Most competitor analysis is a time sink disguised as strategy.
Teams either go too shallow—Googling a few product pages and calling it a day—or too deep, drowning in spreadsheets no one ever opens again. In both cases, the result is the same: it doesn’t help anyone win deals, build better products, or position more clearly in the market.
This post is about fixing that.
Whether you’re a product marketer trying to sharpen your messaging, a founder figuring out how to stand out, or a sales leader tired of losing to the same names, this is how to actually do competitor analysis—practically, strategically, and without wasting your time.
We’ll cover:
- What to look at (and what to ignore)
- The frameworks that make sense (and the ones that just look good in a deck)
- The biggest mistakes even seasoned pros make
- How to turn competitive intel into better product decisions, pricing, and positioning
If you’re in B2B SaaS and want to stop reacting to the competition—and start outsmarting them—keep reading.
The Real Goal of Competitor Analysis
Let’s get one thing straight: you’re not doing competitor analysis to tick a box on a product launch checklist. You’re doing it to make better strategic decisions—faster.
The goal isn’t to obsess over what your competitors are doing. It’s to understand where you stand, where they’re weak, and where you can win. That’s it.
Done well, competitor analysis helps you:
- Sharpen your positioning – so you’re not saying the same thing as everyone else
- Refine your messaging – by knowing what your audience is hearing from other options
- Build the right features – not just because your competitor has them, but because customers actually care
- Price with confidence – because you know how others price, and why
- Enable sales to win – with battle-tested counterpoints, not vague talking points
It’s not about copying your competitors. It’s about finding the gaps they leave open—and filling them in a way only you can.
That’s how you stop chasing the market, and start defining your own space in it.
What You Actually Need to Analyze
(Spoiler: It’s not just a feature checklist.)
If you’re just comparing features side-by-side, you’re missing 80% of the picture. Competitor analysis should give you a real-world view of how your competitors go to market, who they’re targeting, what they’re saying—and what they’re not.
Here’s what to dig into, and more importantly, what to do with it:
1. Product & Features
Yes, this matters. But don’t stop at “do they have this feature?” Ask:
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- What do they lead with?
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- What’s their product clearly built to do well?
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- What trade-offs have they made?
Why it matters: This shows you where they’re leaning strategically. If they’re betting big on integrations and automation, and you’re not, you’d better have a strong angle to counter it.
2. Positioning & Messaging
Look at how they talk about themselves. Website headlines, landing pages, sales decks, ads.
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- What pain points do they lead with?
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- Who are they clearly talking to?
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- What words or themes show up over and over?
Why it matters: This is how they’re shaping customer expectations. If everyone’s saying “all-in-one,” there’s an opening to be the “focused, best-in-class” option.
3. Pricing & Packaging
Dig into pricing pages, trials, discounting tactics. Talk to customers or prospects who evaluated them.
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- What model do they use—per seat, usage-based, freemium?
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- Where are the pricing cliffs?
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- What’s their upsell motion?
Why it matters: Pricing isn’t just about money—it’s about positioning. A low-cost competitor might look cheap or nimble, depending on how they frame it. Know the difference.
4. Marketing & GTM
Study their funnel. Content, SEO, social, events, partnerships.
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- Are they inbound-heavy? Paid-heavy?
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- Are they aiming for thought leadership or lead gen?
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- Who are they clearly trying to impress?
Why it matters: Their go-to-market approach reveals a lot about their growth strategy—and gives you insight into how they’re attracting (and converting) your shared audience.
5. Customer Reviews & Feedback
Go deep on G2, Capterra, Reddit, Twitter. Don’t skim—read the actual language people use.
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- What do customers love?
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- What do they hate?
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- What keeps coming up again and again?
Why it matters: This is where the truth lives. A slick homepage can’t cover for clunky onboarding or bad support. Use their customers’ words to sharpen your own value prop.
6. Strengths & Weaknesses
Once you’ve gathered all the above, ask:
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- What are they actually good at?
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- Where are they overextended, underperforming, or vulnerable?
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- What would a customer be nervous about?
