Competitive Analysis: Guide and Free Template (2026)

In a competitive analysis, you study your competitors’ products, pricing, and positioning to uncover gaps that your company can fill.

In 1979, Michael Porter published a framework for business competition in the Harvard Business Review. In the ’90s, Clayton Christensen coined the term “disruptive innovation” to describe how cheaper, simpler upstarts can enter overlooked parts of a market and displace established competitors.

Today, the internet can hand you thousands of signals about a competitor. The harder question is what, among all that information, points to an opening in the market. This guide covers the methods and tools to conduct a competitive analysis with real-world examples.

What is a competitive analysis?

A competitive analysis is a structured process for identifying direct and indirect competitors, comparing how they compete across areas such as products, pricing, marketing, and sales, and assessing their strengths and weaknesses. The goal is to find gaps or opportunities that can give your business a competitive advantage.

A real-world competitive analysis example: Manmade

When the four founders of Canadian menswear brand Manmade set out to create a better boxer brief, they started by buying pieces of the competition. They tested every boxer brief they could find and spent thousands of dollars on competitors’ products.

Their analysis revealed a gap. Some existing options performed well, but the founders felt the category had become crowded with patterns, elaborate fabric names, and unnecessary styles. They decided to compete on function, fit, comfort, and simplicity instead.

“We thought it was going to take us three months to get up and running, but it took us a year to get our first prototype ready for market,” says cofounder, Roberto Rebelo.

That research shaped several parts of the business:

• Product. Manmade spent a year and roughly 30 prototypes developing a single black boxer brief in five sizes.
• Suppliers. The founders evaluated more than two dozen manufacturing partners across 10 countries before choosing Modal fabric.
• Positioning. The brand centered their offer on comfort and quality without what they saw as category gimmicks.
• Customer research. After their first major sales spike, the founders called their first 1,000 customers and asked why they had bought from them.
• Marketing. Their customers responded to the founders’ authenticity, so the four friends became central to the brand’s storytelling. That eventually grew from organic TikToks into Dragons’ Den and Super Bowl advertising.

Manmade has since grown from four or five orders per day in its early months to more than one million lifetime customers.

The main types of competitive analysis frameworks

A competitive analysis framework organizes your research so you can compare rivals and turn observations into decisions.

A SWOT analysis

A SWOT analysis sorts findings into strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. The strengths and weaknesses concern the company itself; opportunities and threats come from its external environment.

In competitive analysis, you can conduct a SWOT for your business and key rivals to see where your strengths overlap with their weaknesses—or where an external threat affects everyone in the category.

Porter’s Five Forces

Michael Porter’s Five Forces framework zooms out from individual competitors to examine the structure of an entire industry, and analyzes:

• The rivalry among existing competitors
• The threat of new entrants
• The threat of substitute products or services
• The bargaining power of suppliers
• The bargaining power of buyers

Harvard Business School says the Five Forces framework assesses areas like industry attractiveness, trends that may impact competition, and how companies can position themselves for business success.

A strategic group analysis

Michael S. Hunt has been credited with first using the term “strategic group” in 1972, which Porter defined in 1979 as companies within the same industry that compete according to similarities in their strategies. There can be more competition within groups than between groups, and strategic groups can define the domain of competition within an industry. 

Why is competitive analysis important for ecommerce?

The internet opens up a huge market to businesses and puts you in direct competition with thousands of alternatives. According to Statista, global ecommerce revenue will reach $3.86 trillion in 2026, with the number of ecommerce users expected to reach 4.1 billion by 2030.

You’re tracking a category that spans continents, and new entrants keep showing up. In fact, marketing was the top first-year challenge for 37% of store owners in a 2025 Shopify survey of store owners. 

There’s evidence that systematic competitive intelligence translates into business results, too. In Crayon’s 2026 State of Competitive Intelligence report, 49.6% of surveyed competitive-intelligence and revenue professionals said their win rate against competitors had increased over the previous year.

Take Coop Sleep Goods. The brand’s adjustable-fill pillow design came directly from digging into what customers were saying. Shoppers complaining that pillows were too high or too low led straight to the product’s signature feature. 

