Competitive intelligence, and finding the right tools for your strategy, doesn’t have to be a headache.

Ideally, the tool you choose is affordable, easy-to-use, and tailored to your unique goals.

Here’s our list of the top competitive intelligence tools that’ll help you get the job done, without breaking the bank.

While you might wish your competitors don’t exist, that doesn’t mean you should pretend they don’t.

For better or for worse, competitors impact your business. They influence how consumers perceive your brand, and the unique role you serve in the market.

They can outperform you in the search results and with their website experience, outshine you in reviews and ratings, outplay you with pricing and promotions and, ultimately, steal your customers.

Staying on top of the competition is essential to informing your own competitive intelligence strategy, accordingly.

But it’s impossible to manually track and record all of your competitors online. Or maybe you’re only looking to keep an eye on a select few competitors, but there’s a lot of data and updates to keep track of. That’s why competitive intelligence tools have become the new norm for businesses, big and small. You can get the job done more efficiently – and effectively.

But how do you pick the right tool for you and your team?

Selecting the Right Competitive Intelligence Tool

There are a lot of competitive intelligence software options out there, and not every competitive intelligence tool option is ideal for you and your team. They vary in what they have to offer. So it’s important to first understand what your goals are, before evaluating your options.

You also don’t have to commit to one single competitive intelligence tool. Consider building an arsenal of select software that make the most sense for your team and strategy. Especially given some are more expensive than others, and some offer value that others just don’t.

Many of the most mainstream, common competitive intelligence tools are also the most feature-dense and expensive. It can be tempting to opt for the shiniest, most expensive option, thinking the complicated features will skyrocket your business to victory.

But many teams sign up for these premium subscriptions, only to wind up only using a fraction of the features at their disposal.

That’s why we’ve curated 10 tools that are easy-to-use and relatively affordable for the value you’re getting, and highlighted each of their unique specializations, so you don’t get lost in the noise and can evaluate which tools are right for your business.

Top Competitive Intelligence Tools in 2024

Visualping

If you’re looking to monitor and get notified of specific competitor updates online – from any web pages you care about – while not breaking the bank, then Visualping is a top solution for you.

You can make it track exactly what’s relevant to you and your team, and it’s the most affordable competitive intelligence tool available.

Just enter any web page, on the internet, into Visualping's homepage, and it’ll automatically check the page for changes. When it detects an update, you’ll receive an email alert, showing you a screenshot of the page, with the changes highlighted.

You can track any content on a web page – including competitor price changes, executive leadership changes, product updates, SEO changes – or monitor any competitor website changes, for that matter. The list of data you can track goes on.

But it goes beyond detecting and notifying you of changes. On any of the business subscriptions, you can include AI-generated summaries of all the page changes, so you can understand what happened faster. You can also get AI analysis in your alerts, which will summarize the update according to what you specifically care about.

Visualping offers a free plan, as well as several affordable pricing options to unlock premium monitoring features. Check out its pricing here. It’s among the most affordable competitive intelligence tools available, and it’s real handy too.

HubSpot says Visualping is an “easy and free way” to monitor competitors’ website changes, such as their pricing, product, news feeds, blogs posts and team and career pages.

SemRush says Visualping is the top competitive intelligence tool for monitoring competitors’ websites, and how they’re trying to meet their conversion goals through their site.

But there are other many free and freemium tools that can help with your competitive intelligence strategy in other ways, or alongside a tool like Visualping. Check them out.

Check out our list of the top competitive intelligence tools of 2024

1. Crunchbase

An overall repository of business data for the technology industry, Crunchbase is an online database that provides in-depth information regarding tech companies in your field. The basic tool is free, although it offers two paid versions for more comprehensive analysis.

Crunchbase is a top competitive intelligence tool because, beyond just a business directory, you can uncover insights through information about investments and funding, founding members, mergers and acquisitions, news and industry trends. Crunchbase reports emerging competitors and keeps track of major changes you should be aware of. The tool specializes in providing data on private companies and startups, which can, otherwise, be tricky to find.

2. Talkwalker Alerts

Wondering what your customers (and potential customers) are saying about you and your competitors?

Crayon’s survey, mentioned previously, says respondents viewed monitoring competitors’ social media channels as equally as important to monitoring competitors’ websites. Nearly 90% found independent review sites helpful sources of CI data, and 80% mentioned the value of monitoring public forums.

