How To Write A Competitive Analysis

First things first…

Before you begin, we encourage you to define your target audience. Who will be examining this document? Internal team, stakeholders, potential investors, etc? Will they have consistent access to this document? Will this report be presented? Answering these questions first will help guide the language and content of your analysis.

This is a basic format — do not feel as though you must stick to it. Our tools are here to provide you with a little inspiration and direction, not restrict you to a box. Do your research and ask more questions — you might find unique criteria where opportunities for your company reveal themselves.

Logo

A logo offers a brief glimpse into a company’s branding language. This section will quickly provide your audience with that value, as the different colors and imagery will give life and organization to your document by separating the competitors’ brands from each other. When it comes to adding your competitors’ logos, make sure to use high-quality images. Including words like “vector” and “high-res” to your Google search will bring in superior results. Make sure your logos are consistent across the board. (Most companies have both with-text and without-text logo variations — double check to make sure it’s the same format for each of your competitors.)  

Free Resource: Brands of the World

Company Information

The metrics you provide here will depend on the depth of your research. Be sure to keep it consistent by including criteria that can be answered for all competitors. Providing specific, additional information for just one competitor will give your document a bias. As far as gathering publicly available information, here are the first places to look. For company size, LinkedIn is a great resource for discovering the approximate number of employees. Financial details? Check Yahoo Finance and Wikipedia for relevant information. Want to get an idea of their website’s traffic and ranking score? Search on AngelList, Crunchbase.

Description

A company’s slogan, tagline, mission statement and unique value proposition — all of these are important when determining how you stack up against your competitors. What is the company’s key positioning and how does it compare with other companies in this space? How do they describe themselves? This section is your opportunity to include what you feel is valuable descriptive information. 

More resources! Use some of our other templates to define your unique value proposition:

• Lean canvas template
• Brand positioning canvas
• Business model canvas

On the web

Nowadays, it’s a requirement for any company to live on the internet. This section gives you and your team easy access to your competitors’ online presence. Include links to the social media channels and webpages your competition has the most activity on. By providing these links, your audience can quickly determine what channels the companies take advantage of the most and how they use them to tell their brand story. Understanding why and how the competition’s online presence is performing successfully or poorly can expose the potential.

Product

Whether it’s a food truck or mobile app, every business has a product or service to offer. Find an image that captures your competitor’s offering and upload it to the template. Again, social media will be a great resource for discovering imagery for this section.

Strengths & Weaknesses

It’s easy to notice what your competition is doing wrong, but what about the things they’re doing right? To compete, you must dissect all aspects of your competition by completing a SWOT analysis. For a more positive framing, try a SOAR analysis that focuses on strengths, opportunities, aspirations, and results.  What are their customers happy about? What are they complaining about? Use this opportunity to dive into some qualitative competitor analysis. Go online and gather YouTube and Facebook comments, check out conversations on Twitter. If you can interact with your competitors’ customers face-to-face, go out and talk to them. You can use all of this information to your advantage.

Market Breakdown

What’s each competitor’s position in respect to the market landscape criteria? Add new data pieces to compare across the board. This will help your audience understand the market and where your competitors stand in relation to one another.

So there you have it, Xtensio’s Competitive Analysis Template. Remember this document is super flexible — you’re not bound to use any category the way we have it. Click inside text modules and type away, add new modules, graphs, charts, images, etc, drag & drop to reformat — whatever the case is, make something great. And if you’re working on a team, add your colleagues to join in the editing process with Xtensio’s collaboration feature.

Bonus: After completing your Competitive Analysis, fill out the Business Model Canvas sample to re-evaluate your unique value proposition. Deepen your analysis of the competitive landscape with other strategic frameworks.

• PESTLE Analysis
• Porter’s Five Forces Analysis

Competitive Analysis vs Market Research vs Competitor Profiling

These three terms get used interchangeably, but they serve different purposes. Confusing them leads to documents that try to do too much and end up useful to no one.

