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Best Free Competitor Monitoring Tools in 2024

Best Free Competitor Monitoring Tools in 2024

Competitor monitoring tools are crucial to any business’ triumph over the competition.

Automated monitoring helps you stay on top of the competition, so you can inform your own pricing, products, SEO, marketing content and more.

Improve your competitive strategy with these freemium and easy-to-use tools.

Competitor monitoring makes it easy and more efficient to analyze the competition for competitive intelligence, so you can cultivate tactical business decisions to crush it in your industry, or niche market.

But many of these software platforms are, well, expensive.

We’re talking about those enterprise services whose websites aren’t clear about their subscription fees. You comb through the site, only to resort to the “Book a demo” button and ultimately have to sit through an extended monologue from their sales team about how they’ll “tailor” their prices to your company’s needs.

When you’re just looking for a tool to monitor certain key competitor updates, these fees start to look pretty steep.

That’s why we’ve broken down a robust list of the best competitor monitoring tools that will help you do exactly that. Check it out.

What is a competitor monitoring tool?

Competitor monitoring tools help you gather insights into your rivals’ online activities – pricing patterns, new product releases, shifting marketing messages, SEO activity, and new market expansions, to name a few.

Maybe you want to monitor competitors' websites for changes, like new promotions or products. Maybe you’re interested in updated targeted keywords on their homepage, as part of their SEO strategy, or their latest news content or team hires.

Regardless, there are many freemium competitive intelligence tools that help you more easily and efficiently gauge your competitors’ online whereabouts.

Visualping, for example, is a powerful competitive monitoring tool that can track any web page of interest on the internet – but without the sticker shock. When an update occurs, Visualping notifies you, in real-time, with the changes highlighted for you to see.

Sign up for easy competitor monitoring now

With Visualping, track any web pages on the internet for the exact competitor insights your team is looking for.

STEP 1: Enter the URL you want to monitor
STEP 2: Enter your email address

With the right combination of tools tailored to your organization’s needs, you can efficiently gather this information – without breaking the bank.

To help get you started, check out our list below of the top competitive monitoring tools of 2023. We evaluated the options out there according to their cost, and ease-of-use.

The Best Competitor Monitoring Tools 2023

1. Visualping.io

Visualping, one of the top website change monitoring tools, is used by over 85% of Fortune 500 companies.

And, yet, on top of being the easiest to use – it’s also the most affordable among competitive intelligence software tools available.

Visualping is commonly used by businesses as a way to track competitors online. It automatically monitors web pages for changes, and notifies users once a change has occured. The tool sends the user an email alert, with a screenshot of the page, the changes highlighted.

Competitor monitoring made simple

The monitoring tool offers a simple, straightforward way to stay on top of competitors' activities. Unlike other software suites, with an overload of complicated features and unneccessary gadgets for a hefty fee, Visualping makes competitor monitoring easy by allowing you to simply track the exact web pages you want, for the changes you’re after.

Think competitor websites, for example, in which you can track pricing, new product offers, updated content, SEO activity, team and career pages. By noticing patterns, you can understand competitors' strategies and upcoming initiatives, and adjust your strategies, accordingly.

Visualping is one of the best competitive monitoring tools for tracking changes to the results of other tools

Ever wish you could track changes to the results of top competitive monitoring tools like SimilarWeb or Alexa? Use these tools to harvest the data, and use Visualping to monitor changes.

For example, by combining these services, Visualping can monitor shifts in competitors’ banner advertisements across the web. Just set up a Visualping monitor that detects changes in Moat’s results for your competitor.

Visualping for Business

With Visualping for Business, users can invite team members to their workspace, where change alerts are collected in the user dashboard for review and analysis. Easily review many historical page changes over time by generating advanced custom reports, to skim through hundreds of updates in a glance. Keep monitored pages organized, and coordinate with your team, with folders and labels.

Price

Visualping’s free plan lets you monitor up to 5 pages, once daily, for a total of 150 checks/month.

To monitor more pages, and also for higher frequency monitoring, Visualping offers several personal subscription plans at an affordable cost.

To invite team members to your workspace, with bulk monitoring features, advanced custom reports and the option to receive change alerts via your Slack or Microsoft Teams messaging apps, check out our Business subscription plans.

The Business plans are best for professionals looking to supplement their organization’s competitor monitoring strategy with real-time monitoring – at scale.

Interested in finding out more about how Visualping can help your team’s competitor monitoring strategy? Contact us today – our support team would be happy to help.

2. Moat

Moat is a real-time attention analytics software that opens the door to a creative ad portal in which you can see your competitors’ digital creative history, including advertisements and press releases.

It’s one of the best competitive monitoring tools for easily analyzing competitors’ creative ad history. In an era driven by recycled content, insights like these are invaluable.

And it’s easy to use. Simply navigate to Moat’s home page, and type a competitors’ brand name into the Moat Ad Search bar. The page will fill up with an accumulation of your competitors’ ad impressions from up to three years in the past.

Moat is one of the best competitive monitoring tools for tracking competitors' digital ad history across the internet.

Compare your competitors’ marketing messages to your own, evaluate the effectiveness of their ad campaigns, and gather inspiration from your competitors’ old work, honing your advertisement strategy accordingly. It can even track which clicks originated from humans, rather than bots.

Price

The Moat Ad Search bar is free, and so is the Moat Chrome Extension, which provides you ad intelligence as you browse the internet.

*Click here to test drive Visualping to monitor changes to competitors’ banner advertisements by tracking Moat’s results for changes.

3. SimilarWeb

Can you accurately estimate the number of unique website or app visitors your competitors achieve each month? SimilarWeb can.