Talkwalker Alerts is a top competitive monitoring tool because it's fantastic for alerting users of new mentions on the web. Marketed as an alternative to Google Alerts, Talkwalker monitors audience mentions across the web, including in blogs, newspaper articles, public forums and social media. If someone tweets about your company without tagging you, or enquires about you on Reddit, you can survey what’s being said, and even respond if the discussion warrants it. Talkwalker Alerts filters your company’s mentions, shielding you from an overload of unrelated or irrelevant mentions.

3. Ahrefs

Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the top digital marketing methods. Ahrefs is a top competitive intelligence tool in that it helps companies drive and optimize their SEO campaigns, making it easier to compete against competitors in search rankings. One of the largest databases of live links, Ahrefs is known for its famous backlink authority checker, which allows you to see who’s linking to you and your competitors’ content. You can also use the backlink authority checker to monitor your competitors’ Google rankings.

And, guess what: it's free.

There’s also a free domain authority checker to measure and rate the strength of any given domain name. But when you subscribe to Ahrefs on the paid plan, you get access to several useful tools worth the cash: Site Explorer, Content Explorer, Keyword Explorer, Rank Tracker and Site audit. These tools assist in your keyword research, and show you how your competitors’ content ranks relative to yours. You can even check out the origin of your competitors' traffic.

4. Owletter

What kinds of messages are your competitors sending to their customers (and potential customers)?

A nifty email analytics tool, Owletter lets you study competitors’ email marketing strategies. Owletter is a top competitive intelligence tool in that it monitors email campaigns, evaluates them, and notifies you of any particular trends you have asked the tool to detect and alert you for. You do not have to subscribe to your competitors’ emails, and Owletter does the analytics work for you. You can spot overall patterns and take advantage of opportunities your competitors haven’t touched.

5. Wappalyzer

Wappalyzer is a free browser extension for Chrome, Firefox, or Microsoft Edge. It identifies which tools and technologies the website on your browser is using.

You can imagine how it's a top competitive intelligence tool. Use it to discover what your competitors’ websites are built with, how they’re optimizing their pages and which tools they’re using to send automated emails. You can set up alerts for technology changes and, by comparing technologies across websites, you can see if your own tools provide similar levels of success, or if it’s time for an upgrade.

6. SimilarWeb

Are your website traffic numbers where they should be, or have your competitors caught up?

In terms of comparing website traffic analytics across websites, SimilarWeb is as good as it gets. It's a top competitive intelligence tool that provides a general picture of a website’s reach, ranking and user engagement. Simply enter a website URL in the search bar, and you gain access to insights such as traffic sources, organic versus paid search, social traffic and related sites.

7. Moat

Moat is a cloud-based analytics and intelligence platform that opens the door to a creative ad portal of your competitors’ digital creative history, including advertisements and press releases.

Moat aggregates all the advertisements from a given brand in one location, and lets you compare your brand’s messages to that of your competitors’. You can gather inspiration from your competitors’ work from up to three years in the past, studying their content and making it easier to hone your own advertisement strategy. Moat monitors — even analyzes — trillions of ad impressions from competitor websites, evaluating the effectiveness of their ad campaigns. It also tracks which clicks originate from humans, rather than bots.

8. Hootsuite

Hootsuite is a social media management platform that assists in nearly every aspect of social media marketing, from curating content, scheduling posts, managing a team and measuring ROI.

Hootsuite performs social media monitoring of various accounts for you, such as keeping track of new mentions, retweets, followers and likes. It uses social listening to collect information regarding what’s being said about your brand — and about your competitors. Hootsuite even offers a variety of built-in analytics functionalities, analyzing your competitors’ posts to see which are performing well, and comparing those to your own engagement numbers.

Hootsuite offers several plans to choose from, such as a limited free plan for single users, a paid single user plan with up to 10 social profiles and customized enterprise accounts for large teams and organizations.

9. App Annie

Do you or your competitors have a mobile app and, if so, how is it performing?

App Annie is a top competitive intelligence tool in that it provides marketing and advertising analytics to measure you and your competitors’ app performance. By producing strong mobile experiences, App Annie help you increase mobile engagement and drive more downloads. As App Annie provides data on over 8 million different apps, you can monitor competitors’ app engagement, allowing you to fine-tune own mobile strategy.

Conclusion

With these top competitive intelligence tools, you can collect valuable competitor data and compare competitors' strategies to your own for insights and opportunities.

To determine which of these tools are best for your brand, determine which aspects of competitive research is most fitting for your strategy. Then look at your budget. According to Crayon's report, about half of businesses are currently budgeting $15,000 or more, per year, on competitive intelligence.

The majority of the tools above are freemium, like Visualping so you can test a limited version of the service for free, before unlocking premium features for a reasonable monthly payment.