10 Top Competitive Analysis Tools (2024)

Conducting competitive analysis is crucial for understanding your market, who your top competitors are, and key target audience metrics.

With that, here are the best 10 competitive analysis tools will help you identify essential business and marketing insights in 2024.

1. Semrush

Semrush is a search engine optimization (SEO) and keyword research tool that's ideal for analyzing a competitor’s online presence.

You can use Semrush to discover information about your competitors':

• Organic traffic volume
• Search ranking
• Website traffic from paid ads
• PPC ad keywords and potential spend
• Market share
• Local search results listings
• Audience demographics
• Socioeconomic information (including audience education level and employment status)

Because it's such a comprehensive tool, Semrush is a great place to start your competitive analysis process. You'll be able to uncover valuable insights that lead to new discoveries, conduct keyword research, develop your marketing strategy, and more.

How Much Does Semrush Cost?

Semrush offers a limited amount of data for free. To unlock additional metrics, you'll need a paid plan starting at $108.33 per month (billed annually).

To see demographic and socioeconomic insights about your competitors' website visitors, you'll need to add on an Semrush .Trends plan, which costs at $200 per user, per month.

2. Similarweb

Similarweb is a competitor intelligence tool that provides insights around companies' market share, brand recognition, and online activity.

By entering a website into Similarweb, you can see in-depth information that includes:

• Competitor traffic
• Competitor rank in organic search
• Top competitor keywords
• Top traffic locations
• Popular traffic referral sources
• Keyword search volume and difficulty
• Related browsing habits and interests of site visitors
• Key audience demographics

This lets you get an idea of who's most interested in your competitors—as well as where they're located, and the channels they're using to find said competitor.

If you don't need all of the SEO tools available in Semrush, but would still like to access some keyword data and actionable insights around audience demographics, Similarweb is a good alternative.

How Much Does Similarweb Cost?

Similarweb pricing starts at $125 per month, billed annually.

3. Clearscope

Clearscope is a content marketing tool that you can use to evaluate (and outrank) competitor websites.

When using Clearscope, can create a report on any topic and view the quality of the web pages that show up in the SERP results for that search. Quality is graded on a letter scale, just like in school—from F to A++.

This is a good way to get a lay of the land if you want to understand which of your competitors’ content is the strongest—and it’s useful for developing your own content strategy.

Clearscope also includes a basic keyword rankings tool, though it’s not as full-featured as the ones provided by Semrush or Similarweb.

How Much Does Clearscope Cost?

Clearscope plans start at $199 per month and allow you to run 15 reports per month. A business plan with higher usage limits is also available for $599 per month.

4. Exploding Topics

Exploding Topics is a trend tracking and social listening tool that lets you identify how popular your competitors and their products are.

When you search for a competitor, industry, or keyword with Exploding Topics, you'll see information including:

• Popular channels (including social media platforms) on which the topic is discussed
• Changes in interest over the past 15 years
• Whether interest is expected to peak or decline
• A future growth forecast
• Related trends

And if you're searching for a startup, we can show you information about their location, funding stage, number of employees, and related companies.

You can also use our platform to monitor your industry and identify new potential competitors before others are aware of them.

Here's an example: We identified Perplexity AI—an artificial intelligence search engine—as a company to watch in January 2023.

As you can see in this Semrush graph, though, search traffic to the Perplexity AI website began to noticeably pick up approximately four months later.

Founders and employees of other AI startups might have been surprised by this sudden surge in interest around Perplexity, especially so closely on the heels of OpenAI's public ChatGPT launch.

If they were using Exploding Topics, though, they'd have known to expect Perplexity to take off in popularity quickly, and could have analyzed the new AI company accordingly.

They’d even be able to see that most of the chatter around Perplexity was happening on X, not LinkedIn or Facebook—and could concentrate future marketing efforts on the appropriate social networks.

How Much Does Exploding Topics Cost?

It's free to use Exploding Topics and see basic trend data. To unlock our full trends library, as well as additional features like trend forecasts, lists of trending startups, and channel breakdowns, you'll need to select a paid plan.

Options start at $39 per month, billed annually. We offer a trial period on all Exploding Topics Pro plans, too—it's just $1 for your first 14 days.

5. Majestic

Majestic is an SEO competitor analysis tool that lets you see competitors’ backlink profiles.