“We took the approach of going an inch wide and a mile deep versus an inch deep and a mile wide with a bunch of products that don’t really mean anything,” says Cofounder Kevin Chon. “We wanted to be the Kleenex of pillows.”

When to do a competitive analysis

The best time to analyze competitors is before a decision becomes expensive to reverse. Build competitive research into your operating rhythm and revisit it whenever the market gives you a reason to question what you know.

Before you launch

This is perhaps the only point where the findings can still change your entire approach instead of just tweaking a plan you’ve already committed to. 

On a cadence matched to your market

Crayon’s 2026 State of Competitive Intelligence report found that 79% of teams sharing competitive intelligence weekly or faster had revenue impact, versus 41% of teams sharing it monthly or less often.

Before entering a new category

Check the competitive landscape instead of assuming what worked in your existing category will transfer. Research competitor positioning, pricing, messaging, and customer reviews before expanding, alongside demand and customer behavior. Bushbalm, for example, expanded from cosmetics to adjacent skincare needs, adding depth to their offerings and increasing customer lifetime value.

How to do a competitive analysis

The process runs from picking who to study to plotting where you fit against them: 10 steps, in order, from a rough competitor list to a finished market map.

The US Small Business Administration (SBA) recommends looking beyond obvious rivals to assess characteristics including market share, strengths and weaknesses, barriers to entry, your window of opportunity, the importance of your target market to competitors, and indirect competitors.

1. Select competitors

The US Chamber of Commerce recommends creating a shortlist of no more than 10 direct competitors.

Search as your customers would. Try your main product terms on Google, marketplaces, social platforms, and retailers where your audience shops. Search for “[product] alternatives,” “[brand] alternatives,” and category terms.

Aim for variety. Your final group might contain several close substitutes, one or two alternative ways of solving the same problem, an established category leader, and a fast-growing challenger.

For each candidate, ask:

• Does it target the same customer?
• Does it solve the same problem?
• Does it sell at a comparable price?
• Would a customer realistically choose it instead of us?
• Is it changing how customers expect this category to work?

2. Create a spreadsheet

Give every competitor a row and every comparison point a column. Keeping the structure consistent forces you to compare like with like rather than collect interesting, but disconnected facts.

Here’s a rough idea of what that might look like:

Record the evidence and when you found it, and keep your interpretation in separate columns.

3. Categorize competitors into direct, indirect, legacy, and disruptors

Categorize each business in your spreadsheet by how it competes with you. Start with direct and indirect competitors, then flag established legacy brands and genuine disruptors that could reshape the category. This will help you determine how they relate to you.

These categories can overlap. Direct and indirect describe how a competitor relates to your offer, while legacy and disruptor describe the kind of competitive force it represents. A legacy brand, for example, can also be a direct competitor.

Direct competitors

These are the brands that sell the same core product as you, often at a similar price point. For example, Gymshark and Alo Yoga are direct competitors, as they both sell activewear to overlapping fitness and lifestyle audiences.

Direct competitors help establish benchmarks for pricing, features, and customer expectations.

Indirect competitors

These brands solve the same customer problem as you, just in a different way or an adjacent category. A good example is BlendJet, which makes portable blenders, and Huel, which makes meal replacement shakes. Both companies can serve the need for convenient nutrition on the go, but through different products.

Indirect competitors compete as substitutes for the same underlying customer need. For example, someone looking for a fast breakfast could buy ready-to-drink meal replacements instead of making smoothies themselves.

Legacy brands

Legacy brands are long-established competitors with a durable presence in their category. They often benefit from established distribution and years of customer familiarity.

It would be like comparing legacy denim brand Levi’s with a newer brand like Revtown. Both sell denim, but Levi’s has operated since 1873 and has much longer-standing category recognition. Nonetheless, studying a legacy brand can help you identify category conventions as well as openings where a smaller company might compete through specialization, speed, community, or a more narrowly defined customer.

Disruptors

Clayton Christensen’s disruptive innovation theory describes companies that gain a foothold by making a product or service simpler, cheaper, or more accessible for overserved customers or people previously excluded from the market, then improve and move upmarket.