Why it matters: This is where strategy happens. Your job isn’t to beat them at everything. It’s to beat them at something that matters.
Use These, Not a 50-Tab Spreadsheet
Frameworks that actually help you think—and win.
There’s no shortage of ways to slice and dice competitor intel. But most teams either overcomplicate it or pick frameworks that look good in a deck but don’t help anyone make a decision.
Here are the ones that are actually useful—and when to use them:
SWOT Analysis
Use it for: Executive overviews. Quick internal alignment.
Why it works: It gives a simple snapshot of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats—especially useful when comparing multiple competitors at once.
Watch out for: Vagueness. “Weak brand awareness” isn’t helpful if you don’t say why or how to counter it. Keep it sharp.
It’s a strategy lens, not a feature comparison tool. Use when thinking long-term.
Gap Analysis
Use it for: Finding real differentiation opportunities.
Why it works: Looks at what customers want vs. what competitors deliver. Goldmine for product strategy and messaging angles.
Watch out for: Seeing “gaps” that aren’t valuable. Not every missing feature is a real opportunity.
Validate the gap before you chase it. Talk to customers. If they’re not frustrated by it, it’s not a gap—it’s noise.
Battlecards
Use it for: Sales enablement. Competitive calls. Deal-winning ammo.
Why it works: Boils down the must-know stuff—what they say, what we say, where we win, where we need to be careful.
Watch out for: Letting them go stale. A dusty battlecard is worse than none.
Make battlecards living docs. Update them when pricing changes, when you launch a new feature, or when Sales says “Hey, this isn’t landing.”
These frameworks aren’t just for the slide deck. They’re for driving decisions—how you position, how you build, how you sell.
How to Not Screw This Up
The most common mistakes even smart teams make.
You can follow all the frameworks, gather all the intel, and still end up with competitor analysis that does nothing but collect dust.
Here’s where it usually goes wrong—and how to avoid it:
Benchmarking against the wrong competitors
Just because someone’s in your category doesn’t mean they’re your benchmark.
If you’re serving SMBs and they’re chasing enterprise whales, you’re not playing the same game. Stop obsessing over them.
Fix it: Compare yourself to competitors that actually sell to the same people as you, at the same price point, with the same buyer journey. Relevance > prestige.
Copying your competitors
“If they’re doing it, it must be working” is lazy thinking. Chasing feature parity or mimicking messaging just makes you blend in.
Fix it: Use competitor intel to differentiate, not imitate. If they zig, find your zag.
Only analyzing what’s easy to see
Website copy, feature lists, pricing pages—that’s the surface. The real insight is in how customers talk about them, how they sell, and how they show up in the market.
Fix it: Go deeper. Read reviews, listen to demo recordings, watch their webinars, stalk their sales reps on LinkedIn. Yes, really.
Treating it like a one-time project
Competitive landscapes shift fast—new features, new entrants, pricing changes, funding announcements.
Fix it: Make it an ongoing process. Set a cadence. Even light updates quarterly will keep you from getting blindsided.
Gathering intel but doing nothing with it
You spent weeks researching, dropped it into a Notion doc… and nobody ever opened it again.
Fix it: Always end with: “So what do we do with this?” Update your battlecards. Change your messaging. Kill a roadmap item. If it doesn’t drive action, it’s just trivia.
Ignoring the customer perspective
You’re not selling against a competitor’s pitch. You’re selling against the customer’s experience with that product.
Fix it: Listen to what customers say in reviews, sales calls, churn interviews. That’s where the real competitive edge is.
Getting shady
Pretending to be a customer to get a private demo? Logging into their tool under fake info? That’s a fast way to get burned.
Fix it: Stick to public info, customer conversations, and ethical gray areas you can justify (like a free trial with your real email). Competitive intelligence should make you smarter—not sketchier.
Turning Insights into Action
Because a beautiful deck no one reads won’t help you win deals.
Competitor analysis isn’t done when the research is done. It’s done when it drives a decision—on positioning, on product, on pricing, on messaging. Otherwise, it’s just strategy theatre.
