We’ve written in-depth analyses of GrowthHackers, ClickUp, Asana, Trello, Monday.com, Notion, and over a dozen other tools. That work shaped how we build Growth Method — what to prioritise, where to differentiate, and which battles not to fight.
If I could give one piece of advice to product builders, it would be this: competitor research is some of the best time you’ll ever spend. Not because it tells you what to copy, but because it forces you to understand why customers choose one product over another. That understanding compounds.
But most of it gets wasted. Someone builds a spreadsheet comparing features, another person screenshots a few landing pages, and the whole thing gets forgotten in a shared drive within weeks. Meanwhile, their competitors are watching them.
According to Crayon’s State of Competitive Intelligence report, two-thirds of open deals are now head-to-head with a competitor. Yet 44% of companies admit to having zero visibility into what their competitors are doing. That gap is where deals die quietly.
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Open Table of contents
Why most competitor research fails
The standard approach looks the same everywhere. Open a spreadsheet. List features. Compare pricing. Maybe screenshot a homepage. File it away.
This fails for three reasons.
It’s a snapshot, not a system. Competitors change pricing, launch features, shift messaging, and hire new leadership constantly. A static document decays the moment it’s finished.
It focuses on features, not positioning. Knowing a competitor has “AI-powered analytics” tells you nothing useful. Understanding why their customers chose them over you — that’s intelligence.
Nobody owns it. When competitor research is everyone’s job, it’s nobody’s job. Without clear ownership and a regular cadence, it simply doesn’t happen.
April Dunford, author of Obviously Awesome, argues that most companies don’t even identify the right competitors. In her positioning framework, the starting question isn’t “who are our competitors?” — it’s “what would a customer do if our product didn’t exist?” The answer is often surprising. Your real competition might be a spreadsheet, an intern, or doing nothing at all.
“The more deeply you understand your prospects’ status quo and which other solutions land on a shortlist with you, the stronger your positioning will be.”
What to actually track
Effective competitor research goes beyond feature matrices. Here’s what matters and why.
Positioning and messaging
How competitors describe themselves reveals their strategy. Track their homepage headline, their “how it works” flow, their primary CTA, and the language they use to describe the problem they solve. Changes to positioning often signal a strategic pivot before it’s formally announced.
Pricing and packaging
Pricing changes are one of the strongest competitive signals. A competitor adding a free tier means they’re going after volume. A competitor removing their cheapest plan means they’re moving upmarket. Track not just the numbers but the structure — what’s included, what’s gated, and what requires a sales conversation.
Content and SEO
What your competitors publish tells you what audience they’re chasing and what keywords they’re targeting. Track their blog topics, content frequency, gated resources, and organic search rankings. If a competitor suddenly starts publishing about a topic you own, they’re coming for your territory.
Job postings
Hiring tells you where a competitor is investing. A sudden burst of engineering hires means a product push. New sales roles in a specific region mean geographic expansion. A Head of Partnerships hire means a channel play. Job boards are an underused competitive intelligence source.
Customer reviews and sentiment
Sites like G2, Capterra, and TrustRadius contain unfiltered competitive intelligence. Read your competitors’ negative reviews carefully — their customers’ pain points are your positioning opportunities. Read their positive reviews too — that’s what you need to beat.
Product changes
Sign up for competitor products. Use them. Track what they launch, what they sunset, and how their onboarding evolves. There’s no substitute for first-hand experience. When we reviewed tools like UpGrow, Truenorth, and GrowthHackers Projects, actually using each product revealed far more than any feature comparison page could.
How to structure competitor research
Choose your competitors wisely
Not every company in your space deserves the same level of attention. Categorise competitors into three tiers:
| Tier | Description | Tracking cadence |
|---|---|---|
| Primary | Companies you regularly lose deals to | Weekly |
| Secondary | Companies in your space with different positioning | Monthly |
| Emerging | New entrants and adjacent tools that could become competitors | Quarterly |
For most marketing teams, 3-5 primary competitors is the right number. More than that dilutes focus.