SimilarWeb is the top website and app traffic analytics tool online, allowing you to compare competitors’ traffic to each other, and to your own.

And getting started is simple. Simply navigate to SimilarWeb’s homepage, and type your competitors’ domain or app name into the search bar. A comprehensive overview of the websites’ reach, ranking and user engagement appears. You gain access to traffic sources, organic versus paid search, social traffic and related sites.

It’s among the best competitive monitoring tools. Click the “Add Competitors” button, and you can compare traffic statistics across two or more competitors, including your own traffic performance.

*Click here to test drive Visualping to monitor changes to your competitors’ website traffic by tracking changes in SimilarWeb’s results.

SimilarWeb is among the best competitive monitoring tools for tracking and comparing website traffic analytics over time.

Price

SimilarWeb is free. But, for more competitive monitoring features tailored to your company’s needs, you can get a custom quote from their team.

4. CrunchBase

An overall repository of business data of the technology industry, CrunchBase is an online database that provides in-depth information regarding funding and high growth investments of technology companies.

The public can make submissions to the site, including submissions of companies, but also individuals, funds, funding campaigns and events. A CrunchBase profile is an extra source of data for consumers and shareholders on your products and services.

Beyond just a business directory, CrunchBase is one of the best competitive monitoring tools in that it provides you with an overview of your field’s major players and latest trends. It reports newly emerging competitors, and is particularly useful for providing data on private companies and recent venture-funded startups, which can, otherwise, be tricky to find.

Price

The basic CrunchBase tool is free, although it offers two paid versions for more comprehensive competitive analysis.

5. Alexa

Alexa is one of the most well-known and commonly used competitive monitoring tools online. Alexa offers several free services, such as the Website Traffic Statistics tool and the Alexa Traffic Rank Chrome extension, both of which are seamless to use and offer you a plethora of traffic metrics and competitive intelligence to help you make informed decisions.

Simply enter you or your competitors’ domain into the search bar and click the Run Analysis button. A pack of insights appear, including a breakdown of keyword opportunities you need to optimize content for new customers. Check out the Keyword Gaps list – the keywords driving traffic to your competitors’ sites, but not yours.

*Click here to test drive Visualping to monitor changes to your competitors’ website analytics by tracking changes in Alexa’s results. Keep tabs on changes to the percentage of organic search referrals to your site, or the percentage of visits to your site that consist of a single page view, and compare these changes to that of your competitors’ metrics.

The Alexa Traffic Rank is Alexa’s extension for Chrome. Accompanying you as you search the web, the extension provides data such as the site’s Alexa Traffic Rank, the top search queries driving its traffic, the number of sites linking to it and the site’s average load time.

Use Alexa Rank, one of the best competitive monitoring tools, to track website traffic and keyword metrics

Price

Both Alexa’s Website Traffic Statistics tool and the Alexa Traffic Rank Chrome extension are free. To upgrade to more competitive monitoring features, Alexa Pro offers a basic plan with limited features for 12.99/month. The Advanced subscription, which offers the complete bundle of marketing tools and is suitable to the single user, is $149/month, with a 14-day free trial.

6. Moz Pro

SEO competitive monitoring is a powerful research strategy that can boost your search rankings, drive more traffic to your site and improve your conversion rate. Analyzing key SEO metrics overlaps is about unveiling opportunities in optimizing your content for the search engines, which you can do with Moz Pro.

Moz Pro is a popular and healthily-stocked SEO tool suite designed to elevate your search engine visibility. It includes the tools Link Explorer, Keyword Explorer and MozBar.

Keyword Explorer shows you your site’s ranking for target keywords compared to competitors’. The audience analysis insights helps you survey the origins of your website visitors, such as if they came from paid ads, search or social media. When you know where your audience came from, you can optimize your visibility for new keyword opportunities to attract more qualified leads to your site.

Moz Pro offers its own crawler to constantly audit your site, which combs it for errors and immediately reports issues, helping you fix errors quickly and efficiently.

Price

Moz Pro offers a 30-day free trial. When billed annually, Moz Pro’s Standard plan is $79 per month.

7. Mention

Mention is an easy-to-use social media and web monitoring tool that monitors the internet for the particular keywords you wish to track, such as your brand name or your competitors’.

Mention is one of the best competitive monitoring tools in that you can monitor where you and your competitors are being talked about – major social media channels, blogs, forums and news outlets – and what people are saying. Use the Insights Center to dive deep in brand sentiment patterns, and see volume trends of competitor mentions and their overall social reach.

Mentions provides real-time alerts for your keywords. It also allows you to track the influencers who mention your competitors, enabling you to monitor influencer marketing campaigns.

Price

Mention offers a variety of plans, which start at the Solo plan for $29/month.

Best Competitor Monitoring Tools: That’s a Wrap

The best competitive monitoring tools above will help you gather valuable insights into competitors’ online activities and analyze that data to make smart business decisions.

Even better are competitive monitoring tools that are easy-to-use and don’t cost a fortune.

Interested in finding out more about how Visualping can help your team’s competitor monitoring strategy? Contact us today – our support team would be happy to help.

Visualping: competitor monitoring made simple

Trusted by 85% of Fortune 500 companies. Get automatic alerts when any competitor web pages change.

Visualping: competitor monitoring made simple

Start Monitoring Now (It's Free)

Visualping: competitor monitoring made simple

Trusted by 85% of Fortune 500 companies. Get automatic alerts when any competitor web pages change.

Start Monitoring Now (It's Free)

Emily Fenton

Emily is the Content Marketing Manager at Visualping. She has a degree in English Literature and a Masters in Management. When she’s not researching and writing about all things Visualping, she loves exploring new restaurants, playing guitar and petting her cats.