Here’s how to actually get value from all that work:
Build the right outputs for the right people
Not everyone needs a 20-page teardown. Tailor the output to the team:
- PMMs & Product Teams → Competitive profiles, feature comparisons, SWOTs, messaging risks/opportunities.
- Sales → Tight battlecards with “why we win,” objection handling, trap questions, and pricing comparisons.
- Leadership → One-pager with market moves, threats/opportunities, and strategic implications.
If you’re sending the same doc to everyone, you’re either giving too much… or not enough.
Create battlecards that actually get used
Battlecards shouldn’t be pretty. They should be brutal, useful, and fast.
- Keep them to 1 page.
- No fluff. Just: Who they are, where we win, how to respond.
- Add scripts or phrases reps can steal on a call.
- Include traps: “Ask them if they need X—most can’t do that natively.”
Bonus: Add links to win/loss notes, recent customer feedback, or a Slack thread where a rep just crushed a deal against them.
Give product teams insight, not just info
Dumping a spreadsheet of feature comparisons isn’t helpful. Instead, show them:
- What competitors are prioritizing in public (via updates, roadmap reveals, hiring patterns).
- Where customers are frustrated (from reviews, community posts, etc.).
- Which features are differentiators vs. expected table stakes.
Help PMs see where the real strategic opportunity is—not just where they’re “missing something.”
Make it ongoing and accessible
Stick it in a Google Drive folder and it dies. Make it visible.
- Set up a Slack channel for competitive intel.
- Drop monthly or quarterly summaries of major moves.
- Use Loom to walk through updates in 5 mins for teams who won’t read a doc.
This stuff should live where the team already works—not in a silo.
Tie every insight to a decision
Always ask: So what? So what does this competitor’s new feature mean for our roadmap? So what does their price drop mean for our mid-tier plan?
Competitor analysis is only as valuable as the decisions it influences. If nothing changes, you didn’t find anything worth knowing.
Real-World Examples: How Smart Teams Use Competitor Analysis to Win
Plenty of companies say they “monitor the competition.” But the ones who win? They use that intel to out-position the competition, not just react to them.
Here are two examples that prove the point:
Slack vs. Microsoft Teams: Outmanoeuvring a Giant
When Microsoft bundled Teams into Office 365, Slack could’ve panicked. Instead, they doubled down on product-led growth and focused on being the best experience, not the biggest platform.
- What they knew: Teams would win by default in enterprise—so Slack targeted teams who actually choose their tools.
- What they did with it: They framed Microsoft as bloated and old-school. Slack became the “friendly, fast, integrates-with-everything” alternative.
- How they positioned: A full-page ad that welcomed Microsoft Teams to the space—confident, not defensive.
What you can steal: If you can’t beat a competitor on size, beat them on focus and experience. Know your strengths. Own your narrative.
Monday.com vs. ClickUp & Asana: Winning on Clarity
The project management space is crowded. Monday knew it couldn’t be the cheapest (hi, ClickUp), and it wasn’t the most enterprise-heavy (hello, Asana). So it leaned into clarity and usability.
- What they knew: Everyone else was chasing “all-in-one” with bloated feature sets. That made things complicated, especially for mid-sized teams.
- What they did with it: They made onboarding ridiculously easy. Templates, clean UI, fast setup.
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- How they positioned: “Work OS” for teams that want flexibility without the headache.
What you can steal: Competitor analysis isn’t just about what others have—it’s about what they’ve sacrificed. That’s where you differentiate.
These companies didn’t just respond to competitors—they out-positioned them. That’s the whole point.
Your Strategy Is Only As Good As Your Intel
Competitor analysis isn’t about obsessing over what everyone else is doing. It’s about understanding the landscape well enough to own your position in it.
Done right, it sharpens your messaging, informs your roadmap, powers up your sales team, and helps you make smarter decisions—faster. Done wrong, it’s just another deck collecting digital dust.
So skip the bloated spreadsheets and one-off slide decks.
Instead:
- Focus on what actually matters.
- Use frameworks that lead to action.
- Share insights people actually use.
- And for the love of strategy—don’t copy, differentiate.
