailed step-by-step guide teaching you about how to perform market research.

How to Integrate Intelligence Tools into Your Business Operations

And here’s the thing, right?

The competitive intelligence tools we described above are great; there’s no denying it. But how do you integrate them into your business operation?

In-depth, feature-specific tools can add up quite quickly, and suddenly, you are overwhelmed with notifications and insights you can’t quite process. Frustrating, to say the least.

This is why your best bet is to use a tool that can, yes, be your source of information but, more importantly, be an enabler for you to make critical business decisions quickly.

Is it Unkover? We think so. You can find out for free in just three minutes.

Wrapping up: The Long-term Value of Competitive Intelligence Tools

At the end of the day, competitor research enables businesses to gain a competitive edge in the market by staying in the know about what your competitors are doing as well as industry trends, customer behavior (from sentiment analysis to customer feedback), and all emerging trends in your industry.

Using the right competitive intelligence tools can provide valuable insights and data points that can help you make informed decisions about your business strategy, product development, and marketing efforts. It can also save you time and resources by streamlining the research process.

But remember, these tools are just one piece of the puzzle. The true value comes from taking this information and using it to make strategic business decisions. So, yes, rely on competitive intelligence tools, but more importantly use them as a tool to empower yourself in making impactful choices for your business.

The reality is that investing in competitive intelligence is an investment in the long-term success of your business.

Start using a tool like Unkover today (it’s free!) and see how it can help you stay ahead of the competition.

FAQs

What is a competitive intelligence tool?

A competitive intelligence tool is a software or service designed to help businesses gather, analyze, and monitor data related to their industry, competitors, and market trends. These competitive analysis tools provide valuable insights into the actions and strategies of your competitors, giving you a competitive edge in the market.

What are the 7 P’s of competitive intelligence?

The 7 P’s of competitive intelligence are People, Process, Partnerships, Platforms, Products/Services, Positioning and Profitability. These elements make up the core components of a successful competitive intelligence strategy.

What are the major sources of competitive intelligence?

The major sources of competitive intelligence include public information, such as industry reports and news articles, competitor websites and mobile apps, social media accounts, customer reviews, industry events and conferences, and market research data. Additionally, some businesses may choose to use paid services that specialize in collecting and analyzing competitive intelligence data.

What are 5 ways that you can gather competitive intelligence?

1. Conducting market research—This involves collecting data about your industry, customers, and competitors through surveys, focus groups, and other research methods.

2. Monitoring social media—By following your competitors’ social media accounts and tracking relevant hashtags and keywords, you can gain insights into their marketing strategies, product offerings, and customer sentiment.

3. Analyzing website traffic—You can get valuable information about your competitors’ website traffic with embedded analytics tools like Google Analytics. For example, historical data, including which pages are most popular and where their traffic is coming from.

4. Using competitive intelligence software—Various software can help gather and analyze data on your competitors, such as pricing information, website changes, and content strategies.

5. Monitoring online reviews—Keep an eye on the reviews your competitors receive on platforms like Yelp or Google Reviews. This can give you an idea of what customers are saying about their products or services.

How do competitive intelligence and market research yield actionable insights for your strategy?

Competitive intelligence and market research yield actionable insights by analyzing the market and competitors. Incorporating broker research enriches this analysis with industry-specific trends, while digital marketing provides a real-time measure of consumer response.

Together, they inform a strategy that is responsive to market demands and competitive dynamics, guiding targeted actions for improved business outcomes.

What is a competitor information system?

A Competitor Information System (CIS) actively collects, analyzes, and manages data on competitors and the market environment. It helps organizations make informed strategic decisions by offering insights into competitors’ actions, strengths, weaknesses, and positions.

By providing critical information for strategic planning, a CIS enables businesses to anticipate market changes, seize growth opportunities, and devise strategies to improve their competitive edge. This ensures strategic decision-making is informed and aligned with the organization’s goals and market dynamics.

Is it legal and ethical to use competitive intelligence tools?

The use of competitive intelligence tools is generally legal and ethical as long as they are used ethically and within the boundaries of the law. It is important only to gather information that is publicly available or obtained through legal means, such as monitoring online reviews or using software with permission.

Engaging in illegal activities, such as hacking into a competitor’s website or stealing confidential information, is unethical and can lead to serious consequences. It is also important to respect the privacy of individuals and companies when gathering information.

As long as these guidelines are followed, using competitive intelligence tools can provide valuable insights for businesses without crossing any legal or ethical lines.