Top 5 Competitive Intelligence Tools to Understand What Competitors Are Doing Online

Competitive intelligence (CI) is a broad term that encompasses multiple different aspects and activities, such as gathering data about competitors, customers, and market trends. Since it’s so vast, there are countless tools to choose from, each for a different purpose. We wrote this article to shortlist top 5 competitive intelligence tools you can choose from, depending on your needs. 

Our top 5 list is as follows:

1. Crayon (for tracking competitor messaging, launches, and positioning)
2. Price2Spy (for eCommerce price monitoring, alerts, and historical reporting)
3. SimilarWeb (for benchmarking competitors’ traffic and channels)
4. SEMrush (for SEO and SEM research)
5. Contify (for automated market and competitor news monitoring)

Let’s take a more detailed look at each of these tools and what kinds of problems it solves. 

Crayon

Website: https://www.crayon.co/ 

What is Crayon most suitable for?

Crayon is most suitable for go-to-market-facing competitive intelligence needs. Primarily this means monitoring competitors and noting every change they make. The idea is to supplement your sales team with competitive intelligence that can be used to create talking points, comparisons, battlecards, and other assets that help you close deals.

Pros

• Always-on competitor monitoring
• Alerts that reduce the manual workload of checking competitors
• Excellent when CI is meant to enable sales
• Helps make the work on CI become more integrated into a broader organizational/team workflow

Cons

• Needs governance (in the sense that it requires you to define what a “signal” is), without which there can be a lot of noise in the data.
• Doesn’t completely eliminate the need for human judgement.

General conclusion

If your primary problem with the competition is summed up in the following statement, it is likely that Crayon is a tool you should consider: “We need to keep up with the competitor moves and arm our sales team, quickly.” The tool is less about performing deep market research, and is much more geared towards supplying the data required for you to stay operational. 

Price2Spy

Website: https://www.price2spy.com/ 

What is Price2Spy most suitable for?

Price2Spy is best suited for gathering pricing intelligence of all types. From monitoring competitors to see if somebody is undercutting or planning to start a price war, to monitoring resellers to see if they are violating pricing policies. On top of that, it offers an analytical toolset for deeper competitive insights. Alternatively, it offers various export and integration options so that you may analyze the competitive data on your own.

Pros

• Precise price monitoring infrastructure
• Historical reporting and near-instant alerting system
• Provides clear output in the sense that it concisely answers questions such as “What price changed, when, and by who?”
• Offers different pricing options for different company sizes

Cons

• Depending on your business scale, onboarding and account setup can take a few weeks.
• It is specialized for eCommerce, not as a comprehensive competitor tracker.

General conclusion

If you are having issues with getting quality competitive pricing data Price2Spy can likely solve that problem. Also, if you are a brand looking to get a more firm grasp of the reseller landscape, it is also a good fit. 

Similarweb

Website: https://www.similarweb.com/ 

What is SimilarWeb most suitable for?

Similarweb is best used for understanding your competitors online performance. To be more precise, this tool gives insights and estimates into traffic patterns, channel mix, and broader digital marketing signals. In turn, this will help you infer what drives your competitors’ growth. 

Pros

• Gives a “bird’s-eye view” across digital channels
• Great for benchmarking (e.g. compare demand sources of competitors)
• Provides clear competitive signals at scale

Cons

• Competitor data is modeled (estimated)
• Coverage tends to be better for larger, more visible properties
• If you have narrow and precise CI questions, can be more than you need

General conclusion

Similarweb is great for when you need to go beyond the scope of what the cookie-cutter SEO tools offer. If you are wondering “How are competitors winning traffic online?” and you don’t have an answer, this may be the tool for you. 

SEMrush

Website: https://www.semrush.com/ 

What is SEMrush most suitable for?

SEMrush is primarily used for SEO- and SEM-related competitive analysis. It discovers keyword & content gaps, and highlights relevant opportunities. It comes with a wide variety of reports that can be used for different purposes. 

Pros

• Very practical, easy to use, and filled with dashboards
• Helps (especially marketers) turn CI and strategies into tactics (by telling you what to write, what to optimize, and where to compete)

Cons

• Some features are based on estimates, instead of hard data
• The reports may feel overwhelming if you don’t have clear questions you want answered
• Interpreting “why” competitors rank often needs additional context beyond the tool

General conclusion

Semrush is CI for teams where search is a growth lever. If your competitive battlefield is Google (organic + paid), it’s one of the most actionable toolsets.

Contify

Website: https://www.contify.com/ 

What is Contify most suitable for?

Contify is suitable for organization-wide CI efforts (incl. Sales, Marketing, Strategy, and Product teams). It is used for collecting, organizing, and sharing market and competitor updates all in one place, within and across teams. It supports integrations with different data sources, which you choose.

Pros

• Suitable for large organizations
• Helpful when you need consistent monitoring of certain sources of data and topics
• Great for organizations who treat CI as an internal service (in the sense of wanting regular briefs/digests)

Cons

• Can be too broad for some organizations
• Account setup may take a while, and there’s a slight learning curve to it

General conclusion

Contify is a steady stream of curated intelligence that multiple stakeholders rely on. It is not a tool for one-off research efforts. 

Conclusions

The five tools mentioned above solve different problems. This just goes to show how vast the field of competitive intelligence is. The best way to go from here is not to pick a specific tool right now. Instead, go through the questions below, and based on what you are currently asking yourself, pick a tool:

• Looking for ways and tools that enable sales and keep messaging current? Go with Crayon.
• Having issues with competitor pricing data, competitive pricing and MAP compliance? Price2Spy is the specialist.
• Want CI on digital demand and channel mix? Explore Similarweb.
• Are you feeling lost in the SEO and SEM competition? Semrush may be of use.
• Want a curated intelligence engine serving multiple teams? Contify

There is our list. Hopefully, we did manage to help you find a potential solution to a competitive problem you are facing. Have in mind that most of these tools will require some time to get to know them and set them up to your liking. Don’t let that deter you, as the benefits they may bring can significantly outweigh the initial setup costs.