As the old saying goes, "Keep your friends close and your enemies closer." In an age of increasing customer acquisition costs, expensive paid ads, and AI threatening to disrupt every business, the last thing you want to worry about is your competition.
This is why today we're giving you the very best tools for competitor analysis. Whether it's through social media, SEO, paid ads, or just their website, there's a competitor research tool for everything. Read on to discover how to monitor the competition even in your sleep.
1. Prowly - for coverage tracking, PR Outreach (and more)
💸 Pricing: Basic ($258/month), Pro ($416/month), Enterprise (custom pricing)
Best for: combining media outreach, press release distribution, and coverage tracking to gauge competitors’ PR reach. Best suited for small to medium in-house PR teams and PR or marketing agencies.
What you can do with Prowly
Prowly is the best all-in-one PR tool for creating press releases and reaching out to journalists. Instead of spraying and praying, you can tap into Prowly's media database of over one million contacts.
With advanced filters, you can find journalists who talk about your industry and your competitors and pitch them a story to get the spotlight on your client or brand.
With features such as media monitoring (more on that later), you can find out what kind of reach your competitors' content is getting and learn what you can do better. With Prowly's AI PR software, anyone can create a press release, even with no experience in public relations.
The top features include:
- AI PR software for creating press releases and tracking engagement
- Media database of over one million contacts
- Online newsroom
- PR reports
- Media pitching tool
- And many others
2. Brand24 - for social media listening
💸 Pricing: Individual ($119/month), Team ($159/month), Pro ($239/month), Enterprise ($399/month)
Best for: AI social listening, getting access to media mentions across platforms such as web, socials, videos, podcasts and much more.
What you can do with Brand24
Brand24 is the best-in-class brand mention monitoring tool.
With access to over 25 million online sources, you can get a historical overview of your mentions and track them in real time. With features such as advanced sentiment analysis and detailed reporting, it's a great fit for in-house teams and agencies.
Some of its top features include:
- Reach and sentiment analysis
- Personalized reports for in-house teams or clients
- AI-based recommendations for branding and marketing campaigns
- AI topic analysis
- PR metrics such as AVE and presence score
3. BuzzSumo - for content performance analysis
💸 Pricing: Content Creation ($199/month), PR & Comms ($299/month), Suite ($499/month), Enterprise ($999/month)
Best for: helping marketers and PR teams track competitor content performance, discover popular topics, and identify high-impact influencers.
What you can do with BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo is an all-in-one tool for content creators.
Whether you're a journalist or run a brand, you can use this tool to measure how your content performs in the real world. You can tap into new topics, identify popular content across the web and social media, monitor your brand mentions, find influencers and much more.
Top features include:
- Real-time trending topic research
- Easily find the most viral content
- Competitive benchmarking
- Competitor backlink analysis
4. Prowly - for monitoring mentions
💸 Pricing: Basic ($258/month), Pro ($416/month), Enterprise (custom pricing)
Best for: combining PR outreach with mentions monitoring, tracking press coverage and media mentions, and offering a media database for competitive PR insights.
What you can do with Prowly
Prowly is everything a PR team might need for creating press releases, building lists of journalists, sending personalized pitches and tracking their success in PR CRM. As a part of its numerous PR features, Prowly also offers media monitoring.
With this feature, simply choose your most relevant keywords (branded or not) and get curated reports with mentions: who mentioned your competition, where and how. On top of the source, you also get AI analysis of the sentiment, so you'll know if the mention is neutral, positive or negative.
And if a crisis is looming, Prowly will let you know.
If there's a sudden spike in negative mentions, you'll get an alert so you can put out the fire before it spreads. And if your competitors are verging on a crisis, you can react in time.
Some of the many features offered include:
- Online monitoring
- Social media monitoring
- Print monitoring
- Broadcast monitoring
5. Upfluence - for influencer identification and tracking
💸 Pricing: not available publicly, you have to talk to their sales to get pricing details
Best for: identifying influencers connected to competitor brands, helping PR and marketing teams pinpoint key voices in their industry.
What you can do with Upfluence
Upfluence allows you to find, manage, track and pay influencers all in one place.
You can look into the influencers in your industry that your competitors are using, discover their rates, the performance of their content, and their typical requirements for collaboration. You can then hire the same influencers or find someone better on their platforms.
Top features are:
- Finding influencers who already track and love your brand
- Detailed campaign metrics to help you pick and choose the best influencers with the highest ROI
- Managing, hiring and paying influencers directly through Upfluence
- Setting up affiliate campaigns
6. Mailcharts - for competitor email monitoring
💸 Pricing: Free, Pro ($149/month), Enterprise (custom pricing)
Best for: monitoring competitor email strategies, design, and frequency, giving marketing teams insights for optimized email campaigns.
What you can do with Mailcharts
Whether you're looking for inspiration for your campaigns or you want a sneak peek at competitors, Mailcharts has all the data on email and SMS campaigns.
From email pros to complete beginners, Mailcharts gives you a full stack of tools to get started with your next campaign.
You'll find features such as:
- Historical and competitive data for your industry
- Mailcharts Index with 1,000+ brands and their email data
- Lifecycle campaign data for all companies in the Mailcharts database
7. Semrush - competitor analysis tool for SEO and content gaps
💸 Pricing: Pro ($139.95/month), Guru ($249.95/month), Enterprise (starts at $5,000/month)
Best for: identifying SEO and content gaps, showing keywords competitors rank for, content ideas, and backlink opportunities.
What you can do with Semrush
Semrush is the all-in-one tool for SEO.
Its competitor website analysis tool lets you see what keywords your competitors are ranking for, which pages are driving that traffic, how many backlinks they have, and much more.
