Free Competitor Analysis Tools: 25 Top Picks in 2025
Founder and Editor-in-chief
The Starting Idea
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This is a list of the best free competitor analysis tools in 2025.
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.
Note: All the tools here have free versions but if you choose to upgrade to a paid version of the tool, I will earn a small commission at no extra cost to you.
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
- Free Competitor Business Intelligence Tools
- Free PPC Spying Tools
- Free ChatGPT Competitor Spying Tools
- Free Competitor Historical 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.
17. ViralFindr
ViralFindr is a free tool that lets you analyze Instagram accounts based on engagement, likes, comments, and more. You can use this tool to find hidden outliers among your competitors. For example, you can see which posts of your competitors and industry leaders did the best in terms of engagement, and reverse engineer their hook, captions, etc., for your own channel.
18. SocialInsider
ViSocialInsider is not completely free but worth a mention as its free trial does not require credit card. The power of this tool is immense. It can analyze the best performing competitor posts from a variety of social media channels.
You just enter your competitor username for LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter/X, or Instagram, and it will analyze the entire profile and fetch the best performing content from those channels. It will also tell you valuable data which time and day of the week does the channel get maximum traction. The free trial lasts for 14 days and let’s you analyze historical data for up to 1 month.
19. RivalIQ
RivalIQ is Another brilliant tool for finding the best performing posts of your competitors on FB, Twitter, Instagram, and more.
You can choose the specific time period that you want to analyse and see the best and worst performing posts of competitors for that period.
You can see the total engagement and also the engagemnt rate with respect to total number of followers.
Free Competitor Business Intelligence Tools
20. Unkover
Unkover is a tool that lets you uncover relevant page changes of competitors, new funding rounds, email workflows, press mentions, SEO topic gaps, and more.
Take advantage of its free trial to keep a sharp eye on your competitors and make your strategic move accordingly.
21. Owler
Owler is a great free tool to access and track detailed company data of your competitors. It can give vital information like revenue, employee count, funding history, acquisitions, and other important insights that can be crucial for your next action steps.
This tool will help you find industry trends, new competitors, and more, with real-time alerts, empowering your next business move. A must-have tool in your competitor analysis tool arsenal.
Free PPC Spying Tools
22. SpyFu
SpyFu can be a great free secret weapon of yours to research hidden details about your competitors for free. You just enter your competition/industry leader’s domain name and run a search. SpyFu fetches powerful details like keywords being targeted by the competition, main competitor’s of the domain (this helps in knowing who all are in competition in your niche), PPC ads run by the competitor, best performing pages, and much more.
23. iSpionage
Another great free alternative to SpyFu, it shows detailed top ads of your competitors on Google, along with the destination landing page URLs. Moreover it can also show you Bing/Yahoo ads if your competition is running them You can set alerts for every new ad, PPC keywords, and organic keywords of your competitors. Truly a nifty tool.The premium upgrade lets you download reports too and can be handy for doing prospect research and winning clients.
Free ChatGPT Competitor Spying Tools
24. SpyGPT By SpyFu
SpyGPT is another great tool by SpyFu that lets you see how ChatGPT is talking about your brand. It tells you where and for what query are your competitor websites are featuring on ChatGPT. You can use this competition intel to optimize your content for the same queries too.
Free Competitor Historical Research Tools
25. Wayback Machine By archive.org
This is a great free tool to see the erstwhile or old versions of your competitor websites, what they looked like, what copy they used on their landing pages, etc. this is a great tool to see competitor landing page evolution and take cues from their pivot and bring forth the valuable analysis on to your website.
If you are starting small, you can run the way back machine on top unicorns when they started and look for clues on what growth hacks, messaging etc they used whne thye were small and replicate the same for your brand as well.
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