Because in SaaS, the competition isn’t going away. But if you know them better than they know you—and you act on it—you don’t just keep up.
You win.
Try multiple axes until you find one that frames you as the obvious choice. If none do? That’s a positioning problem, not a mapping one.
Porter’s Five Forces
Use it for: Big-picture market strategy. Especially when entering a new category or facing disruption.
Why it works: Forces you to look beyond direct competitors—think substitutes, buyer power, threat of new entrants.
Watch out for: Overkill. This is macro-level stuff. Don’t use it to compare CRMs.
It’s a strategy lens, not a feature comparison tool. Use when thinking long-term.
Gap Analysis
Use it for: Finding real differentiation opportunities.
Why it works: Looks at what customers want vs. what competitors deliver. Goldmine for product strategy and messaging angles.
Watch out for: Seeing “gaps” that aren’t valuable. Not every missing feature is a real opportunity.
Validate the gap before you chase it. Talk to customers. If they’re not frustrated by it, it’s not a gap—it’s noise.
Battlecards
Use it for: Sales enablement. Competitive calls. Deal-winning ammo.
Why it works: Boils down the must-know stuff—what they say, what we say, where we win, where we need to be careful.
Watch out for: Letting them go stale. A dusty battlecard is worse than none.
Make battlecards living docs. Update them when pricing changes, when you launch a new feature, or when Sales says “Hey, this isn’t landing.”
These frameworks aren’t just for the slide deck. They’re for driving decisions—how you position, how you build, how you sell.
How to Not Screw This Up
The most common mistakes even smart teams make.
You can follow all the frameworks, gather all the intel, and still end up with competitor analysis that does nothing but collect dust.
Here’s where it usually goes wrong—and how to avoid it:
Benchmarking against the wrong competitors
Just because someone’s in your category doesn’t mean they’re your benchmark.
If you’re serving SMBs and they’re chasing enterprise whales, you’re not playing the same game. Stop obsessing over them.
Fix it: Compare yourself to competitors that actually sell to the same people as you, at the same price point, with the same buyer journey. Relevance > prestige.
Copying your competitors
“If they’re doing it, it must be working” is lazy thinking. Chasing feature parity or mimicking messaging just makes you blend in.
Fix it: Use competitor intel to differentiate, not imitate. If they zig, find your zag.
Only analyzing what’s easy to see
Website copy, feature lists, pricing pages—that’s the surface. The real insight is in how customers talk about them, how they sell, and how they show up in the market.
Fix it: Go deeper. Read reviews, listen to demo recordings, watch their webinars, stalk their sales reps on LinkedIn. Yes, really.
Treating it like a one-time project
Competitive landscapes shift fast—new features, new entrants, pricing changes, funding announcements.
Fix it: Make it an ongoing process. Set a cadence. Even light updates quarterly will keep you from getting blindsided.
Gathering intel but doing nothing with it
You spent weeks researching, dropped it into a Notion doc… and nobody ever opened it again.
Fix it: Always end with: “So what do we do with this?” Update your battlecards. Change your messaging. Kill a roadmap item. If it doesn’t drive action, it’s just trivia.
Ignoring the customer perspective
You’re not selling against a competitor’s pitch. You’re selling against the customer’s experience with that product.
Fix it: Listen to what customers say in reviews, sales calls, churn interviews. That’s where the real competitive edge is.
Getting shady
Pretending to be a customer to get a private demo? Logging into their tool under fake info? That’s a fast way to get burned.
Fix it: Stick to public info, customer conversations, and ethical gray areas you can justify (like a free trial with your real email). Competitive intelligence should make you smarter—not sketchier.
Turning Insights into Action
Because a beautiful deck no one reads won’t help you win deals.
Competitor analysis isn’t done when the research is done. It’s done when it drives a decision—on positioning, on product, on pricing, on messaging. Otherwise, it’s just strategy theatre.
Here’s how to actually get value from all that work:
Build the right outputs for the right people
Not everyone needs a 20-page teardown. Tailor the output to the team:
- PMMs & Product Teams → Competitive profiles, feature comparisons, SWOTs, messaging risks/opportunities.