The best Semrush features are:
- Site audits
- Keyword research
- Content planning, creation, and optimization
- Backlink analysis and tracking
- Rank tracking
8. iSpionage - for paid advertising and PPC analysis
💸 Pricing: Starter ($59/month), Professional ($99/month), Advanced ($299/month), Enterprise (custom pricing)
Best for: tracking competitors' PPC campaigns, keywords, and ad copy to provide detailed insights into digital advertising strategies.
What you can do with iSpionage
iSpionage lets you see what your competitors are doing in the field of PPC and SEO.
Find out what keywords they are targeting organically, which ones they are bidding for, and the budget and creatives for each of them.
Top features include:
- Detailed competitor analysis
- PPC keywords and ad effectiveness index scoring
- SEO keywords, keyword groupings, and landing page snapshots
9. Boardfy - for price monitoring
💸 Pricing: starts at €39/month, depending on the number of products you want to track
Best for: tracking competitor pricing at a glance, making automated pricing changes, optimizing Google Shopping campaigns and more.
What you can do with Boardfy
Boardfy is built for e-commerce stores and brands that want to stay on top of pricing changes for their products all in one dashboard.
Track thousands of products or competitors at a time and inform your sales and marketing strategies with real-time data.
Top features are:
- Competitor monitoring, pricing intelligence, feed optimizer, and dynamic pricing AI for e-commerce
- Monitoring distributors and MSRP variations for brands
10. VidIQ - for YouTube monitoring
💸 Pricing: Boost ($16.58/month), Coaching ($99/month)
Best for: insights into YouTube video performance, including competitor keyword usage, engagement metrics, and content strategies for YouTube-specific growth.
What you can do with VidIQ
If you want to win with YouTube content, VidIQ gives you all the insights you need with their competitive tracking software designed solely for this platform.
Whether you want to do research and come up with new content ideas or find out what competitors are doing, VidIQ offers it all.
You can find features such as:
- Competitor channel analysis (highest viewed videos, views per hour, subscriber growth driven by premium content)
- Exporting top competitor keywords
- Sorting competitors by date, views per hour and other critical data points
11. Sparktoro - for audience insights and social behavior
💸 Pricing: Free, Personal ($38/month), Business ($112/month), Agency ($225/month)
Best for: insights into where audiences spend time online, including their preferred social platforms, influencers, and interests. Ideal for PR and marketing teams looking to identify target audience behaviors and improve targeting strategies.
What you can do with Sparktoro
Instead of researching your competitors, Sparktoro researches your target audience to find their preferences.
If you struggle to determine why your audience behaves in a certain way or why your competitors perform the way they do, Sparktoro can provide many answers.
Key features include:
- Audience research: find websites, social media accounts, podcasts, YouTube channels and more that your target audience engages with
- Keyword insights: find keywords your target audience searches for
- Demographic data: find out your audience's age, geographic location, gender, job titles, skills and more
12. Visualping - competitor website analysis tool
💸 Pricing: Free, Starter ($10/month), Personal 5k ($25/month), Personal 10k ($50/month), Business 20k ($100/month)
Best for: tracking visual and content changes on competitors' websites, sending alerts when updates occur. Useful for monitoring pricing, messaging, and new product announcements.
What you can do with Visualping
From small tweaks to major changes on landing and pricing pages, Visualping shoots you an update every time one of your competitors makes a change on their web presentation.
Expect features such as:
- Website change detection and real-time alerts
- Email alerts with screenshots of the changed page
- Browser extension and web widget
13. AdClarity - for advertising campaign insights
💸 Pricing: not available publicly - you can only book a demo
Best for: detailed insights into competitors’ display, social, and video advertising campaigns, offering valuable data for benchmarking digital ad strategies.
What you can do with AdClarity
AdClarity is a digital ad intelligence platform that lets you compare your performance against competitors' paid ads.
It covers everything from display ads, social media, video and in-app ads, programmatic vs. direct ads, and much more.
Some of the best features are:
- Explore competitors' ad activity across platforms from a single dashboard
- Data exports, APIs and custom dashboards
- 25 million human panellists that provide insights on paid ads
14. Rival IQ - for social media comparison
💸 Pricing: Drive ($239/month), Engage ($349/month), Engage Pro ($559/month)
Best for: Comparing competitor social media performance, delivering metrics on engagement, follower growth, and content strategies across platforms.
What you can do with Rival IQ
Rival IQ is a competitor tracking software exclusively for social media platforms.
Simply add your own account and your competitors' info and you will get a quick rundown of where you're (under)performing and what you could do better.
Key features include:
- Head-to-head social media account comparison
- Social media audits with customizable reports
- Social post analysis (top-performing content, hashtags, best time to post, Boolean keyword search and more)
15. Google Trends - for forecasting search trends
💸 Pricing: free
Best for: real-time data on search trends, helping PR and marketing teams understand rising topics, forecast seasonal trends, and align content with audience interests.
What you can do with Google Trends
Google Trends is a completely free competitor analysis software that should be on everyone's radar.
It displays the popularity of search queries over time and lets you see how (un)popular a term is in searches on the web.
Some of the many things this tool can do include:
- Showing search interests over time
- Comparing different terms and topics
- Showing regional interest
- Related topics and queries
- Real-time trends
- Seasonal insights
💡 Since it's free, there is no excuse not to check it out before trying the paid competitor monitoring software on this list.
Conclusion
A competitor analysis tool can give you tons of helpful information without lifting a finger. In an age where a competitive research tool can do the heavy lifting for you, it simply makes no sense to do the manual research yourself.
This is where Prowly's competitive analysis software comes in. We monitor the web for mentions of your brand or target keywords, so you never miss a beat.