A competitive analysis compares your company directly against specific competitors across defined criteria: pricing, positioning, product features, market share, and customer sentiment. The output is a side-by-side comparison that helps teams make tactical decisions about positioning, messaging, and product roadmap priorities. It answers the question: “How do we compare to Company X, and where can we win?”

Market research is broader. It examines the entire landscape: market size, growth trends, buyer demographics, regulatory factors, and emerging segments. Market research does not focus on individual competitors. Instead, it tells you whether the opportunity is worth pursuing and what the total addressable market looks like. You would do market research before entering a new vertical or launching a new product category.

Competitor profiling is deeper but narrower. A competitor profile is a detailed dossier on a single company: their founding story, leadership team, funding history, product evolution, pricing model, go-to-market strategy, and hiring patterns. Think of it as an intelligence report rather than a comparison chart.

Here is a practical framework for when to use each:

• Use a competitive analysis when you need to position against 3-7 direct competitors for a sales deck, board presentation, or strategy session.
• Use market research when entering a new market, evaluating a pivot, or building a business case for investment.
• Use competitor profiling when a single competitor poses an outsized threat or when preparing for a competitive deal where deep knowledge of one rival is critical.

Most teams need all three over time. The competitive analysis sits in the middle and gets referenced most frequently, which is why it needs to be a living document rather than a one-time exercise. Building your analysis in a competitive analysis template that your team can update as new information surfaces keeps it useful beyond the quarter it was created.

5 Competitive Analysis Mistakes That Cost You Deals

A competitive analysis is only as valuable as the decisions it informs. These five mistakes are common across startups, agencies, and enterprise teams, and each one reduces the document from a strategic asset to a filing exercise.

1. Analyzing too many competitors at once. When you include 15 or 20 companies in a single analysis, the document becomes a data dump. The comparison criteria get shallow because you cannot go deep on that many companies simultaneously. Limit your primary analysis to 3-5 direct competitors. If you need to track a broader set, maintain a separate watchlist with basic metrics and rotate companies into the primary analysis as they become more relevant.

2. Comparing features instead of positioning. Feature comparison tables are the most common section in competitive analyses, but they are also the least strategic. Features change quarterly. What matters more is how each competitor positions themselves, which customer segment they prioritize, and what their pricing model signals about their strategy. A competitor that offers fewer features but targets your exact ICP with aggressive pricing is a bigger threat than one with a longer feature list aimed at a different buyer.

3. Treating the analysis as a one-time project. A competitive analysis created in Q1 and never updated is misleading by Q3. Competitors launch new features, adjust pricing, hire new leadership, and shift their messaging. Teams that treat competitive intelligence as a point-in-time snapshot make decisions based on outdated information. The most effective teams maintain their analysis as a living deliverable that gets updated when material changes occur.

4. Ignoring indirect competitors entirely. Direct competitors sell a similar product to a similar buyer. Indirect competitors solve the same problem through a different approach. For example, if you sell project management software, your indirect competitors include spreadsheets, email, and even whiteboards. Buyers often evaluate these alternatives even when they do not appear in competitive comparisons. Including 1-2 indirect competitors in your analysis gives stakeholders a more honest view of the buying decision.

5. Not connecting the analysis to a strategic action. The most common failure mode is a competitive analysis that ends with data and never translates into decisions. Every section of your analysis should connect to a “so what” for your team. If a competitor is weaker on customer support, your sales team should know that and use it in positioning calls. If a competitor just raised funding, your product team should anticipate accelerated feature development. Without this translation layer, the analysis sits in a folder and gets forgotten.

How to Update Your Competitive Analysis (and Why Most Teams Don’t)

Fewer than 30% of B2B teams update their competitive analysis more than once per year. The rest let it decay until someone needs it for a board meeting or investor pitch, at which point the team scrambles to rebuild it from scratch. This cycle wastes time and means the document is never current when decisions actually need to be made.