- Sales → Tight battlecards with “why we win,” objection handling, trap questions, and pricing comparisons.
- Leadership → One-pager with market moves, threats/opportunities, and strategic implications.
If you’re sending the same doc to everyone, you’re either giving too much… or not enough.
Create battlecards that actually get used
Battlecards shouldn’t be pretty. They should be brutal, useful, and fast.
- Keep them to 1 page.
- No fluff. Just: Who they are, where we win, how to respond.
- Add scripts or phrases reps can steal on a call.
- Include traps: “Ask them if they need X—most can’t do that natively.”
Bonus: Add links to win/loss notes, recent customer feedback, or a Slack thread where a rep just crushed a deal against them.
Give product teams insight, not just info
Dumping a spreadsheet of feature comparisons isn’t helpful. Instead, show them:
- What competitors are prioritizing in public (via updates, roadmap reveals, hiring patterns).
- Where customers are frustrated (from reviews, community posts, etc.).
- Which features are differentiators vs. expected table stakes.
Help PMs see where the real strategic opportunity is—not just where they’re “missing something.”
Make it ongoing and accessible
Stick it in a Google Drive folder and it dies. Make it visible.
- Set up a Slack channel for competitive intel.
- Drop monthly or quarterly summaries of major moves.
- Use Loom to walk through updates in 5 mins for teams who won’t read a doc.
This stuff should live where the team already works—not in a silo.
Tie every insight to a decision
Always ask: So what? So what does this competitor’s new feature mean for our roadmap? So what does their price drop mean for our mid-tier plan?
Competitor analysis is only as valuable as the decisions it influences. If nothing changes, you didn’t find anything worth knowing.
Real-World Examples: How Smart Teams Use Competitor Analysis to Win
Plenty of companies say they “monitor the competition.” But the ones who win? They use that intel to out-position the competition, not just react to them.
Here are two examples that prove the point:
Slack vs. Microsoft Teams: Outmanoeuvring a Giant
When Microsoft bundled Teams into Office 365, Slack could’ve panicked. Instead, they doubled down on product-led growth and focused on being the best experience, not the biggest platform.
- What they knew: Teams would win by default in enterprise—so Slack targeted teams who actually choose their tools.
- What they did with it: They framed Microsoft as bloated and old-school. Slack became the “friendly, fast, integrates-with-everything” alternative.
- How they positioned: A full-page ad that welcomed Microsoft Teams to the space—confident, not defensive.
What you can steal: If you can’t beat a competitor on size, beat them on focus and experience. Know your strengths. Own your narrative.
Monday.com vs. ClickUp & Asana: Winning on Clarity
The project management space is crowded. Monday knew it couldn’t be the cheapest (hi, ClickUp), and it wasn’t the most enterprise-heavy (hello, Asana). So it leaned into clarity and usability.
- What they knew: Everyone else was chasing “all-in-one” with bloated feature sets. That made things complicated, especially for mid-sized teams.
- What they did with it: They made onboarding ridiculously easy. Templates, clean UI, fast setup.
-
- How they positioned: “Work OS” for teams that want flexibility without the headache.
What you can steal: Competitor analysis isn’t just about what others have—it’s about what they’ve sacrificed. That’s where you differentiate.
These companies didn’t just respond to competitors—they out-positioned them. That’s the whole point.
Your Strategy Is Only As Good As Your Intel
Competitor analysis isn’t about obsessing over what everyone else is doing. It’s about understanding the landscape well enough to own your position in it.
Done right, it sharpens your messaging, informs your roadmap, powers up your sales team, and helps you make smarter decisions—faster. Done wrong, it’s just another deck collecting digital dust.
So skip the bloated spreadsheets and one-off slide decks.
Instead:
- Focus on what actually matters.
- Use frameworks that lead to action.
- Share insights people actually use.
- And for the love of strategy—don’t copy, differentiate.
Because in SaaS, the competition isn’t going away. But if you know them better than they know you—and you act on it—you don’t just keep up.
You win.
Feature Matrix