But not every fast-growing challenger meets that definition. Bain & Company tracks “insurgent brands,” which are high-growth consumer brands accounting for disproportionate category growth. The company’s 2026 Insurgent Brands report found that 113 high-growth US consumer brands captured about 36% of category growth in 2025, despite holding less than 2% of total market share

Track both types of challenger brands. Insurgent brands can reveal where customer demand is accelerating, while true disruptors can signal a more fundamental change in who the market serves and how. 

Liquid I.V. is one example. McKinsey & Company identified the electrolyte brand as a disruptor in beverages in early 2026, where disruptor brands contributed 22% of category growth. Liquid I.V. now generates more than $1 billion in annual sales, according to McKinsey.

4. Identify your competitors’ positioning

Work out where each competitor wants to sit in the customer’s mind. Review their homepage, product pages, ads, social bios, packaging, emails, and founder interviews, then record:

• The people they target
• The problem they emphasize
• Their main value proposition
• The attributes they compete on, such as price, quality, convenience, or exclusivity
• The evidence they use to support those claims

Rainbow Shops, for example, may compete with large retailers like Amazon, Walmart, and Shein. But they don’t try to imitate their everything-store positioning. Rainbow focuses on affordable, trend-led fashion and describes their in-store experience as a “treasure hunt” and “retail as entertainment,” distinguishing itself from what Chief Digital Officer David Cost describes as shopping in a warehouse.

Gauge share of voice (SoV)—that is, how much presence your brand commands relative to competitors. Measure it within a specific channel.

For example:

• Search. Track a defined set of commercially relevant keywords and compare the estimated organic visibility each competitor captures. Ahrefs calculates SoV in its Rank Tracker based on the portion of clicks your website gets for tracked keywords.
• Social. Compare your brand mentions with the total mentions earned by you and the competitors in your analysis. 
• AI search. You can also track how often your brand appears relative to competitors in AI-generated answers for relevant prompts.

Pair visibility with the message earning that visibility. 

5. Analyze competitor technology stacks

A competitor’s website tells you what customers see. Its technology stack, however, can hint at what the business is preparing to do next.

For example, if you discover that a competitor’s ecommerce site runs on Shopify, you know it has access to infrastructure that Shopify says helps businesses move and load faster. Shopify stores render up to 2.4 times faster than stores on other platforms and 1.8 times faster on average. Shopify businesses expanding internationally can also use tools such as Managed Markets.

A technology profiling tool such as BuiltWith or Wappalyzer can give you valuable insights into a competitor’s stack, such as its ecommerce platform, marketing software, customer experience apps, and JavaScript libraries.

Look for patterns, too. For instance, a subscription app may signal recurring-revenue ambitions, and loyalty or personalization software can indicate investment in retention.

6. Determine competitive advantage and offerings

Compare what customers get from each competitor. For every business in your spreadsheet, evaluate:

• Product quality. Materials, ingredients, construction, durability, reviews, and evidence supporting quality claims.
• Features. Sizes, variants, specifications, customization, bundles, subscriptions, or other product capabilities.
• Benefits. The outcomes or problems each feature promises to address.
• Distribution. Where customers can buy, including direct-to-consumer (DTC) stores, marketplaces, wholesale, retail, social commerce, or internationally.

Supplement the research above with product pages and customer reviews, and place the findings side by side. Look for features everybody offers, advantages any competitors own, recurring compromises, and needs nobody appears to serve well.

Woodlot did this at the category level. The brand’s founders Sonia Chhinji and Fouad Farraj saw space between luxury home-and-body products and natural grocery-store brands. 

They also recognized that candles are sensory products. Although Woodlot sold through their Shopify store, wholesale generated most of their revenue, so the founders researched neighborhoods and retailers where customers could encounter the products in person. Before approaching a store, they compared their products with existing brands on price, design, target audience, merchandising, and location.

7. Understand how your competitors market their products

You don’t need to compete on every channel your rivals use. Find out where they consistently invest attention, what they say there, and what happens after a customer clicks.