Build a competitive brief for each
A competitive brief is a living document — not a one-time deliverable. For each primary competitor, maintain:
- Company overview — what they do, who they serve, how they’re funded
- Positioning summary — their core message, value proposition, and differentiation claims
- Strengths and weaknesses — based on product experience, reviews, and customer feedback
- Recent changes — pricing updates, feature launches, messaging shifts, leadership changes
- Win/loss insights — why customers chose them over you (and vice versa)
Set a cadence
Competitor research without a cadence becomes competitor research that doesn’t happen. A practical rhythm:
- Weekly: Quick scan of primary competitors — new blog posts, social activity, product updates
- Monthly: Deeper review — pricing changes, job postings, review site sentiment
- Quarterly: Full refresh — update briefs, revisit tiers, present findings to leadership
Assign ownership
Someone needs to own competitive intelligence. In smaller teams this is often a product marketer or growth lead. In larger organisations it might be a dedicated competitive intelligence analyst. What matters is that one person is accountable for keeping it current.
AI is changing competitor research
Traditional competitor research is manual, slow, and tedious. AI tools are collapsing the time required from days to minutes.
Claude Code for Marketers recently documented how marketing teams are using Claude’s deep research capabilities to produce complete competitive analyses — including comparison tables, executive summaries, and strengths/weaknesses assessments — in roughly 15 minutes. The same work previously took hours of manual tab-switching and note-taking.
When competitor research takes hours, it happens rarely. When it takes minutes, it becomes a habit.
Here’s what marketing teams are doing with AI right now:
- Automated monitoring — tracking competitor website changes, pricing updates, and new content publication
- Review analysis — synthesising hundreds of customer reviews into patterns you can act on
- Content gap analysis — identifying topics competitors rank for that you don’t
- Messaging comparison — extracting and comparing positioning statements across competitors
- Research synthesis — pulling together information from multiple sources into structured reports
Tools like Firecrawl MCP can automatically crawl competitor websites to track changes in pricing, features, and messaging. Perplexity’s Search API enables automated competitive intelligence gathering. And using a CLAUDE.md context file ensures your AI assistant already knows your company, audience, and tone — so you’re not repeating yourself every session.
Michael Porter wrote in Competitive Strategy that understanding competitive forces “reveals the roots of an industry’s current profitability while providing a framework for anticipating and influencing competition over time.” The difference now is that the analysis doesn’t have to be a one-off project. With the right setup, it runs continuously.
Common mistakes
Obsessing over features. Feature parity is a losing game. Focus on positioning, messaging, and customer perception instead. The competitor with fewer features but better positioning often wins.
Ignoring indirect competitors. Your biggest threat might not be a direct competitor. It might be a spreadsheet, a general-purpose tool like Jira or Airtable, or the customer deciding to do nothing. Understanding the full set of alternatives your buyers consider is more valuable than tracking every SaaS startup in your category.
Gathering intelligence without acting on it. A beautifully maintained competitive database that doesn’t influence product decisions, sales conversations, or marketing messaging is just expensive busywork. Every piece of competitive intelligence should connect to an action.
Tracking too many competitors. Monitoring 15 competitors means monitoring none of them well. Focus on the 3-5 that actually show up in your deals.
Letting it go stale. A competitive brief from six months ago is actively misleading. If you can’t commit to keeping it current, you’re better off not having one at all.
Making competitor research actionable
Competitive intelligence only matters if it changes behaviour. Here’s how to connect research to outcomes.
Sales enablement. Turn competitive briefs into battlecards — one-page documents that help sales reps handle competitive objections in real time. Keep them short, specific, and regularly updated.
Positioning refinement. Use competitor research to sharpen your own positioning. If every competitor claims “AI-powered” everything, that’s not a differentiator — it’s table stakes. Find the gap where your strengths meet unmet customer needs. Our comparison of ClickUp vs Asana showed us that both tools are general-purpose — which confirmed our decision to go deep on growth marketing workflows rather than trying to compete on breadth.
Content strategy. Competitive content analysis reveals gaps worth filling. If competitors rank for terms your audience searches but you don’t, that’s your content roadmap writing itself.
Product feedback. Share competitive intelligence with your product team. Customer complaints about competitors are feature requests for you. Competitor launches reveal where the market is heading.
Start simple
You don’t need a competitive intelligence platform to start. You need a document, a cadence, and an owner.
Pick your three primary competitors. Set up Google Alerts for their company names. Read their blogs. Sign up for their products. Talk to customers who evaluated them. Write down what you learn.
Then do it again next month. And the month after that.
The marketing teams that win rarely have the best product or the biggest budget. They’re the ones who understand their competitors deeply enough to find positions nobody else occupies.