Reference
A generation ago, doing comprehensive competitive research would have meant hiring an expensive market research firm. Today, there are incredibly powerful tools available, many of them free. You may immediately turn to your favorite AI assistant, but here are just some of the other resources you should be aware of.
Old-Fashioned Customer Interviews
Your best insights are always going to come from actually talking to prospective customers. Remember, you're trying to understand the alternative ways customers address the problem your startup will solve. If you're making a shopping list app, your competition isn't just other shopping list apps — it's spreadsheets, notes on scraps of paper, and all the other ways people create shopping lists. When you do customer development interviews, make sure you ask how they are currently solving the problem that your startup proposes to solve.
Google, Google Trends, Google News
Google searches are an obvious tool for competitive research, but do you know about Google Trends? It shows search volume trends that can be very helpful for your research. Google News may help you find press releases and articles about competitors. Remember to set Google Alerts for your competitors so that Google will automatically notify you whenever they make announcements.
The Wayback Machine
Did one of your competitors change their pricing two years ago? Would it be helpful to know how their pricing changed? You can use the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine to see exactly what their pricing page looked like in the past. It's a cool tool for many facets of competitor research.
Crunchbase and PitchBook
Figuring out the financial strength of your competitors may be important. If one of them recently raised one hundred million dollars in new funding, that would be good to know. Crunchbase and PitchBook will give you this data — the free versions will provide some data, but you may have to pay for deeper insights.
Discussion Groups
Sites like Reddit and Facebook Groups have discussion forums around nearly every product sector. See what problems people are facing, and what solutions they are turning to. You will learn about competitors and opportunities, all in one place.
Customer Reviews
If your startup is building enterprise software, check out G2 and Capterra and read customer reviews of current platforms in your category — you'll learn a lot. For consumer products, review sites range from Yelp to Amazon. And if you're building a consumer mobile app, competitor reviews on the App Store and Google Play are particularly valuable — users often describe in precise detail exactly what they love and hate about existing solutions, pointing directly at the unmet needs your startup could address.
Web Traffic Data
If web traffic will be important to your startup, you may want to see what sort of traffic your competitors are currently getting. Platforms such as Semrush and Similarweb will give you insights into competitors' web traffic, search engine optimization (SEO), pay-per-click (PPC), and social media marketing (SMM).
LinkedIn is an underutilized research tool. Find out how many employees work for each of your competitors. See what the employees are currently posting about. Discover whether they brag about funding milestones or operating metrics. Upgrade to LinkedIn Sales Navigator for deeper tools.
Glassdoor
Glassdoor is an often-overlooked competitive intelligence tool. Employee reviews of competitor companies can reveal internal culture, leadership challenges, and organizational growing pains that would never appear in a press release or pitch deck. If a competitor's employees are consistently flagging product direction issues or leadership turnover, that's valuable signal. Job listings on Glassdoor can also reinforce what you've already found on LinkedIn.
Social & Content
Job Postings
An underrated signal. Scraping a competitor's job board on LinkedIn or their own site reveals a lot — what they're building, where they're investing, what's breaking.
Tech Stack Research
Want to know what technology your competitors are running under the hood? Tools like BuiltWith and Wappalyzer can show you a competitor's hosting provider, analytics platform, payment systems, and third-party integrations — often from just their URL. Knowing whether a competitor is running on modern infrastructure or legacy technology can tell you a lot about their scalability and technical limitations.