For each competitor, map:

• Channels. Search, social, email, SMS, influencers, affiliates, marketplaces, PR, retail, and events.
• Messaging. The problems, benefits, proof points, and customer segments that recur.
• Offers. First-order discounts, bundles, free shipping, subscriptions, giveaways, and seasonal promotions.
• Creative. Video, user-generated content, founder-led content, product demos, testimonials, or polished campaign imagery.
• Landing pages. Where ads and social posts send shoppers, and how closely the page matches the original message.

Use public tools to inspect what’s running. For example, the Meta Ad Library is a free database of active Facebook and Instagram ads that lets you compare creative, offers, start dates, and recurring campaign themes.

Google’s Ads Transparency Center similarly lets you search advertisers and review ads served across platforms such as Search and YouTube.

Finally, become your competition’s customer. You can sign up for their email and SMS campaigns, follow them on social media, click through ads to their landing pages, or even buy a product.

8. Analyze pricing and sales

Price is a signal for perceived quality, target customer, and how much margin a competitor is willing to sacrifice to win a sale.

Look at:

• Their pricing models. Not just the sticker price, but the structure behind it, like cost-plus, value-based, subscription, tiered, or bundle-based.
• Their sales channels. The place where the sale takes place can be just as important as the price itself. Each channel comes with different margin pressures, and a competitor selling the same product cheaper on a marketplace than on their own site is revealing where they’re willing to compete on price and where they’re not.
• Their customer journey. Walk a competitor’s path the way a customer would. Note what the price is anchored against on the product page, what shows up at checkout that wasn’t visible earlier, and what happens if you abandon the cart. 

The goal is to understand how each competitor turns interest into revenue, and where that journey gives customers a reason to leave.

9. Conduct a SWOT analysis

Once you’ve compared the full field, narrow your focus. Choose three to five competitors for a deeper SWOT analysis.

Strengths

Evaluate each competitor’s advantages:

• Look at your tech stack analysis. What capabilities does the competitor appear to have invested in, such as subscriptions, personalization, international selling, or advanced analytics?
• Compare product features. Do they use premium materials, own intellectual property, or offer features others can’t easily match?
• Analyze customer reviews. Are product quality, customer service, or another attribute repeatedly praised?

Weaknesses

Look for gaps in your own position and your competitors:

• Look at your market positioning. Are you stuck in a crowded, highly competitive space?
• Review your competitors’ marketing. Are competitors earning substantially more visibility or engagement in channels important to the same audience?
• Assess your operations. Do other brands offer faster or cheaper shipping, easier returns, or wider availability?

Opportunities

Scan for openings the category hasn’t addressed:

• Analyze disruptors and consumer trends. Is there an emerging trend, such as demand for clean beauty, that aligns with the competitor’s existing strengths?
• Look at your competitors’ weaknesses. Could new markets, channels, customer segments, or product categories give the competitor room to grow?
• Revisit your positioning. Are there customer needs or benefits the rest of the category is failing to address that this competitor could credibly claim?

Threats

Flag external forces that could lessen your position:

• Monitor disruptors. Is a new startup rapidly gaining market share with an innovative business model?
• Track legacy competitors. Has a larger brand announced or begun moving into the same category or customer segment?
• Consider macro trends. Are there upcoming regulations or economic shifts that could impact your business?

10. Create a visual market positioning map

Turn your findings into a positioning map that shows where your brand sits relative to competitors on two attributes customers care about.

The two axes divide the map into four quadrants, making it easier to spot clusters and potential whitespace in your market.

Here’s how to make your map:

• Pick two factors. Choose two attributes customers use when deciding what to buy.
• Draw your map. Draw a horizontal and vertical axis, with one factor running from one extreme to the other on each. For example, price could run from low to high vertically, while quality runs from basic to premium horizontally.
• Add your competitors. Plot 5 to 10 relevant competitors based on the evidence you collected, and, where possible, customer perceptions from reviews, surveys, or interviews. 
• Add your brand. Plot your own brand using the same criteria; brands clustered close together are likely competing for similar territory in customers’ minds.
• Find the openings. Look for sparsely occupied areas of the map. These can suggest positioning opportunities, but an empty quadrant doesn’t prove customers want an offer there. Validate the gap with customer and market research before pursuing it.

