8 Top Competitor Intelligence Software Tools (2024)

Do you know what your competitors are doing right now to capture more of your market?

You might think so—but unless you're viewing real data, and even screenshots, from their actions, you can't be totally sure.

Competitor intelligence software is the answer. These tools let you find out exactly what your toughest competition is doing so you can make data-driven decisions, not guesses.

The eight competitive intelligence tools on our list can work for brands of all sizes. They offer a mix of price points and features to help you uncover competitor marketing strategies, tech stacks, and more.

1. Similarweb

Similarweb is an competitive intelligence platform that delivers easy-to-understand competitor overviews.

When you enter a competitor's site into Similarweb, you'll be able to see information like:

• Company details such as founding date and number of employees
• Website metrics including the typical number of visitors, global popularity, and other sites that are referring traffic to your competitor
• Demographic insights about their typical customers, including shared interests
• Marketing data including the top channels your competitors use for promotions
• Other similar competitors

If your business entering a new space, Similarweb can be useful for evaluating your competitor landscape—and figuring out where you fit in your industry. You can even compare two of your competitors to each other.

You can run a few free searches on Similarweb—you won't be able to see every data point available, but it's enough to find out whether this platform will be helpful for your competitive intelligence research needs.

If you like Similarweb and want to use it more frequently or go more in depth, then you'll need to select a paid plan starting at $149 per month (or $125 per month when billed annually).

2. Wiser

Wiser is a competitive analysis tool focused on commerce insights.

If your company sells products DTC or in retail, you can use Wiser to make sure you're remaining competitive in your market.

Wiser's features include:

• Competitive research tools that let you compare your inventory to that of other companies
• Heatmaps that provide at-a-glance insights about competitor pricing
• Insights as to whether resellers are marketing your products online
• Reports detailing how in-store shoppers feel about your company, and your competitors

Wiser's full suite of tools also includes solutions to help retailers manage their pricing policies, marketing campaigns, store operations, and more.

It's a comprehensive solution for companies selling physical products—but won't be worthwhile for service-based businesses.

If you're interested in using Wiser, you'll need to get in touch with the company to set up a consultation and get a price quote.

3. Exploding Topics

Exploding Topics is a trend spotting tool that can add value to your current competitive intelligence research approach.

We listen to online conversations across social media, forums, blogs, news outlets, and more—then identify trends in the data. These trends are published as easy-to-read graphs that we update every day.

You can use the Exploding Topics platform to develop actionable insights to:

• Look up competitors’ brand and product names to see if they’re increasing—or decreasing—in popularity online
• Identify industry trends that could affect you and your competitors—either positively or negatively
• Keep an eye out for competing startups that are raising VC funding and increasing market share
• Get an idea for how much a competitor’s product might sell for across online marketplaces like Amazon

And because Exploding Topics tracks what people are talking about online, you can also use it to stay on top of what your target audience is interested in—giving you a competitive edge over companies that aren’t using our platform.

It’s free to try out Exploding Topics. We make a portion of our trend graphs and reports available at no cost—just start searching for your competitors’ brand names right on our homepage.

To use all our features, including the ability to see startup funding details and get notified instantly when an important topic trends, you’ll need a paid plan. It’s just $1 for your first week of Exploding Topics Pro—and as little as $39 per month after that.

4. Visualping

Visualping is a monitoring tool that sends you an update whenever one of your competitors changes their website.

Unlike Similarweb or Wiser, Visualping won't give you an overview of multiple competitors at once. Instead, you'll need to enter specific competitors' websites into Visualping and begin tracking the URLs. You can track changes to:

• Images
• Text
• Website elements

You can also configure Visualping to carry out actions on a tracked page, such as filling out a form on a landing page. This is useful when you want to track changes on a webpage that is gated and requires specific steps to access.

Visualping will monitor up to five web pages and check for changes 150 times each month when you use their free plan.

In order to turn on text message alerts, scan more pages, and increase the frequency of Visualping’s checks, you’ll need to purchase a paid business or personal plan. Subscription options start at $14 per month, or $10 per month when billed annually.

5. Milled

Milled is an email newsletter search engine. It’s promoted as a way for consumers to find sales, deals, and coupon codes without signing up for a bunch of newsletters manually. 

You can use it for business, too, though, by searching your top competitors and checking out their email blasts.

To use Milled, search for a specific brand or or browse emails by category:

• National retailers
• Fashion and apparel
• Beauty and personal care
• Home and decor
• Politics

Milled’s database is updated frequently—you can commonly see marketing emails sent by competitors within the last 20 minutes.

There are 170,000+ companies’ emails on Milled, so if you’re in a B2C market, it’s a great way to monitor what your competitors are advertising.

There is no cost to use Milled for competitor research.

6. Semrush

Semrush is a search engine optimization (SEO) platform that’s useful for both keyword and competitor research.

Enter a competitor’s website into Semrush’s organic research tool to get started. You’ll then be able to see a variety of other related competitors and an estimate of each one’s dominance in search results.

Additional competitor information available in Semrush includes:

• The number of keywords held by a competitor
• Competitors’ website traffic analytics
• Paid keywords your competitors are running pay per click (PPC) ads on
• Sites that provide backlinks to your competitors’ webpages

You can see limited competitor and search metrics with a free Semrush account. If you’d like to make Semrush a big part of your research, you’ll want to opt in to a paid plan—these start at $129.95 per month (or $108.33 per month when billed annually).

7. Brandwatch

Brandwatch is a social listening tool that can help you keep tabs on your competitors’ social media accounts.

You can use Brandwatch’s benchmarking feature to:

• Evaluate how your social media presence compares to multiple brands in your industry
• View competitor posts, hashtags, and engagement metrics
• Generate reports to share with stakeholders involved in developing your social media marketing strategies

The entire Brandwatch platform contains a variety of other tools that are useful for brands with a growing social media presence, including a way to find influencers and better understand your audience.

As a result, Brandwatch is really best for companies that are heavily investing in marketing efforts across multiple social media platforms.

If social is more of a secondary channel for your brand, you’ll probably be better served by one of the other competitor analysis tools on this list.

If you’d like to use Brandwatch, you can select from three different plans based on your needs. You’ll have to get in touch with the company for a consultation and price quote.

8. Wappalyzer

Wappalyzer shows you the exact tech stack that your competitors are using to build their websites.

There are a few different ways you can use the tool for your research:

• Look up a competitor’s domain and see what’s powering their website
• Look up other websites that have features you like—ones that you believe can give you a competitive edge in your market
• Check to see which websites are using your competitor’s tools, plugins, or software
• Monitor websites for changes—similar to what Visualping does, but for tech updates

You can either look URLs up on the Wappalyzer website, or use their browser extension to check tech details in real time as you’re working online.

Wappalyzer also includes some other features that may be useful to marketing and sales teams, including email verification tools and a customer relationship manager (CRM) integrations.

You can try Wappalyzer out for free and run technology searches on 50 websites every month. To unlock all available features, you’ll need a paid plan that starts at $250 per month or $2,500 per year.

While it’s one of the more expensive competitive intelligence platforms on this list, it may be worth it if your business success depends in part on being more technologically advanced than competitors.

Conclusion

If you're just starting to conduct competitor research for a new brand, tools like Exploding Topics, Semrush, and Similarweb can help you get a big-picture lay of the land. Then, when you're ready to dig down deeper into specific competitors' actions, platforms like Visualping, Milled, or Wiser can give you further insights.

Ultimately, the best competitive intelligence tool for your company isn't necessarily the one with the biggest array of features—it's the one that can get you closest to the marketing channels, technologies, and audiences that your competitors love.