After entering a competitor's domain, you'll be able to see data like:

• Referring domains
• New and lost backlinks
• Anchor text on the backlinks
• Linked pages
• Related topics
• Other sites hosted on the same IP as the one you're evaluating

You can get this information from other analytics tools like Semrush or Ahrefs—so if you’re already subscribing to one of those, you probably won’t need a Majestic subscription as well.

But if you aren't in need of a full SEO platform, then Majestic is a good way to keep an eye on the links that are pointing to your competitors' websites.

How Much Does Majestic Cost?

Majestic plans start at $49.99 per month for one user seat and one million analysis units.

6. BuiltWith

BuiltWith is a tech stack analysis tool that shows you the technology used on any website.

By typing in a competitor's URL, you can see information about:

• Content management systems
• Connected analytics and tracking tools
• Installed widgets
• Available languages
• Frameworks in use
• Content delivery networks (CDNs)
• Payment and shipping services
• Multimedia embeds
• Javascript libraries
• Verified links
• Hosting providers and servers

You can also see how many websites use a specific tool. For example, if you notice your competitor uses WordPress, you can then look up WordPress and assess how popular it is overall.

How Much Does BuiltWith Cost?

It's free to view BuiltWith's basic metrics about websites and technology platforms. If you want to export reports, connect BuiltWith to tools like Salesforce, or gather related contact information, you'll need a paid plan.

Options start at $295 per month or $2,950 per year.

7. Visualping

Visualping is a user-friendly competitive research tool that makes it easy to monitor competitor websites in real time.

All you need to do is enter a URL that you'd like to track, define what changes you're interested in, and input an email for notifications. Visualping will then notify you each time a change occurs—though you can space out your notifications, too, if they're overwhelming.

You can use Visualping to monitor changes to:

• Text
• Images
• Website elements

You can even have the tool perform actions for you. For example, if Visualping detects your competitor has added a new pop-up element, you can have the tool click on a button, refresh a page, or scroll away.

The notifications you receive will include a screenshot and highlights that help you clearly spot what's changed when compared to the original benchmark.

How Much Does Visualping Cost?

You can use Visualping to check up to five webpages once a day for free.

Paid plans, which include higher usage limits and additional features, start at $10 per month (billed annually) for personal use or $50 per month (billed annually) for business accounts with multiple user seats.

8. Sendview

Sendview is a competitor research tool focused on email marketing campaigns.

In order to use Sendview, you'll need to subscribe to your competitors' email list using special tracking addresses generated by the platform. When your competitors email this address, the message is logged in your Sendview account.

From there, you can see and analyze data like:

• Email spam scores
• Message length
• Number of links
• Design features
• Send timing

As your Sendview account amasses data, you can begin to see when your competitors send emails, how they typically format their messages, and where they're making critical mistakes in deliverability.

Plus, you can save your favorite messages to a swipe file for inspiration.

How Much Does Sendview Cost?

Sendview pricing starts at $69 per month or $700 per year for one user seat and 10 trackable email addresses.

9. Meta ad library

The Meta Ad Library is a searchable database of social media advertising copy.

You can search for commercial and political ads in Meta's library, and filter your results by criteria like:

• Location
• Ad category
• Keyword
• Advertiser name

The tool will even show you if there are multiple versions of an ad running—and whether it appears on Facebook, Instagram, or both.

Of course, this ad library is only useful if your competitors (or other companies in your industry) use the Meta advertising platform. If so, though, you can keep an eye on how they're connecting with your shared audience, and tweak your digital marketing strategy accordingly.

How Much Does The Meta Ad Library Cost?

The Meta Ad Library is free, and you don't need a Meta account to view information about the ads.

10. Google Ads Transparency Center

The Google Ads Transparency Center is an index of ad copy used in other companies' PPC ads.

While the Meta ads library focuses specifically on ads across the Meta ecosystem, Google Ads transparency lets you see what your competitors are targeting through search ads. You can search the database by:

• Company name
• Ad topic
• Location the ad is shown
• Time the ad is shown
• Ad format

The tool only shows you Google Ads, but the information you glean here can give you insights around the locations and audiences that are important to your competitors.

How Much Does The Google Ads Transparency Center Cost?

There's no charge to browse the Google Ads Transparency Center. You don't need to log into a Google account, either—it's all available freely through your browser.

Conclusion

When selecting a new competitive intelligence tool, it's a good idea to begin by evaluating your current tech stack.

Identify which market data points and metrics you already have access to—and then note weak areas that you'd like to strengthen with additional data like that found in these 10 tools.

To learn more about how to find and target your top competitors, check out our complete guides to finding low competition keywords for SEO and conducting white space analysis.