Harvard Business School Online recommends building perceptual maps around attributes that shape customer choice, then plotting competing brands according to how customers perceive them. The resulting map can expose crowded positions, close rivals, and areas that appear less occupied.

How to do an SEO competitive analysis

An SEO competitive analysis compares your search visibility with the sites competing for the same queries, so you can find keywords, content, and backlinks they’re winning that you aren’t. Your SEO competitors won’t always be your direct business rivals; publishers, marketplaces, and review sites may compete with you in search, too.

Use this workflow:

1. Find your search competitors. Search five to 10 commercially important keywords and record the domains that repeatedly appear. An SEO tool such as Ahrefs can also identify domains with the greatest keyword overlap with yours.
2. Run a keyword gap analysis. Compare your domain with three to five competitors and find relevant terms they rank for that you don’t; prioritize by search intent and business relevance.
3. Find their winning pages. Find out which competitors’ pages earn the most organic traffic and which keywords they use. Look for recurring formats like buying guides, comparisons, category pages, tutorials, or original research.
4. Inspect the search engine results pages (SERPs). Record search intent, ranking formats, featured snippets, shopping results, forums, videos, and AI Overviews. 
5. Compare backlinks. Run a backlink-gap analysis to find credible sites linking to several competitors but not you. Their linked-to pages can also reveal which topics, data, and assets naturally attract citations.
6. Check AI visibility. Examine AI search experiences for important customer questions and observe which competitors and sources are cited. According to an Ahrefs analysis of 300,000 keywords, AI Overviews were associated with a 58% lower average click-through rate on top-ranking pages as of December 2025.
7. Turn gaps into priorities. Sort opportunities into pages to create, update, or strengthen, then prioritize the ones closest to your products and customers.

For example, a Google search can surface Reddit, editorial review sites, product brands, and an AI Overview on the same results page:

AI tools for competitive analysis

AI can take much of the legwork out of competitive analysis, including scanning thousands of sources, flagging changes, summarizing reviews, and answering questions across the evidence you collect.

In McKinsey & Company’s 2026 State of AI survey, 89% of respondents said their organizations regularly used AI in at least one business function. A 2025 survey of Shopify store owners similarly found that 75% use AI tools.*

For Shopify businesses, AI assistant Sidekick works inside Shopify using your real-time store data, so you can ask questions about sales, traffic, customers, inventory, and performance trends in plain language.

AI-powered competitor research platforms

For ongoing monitoring, purpose-built competitive-intelligence platforms can watch far more sources than you could check by hand:

• Klue. The tool’s AI-powered Compete Agent monitors sources including competitor websites, pricing and product changes, reviews, sales calls, and internal documents.
• Crayon. Crayon’s Sparks AI agent can compare sales calls to find common business objectives, and perform a SWOT analysis based on news and reviews, among other types of analyses. 
• AlphaSense. The SuperAnalyst AI tool searches sources including earnings calls, company filings, broker research, and news as it happens.
• Contify. Contify monitors more than one million sources, including company websites, news, filings, social media, job boards, and reviews. Athena AI can answer research questions and automatically update competitor dashboards and battlecards.

These products can save hours of collection work, but don’t outsource judgment to them. Check the original source behind an important finding, and distinguish facts from AI-generated interpretation.

Tracking AI traffic sources

Google results and social feeds are no longer the only sources of competitive visibility. According to Pew Research Center, 49% of US adults use AI chatbots in 2026, up from 33% in 2024, and 60% read search results that include AI-generated summaries.

You have a new surface to analyze. Use tools such as ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, Gemini, Copilot, and others to find out what your customers are asking about your category. Take note of which competitors are recommended, what attributes they have, and where your own products don’t appear.

For Shopify businesses, you have Agentic Storefronts. Shopify’s Spring ’26 Edition added a central view of orders, sales, and conversions from AI channels including ChatGPT, Copilot, Google AI Mode, and Gemini. 

The search intelligence also shows the top AI queries in your category, which ones your products appear for, and where they don’t. Sidekick can then suggest improvements when a product is being surfaced but isn’t converting.

