Free Competitor Analysis Tools: 16 Top Picks in 2024
Founder and Editor-in-chief
The Starting Idea
This is a list of the best free competitor analysis tools in 2024.
Competitor analysis tools are the fastest way to know what is working in your industry and what’s not. That makes them critical for success of new businesses.
This is because when you are starting out, you cannot waste time, money, and resources on elaborative business experiments and hit and miss efforts. You need concrete proven strategies that have shown their mettle in your industry.
To guide you better, we have divided the tools into different categories.
Use the table of contents listed below to scroll straight to the section that is most relevant to your current needs.
Here you go:
- Free Social Media Monitoring Tools
- Free Website Research Tools
- Free Technology Research Tools
- Free Competitor’s Social Media Performance Research Tools
Find when and where your competitor is being mentioned on the web in real time using Google Trends.
Enter your competitors on Social Mention and get detailed analytics like mentioning frequency, sentiment, reach, etc., collected from across the web.
Free Website Research Tools
3. SimilarWeb
See where your competitor is getting its traffic from, what are the sources of the traffic and the demography of its audience.
4. BuzzSumo
Use Buzzsumo to know what kind of content is working best in your industry. Just use your industry keywords in Buzzsumo and see what kind of articles are getting the highest rate of social engagement.
Alternatively, enter your competitor’s domain and see what articles of your competitor are their best performing hits.
A handy tool to generate viral content and come up with viral headlines.
5. SpyFu
Learn your competitor’s PPC keywords and SEO strategies, search and download their keywords. An awesome PPC research tool.
6. Crayon
Track the changes of your competitor’s digital footprint and get email notifications of it.
7. Ubersuggest
A giant SEO tool that is completely free. Quickly check relevant keywords based on your niche, get SEO based tips and score your site for optimization.
8. SEMrush
Analyze your competitor’s top organic and paid keywords, backlinks and more with SEMrush.
9. Alexa
Get detailed web traffic statistics and analytics using Alexa.
10. Moz
Backlinks are critical for SEO. Get detailed back analysis of any of your competitor with this free tool.
Use the data to create better content and then approach these sites linking to your competitor to now link to you.
11. Siteliner
Use Siteliner to check for broken links of any site, and then help the site fix it by pitching your link as a replacement for it.
Free Technology Research Tools
Free Competitor’s Social Media Performance Research Tools
13. VidIQ
A nifty tool that comes loaded with competitor analysis features.
To use this, just sign up for VidIQ and get their chrome extension for free. Next, when you play a YouTube video, VidIQ will give you all the insider data about your competitor’s video that will help you reverse engineer your competitor’s video plan.
Use it to get competitor data like tags used in competitor’s video, social performance of the competitor video, description length, description link count, no. of views per hour, and an overall score of the video in terms of SEO best practices.
14. Daily 140
See the recent follows and likes of 3 twitter users of your choosing.
15. MyTopTweets
Find any Twitter user’s top 10 tweets based on engagement of each tweet.
16. Vaizle
Vaizle has 2 free social media competitor analysis tools: 1) Facebook competitor analysis tool and 2) Instagram competitor analysis tool. These tools help you uncover the brand performance of your competitors or industry leaders. You can check metrics like brand activity, no. of shares, likes, etc., for the past 30 days. Use it to get some awesome content inspiration.
Abhik Shome
Abhik Shome is the Founder of The Starting Idea, a solopreneur-focused business growth magazine. With The Starting Idea, he aims to share clever (and unconventional) content marketing strategies and untapped tools for solopreneur startups to seize profitable blue ocean opportunities rapidly before the competition. He has previously contributed to major publications like Inc Magazine, Business Insider, Thrive Global, Influencive, and YourStory. Connect with him on LinkedIn.
Free Social Media Monitoring Tools