The fix is a cadence, not a calendar reminder. Different industries and competitive environments call for different update frequencies:

• Fast-moving SaaS markets: Monthly check-ins on competitor pricing pages, feature releases, and job postings. Full analysis refresh every quarter.
• Professional services and agencies: Quarterly reviews tied to client proposal cycles. Update positioning and case study sections as new wins are announced.
• Enterprise or regulated industries: Semi-annual deep dives aligned with budget planning cycles. Supplement with event-triggered updates when a competitor makes a major announcement.

Beyond scheduled reviews, certain events should trigger an immediate update: a competitor acquisition, a new product launch, a significant pricing change, a leadership change at the C-suite level, or a competitor entering or exiting your core market segment.

The question of who owns the competitive analysis matters just as much as how often it gets updated. In practice, the best results come from assigning a single owner – typically in product marketing or strategy – who is responsible for maintaining the document and distributing updates to sales, product, and leadership. Without clear ownership, the analysis becomes an orphan that everyone assumes someone else is maintaining.

This is where format matters. A competitive analysis buried in a slide deck or a PDF attachment is hard to keep current because every update requires re-exporting, re-sending, and hoping people open the new version. Building your analysis in Xtensio and sharing it as a live link means updates reach everyone who has the link without any resending. The document stays current, and stakeholders always see the latest version.

From Analysis to Action: Turning Competitive Intelligence Into Strategy

A competitive analysis is not a deliverable that lives on its own. It is an input to decisions across sales, product, and marketing. The gap between “we have a competitive analysis” and “our competitive analysis drives decisions” is where most teams fall short.

Here is how different teams should use the same analysis differently:

Sales teams need competitor-specific talk tracks, objection handling scripts, and deal-stage-specific competitive positioning. When a prospect mentions they are also evaluating Competitor X, the sales rep should know in under 30 seconds where your product wins and what the competitor’s weak points are. Extract the “Strengths and Weaknesses” section of your analysis into a quick-reference battle card that sales can access during live calls.

Product teams need a feature gap matrix and a competitive roadmap timeline. Which features do competitors have that you do not? Which of those features are actually driving customer acquisition versus being checkbox items? Product teams should use the competitive analysis to prioritize their roadmap based on competitive pressure, not just customer requests. The “Product” section of your analysis feeds directly into sprint planning and quarterly OKR discussions.

Marketing teams need differentiation messaging, comparison page content, and campaign angles. Your analysis should inform everything from homepage copy to ad messaging to content strategy. If your analysis reveals that competitors are all positioning on the same value proposition, marketing can find a white-space message that stands out. The “Description” and “Market Breakdown” sections of your analysis are the raw material for brand positioning work.

Leadership and investors need a strategic overview: market position, competitive dynamics, and defensibility. Strip the tactical details and focus on market share trends, funding comparisons, and strategic moves. This version of the analysis should live in your board deck and get refreshed before every board meeting.

The practical implication is that your competitive analysis should be modular. Instead of one monolithic document, consider creating a master analysis that feeds into team-specific views. With Xtensio, you can organize these different views in a workspace so that each team has quick access to the version they need, while the master analysis stays centralized and up to date.

The ultimate test of a competitive analysis is simple: did it change a decision? If your team made the same choices they would have made without the analysis, the document is not doing its job. Build your analysis with decisions in mind, keep it current, and make it accessible to the people who need it most.

That’s a wrap!

Written by

Alper Cakir is the founder and CEO of Xtensio, the living deliverables workspace for teams that create, deliver, and reuse professional work, a staple tool for businesses globally. He boasts over 17 years in the tech industry with expertise in UX/UI design, product management, and innovative business strategy. His passion for design led him to work with major clients like CBS Interactive, NBC Universal, and Toyota. Before Xtensio, he co-founded Fake Crow in Los Angeles, known for its innovative UX/UI approach. Alper studied music theory and jazz composition at Istanbul Bilgi University and guitar at Musicians Institute in London. Known for his hands-on approach, his philosophy is to simplify processes, cut through bureaucratic red tape, and help teams create work that’s ready to send and stays alive as projects evolve.

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