Collect data with these competitive analysis tools

Use specialist tools to compare search visibility, advertising, social performance, email strategy, content, backlinks, and pricing. Add the findings that affect your strategy to your competitive analysis spreadsheet.

SEO analysis

• Ahrefs. See the organic keywords and pages driving competitors’ estimated search traffic, identify content gaps, and compare backlink profiles.

SE Ranking. Analyze competitors’ organic and paid keywords, estimated traffic, backlinks, and top pages.The website competitor analysis tool can also compare visibility in AI-generated search results.

Pro tip: Browse the Shopify App Store’s SEO competitor-analysis apps for tools that bring competitor research into your existing workflow.

PPC/keyword performance

• Similarweb. Compare traffic sources, search terms, engagement, and traffic share within a defined competitive set.
• SpyFu. See the Google Ads keywords competitors buy, their ad history, and estimated clicks and ad budgets. 

Social media performance

• RivalIQ. See how often competitors post on social media, their average engagement rates, and their most successful content.
• Followerwonk. Followerwonk’s tools analyze X audiences, demographics, follower overlap, engagement, and competitors.
• Sprout Social. Benchmark competitor audience growth, engagement, publishing volume, share of voice, sentiment, and top content.

Email marketing

• Owletter. Automatically capture competitors’ emails and analyze sending frequency, timing, seasonality, and changes in strategy.
• MailCharts. Study competitors’ email and SMS campaigns, life cycle journeys, and promotions, and benchmark brands against peers. 

Content marketing and backlinks

• BuzzSumo. Search a competitor’s domain to find its most-shared and most-linked content, compare formats and networks, and monitor new mentions and links.
• SEOptimer. Track new and lost backlinks and look for sites linking to competitors but not you.

Competitor pricing

The Shopify App Store has competitor-tracking apps store owners can use. For example, Prisync AI | Dynamic Pricing monitors competitor prices and stock, maintains price histories, sends change alerts, and can support rule-based repricing.

A competitive analysis template and example

Use the template below to structure your research, then check the example to see how the pieces fit together.

Free downloadable template

If you’re not sure where to start, use Shopify’s free competitor analysis template and fill it using the same criteria covered above—target customer, products, pricing, positioning, sales channels, marketing, technology, review themes, strengths, and weaknesses.

Competitive analysis example

As an example of how the template might work with real data, consider fragrance brand Dossier as a competitor in your set.

Founder Sergio Tache built Dossier by deconstructing traditional luxury fragrance pricing, removing costs such as elaborate bottles, packaging, and celebrity endorsements, while preserving the ingredients and French manufacturing he believed customers valued. 

“What we told our customers was, ‘Look, you can buy perfume from us. You can open the bottle, try it on. If you don’t like it within 30 days, just reach out to us, send it back to us, and we’ll refund you. No questions asked,’” says Sergio.

The company has since shipped more than one million orders.

What are the most common competitive analysis mistakes and limitations?

You’re usually reconstructing another company’s strategy from public information, third-party estimates, and customer signals. Keep these limitations in mind as you interpret your findings:

• Treating it as a one-and-done exercise. Date your evidence and refresh the parts of your analysis tied to important decisions. Monitoring tools can automate repetitive checks, but they shouldn’t replace periodic deeper analysis.
• Starting without a question. Decide what you need to know first, like can you support a higher price? Is there room for another product? A defined question lets you know which evidence is worth collecting.
• Collecting insights without deciding what to do with them. Any meaningful finding should lead to some kind of action, such as testing a new positioning angle or investigating a recurring product complaint.
• Looking for evidence that proves you right. You may notice information that confirms your existing beliefs and discount evidence that contradicts them because of confirmation bias. Look for evidence that would disprove what you inferred from what you observed.
• Ignoring timing and survivorship bias. According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 51.4% of US private establishments that opened in March 2020 remained operational in March 2025. Compare businesses at similar stages and consider the economic, technological, and consumer conditions surrounding their decisions.

*Based on a 2025 survey of 500 Shopify merchants conducted in English across Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, New Zealand, and the United States. Respondents were established merchants with two or more years on the platform. Results reflect the experiences of this specific sample and may not be representative of all merchants.