Competitor analysis: what it is, when to do it and how

Do a competitor analysis when evidence about the alternatives could change a decision: before you set or change your positioning, before a pricing change, before a launch or a move into a new category, when a lost deal names a rival, or when a rival rewrites its homepage or its plans. Each of these moments brings one question, such as how rivals price the plan your buyers would pick, and that question chooses the products and the pages you read. Choose the products a buyer would weigh for the same task: the direct competitors that sell the same kind of product, and the indirect ones that get the job done another way. Leave out products that serve another task, however well known they are.

coExploro covers the public-page part of a competitor analysis: it supplies the captures for the third step and drafts the observations for the fourth. Enter a rival’s homepage address, and a product teardown usually takes 2–4 minutes: coExploro captures that page with its date, then the pricing and features pages when it finds them, and four AI analysts, PM, Marketing, UX and Designer, draft findings from the capture. Check which of your questions those findings answer, and open a finding’s screenshot, when one is attached, before you use it to support a decision. On the public samples, a receipt under a finding quotes the words it rests on, with their place on the page and the capture date. Compare, included with Pro, starts 2 to 5 product teardowns in one batch and sets them side by side. Without an account, each network can start one run a day; then create a free account to claim the full canvas, every finding and the sources. With a free account you get 3 teardowns a month; paid plans start at $16 a month billed yearly.

Choose the next guide by what you need, because each one covers a part of the path in depth. To ask every product the same questions, use the competitor analysis framework, and to note each answer with its page and date, copy the competitor analysis template. Competitor analysis examples shows what a finished answer looks like, from positioning to pricing, with the quoted words and the capture date. When two products answer one buyer’s question side by side, SaaS competitor analysis works through Zapier and n8n. When one rival needs a closer look, how to tear down a rival’s product reads its pages for a single question. For how a rival’s pages lead a visitor, a UX audit gives a checklist you can use on any site. For traffic, keyword and ad questions the evidence comes from outside the pages, as the next section shows. Whichever guide you follow, keep what a source shows apart from what you conclude from it.

Each type of competitor analysis answers its own question from its own evidence. Positioning asks what a rival says it is and who it is for, product asks which jobs its pages say it does, pricing asks which unit and billing period a price uses and what each plan includes, and UX asks how its pages lead a visitor to a first step. The rival’s public pages answer all four in part, and a product trial or interviews with buyers add what the pages leave out. Traffic asks how many people visit, SEO asks which searches bring them, and advertising asks which ads the rival pays for. None of that is on the pages: traffic and keyword figures are estimates from traffic and SEO tools, and an ad library lists the ads a company runs. Traffic tools estimate how many people reach a rival; a product teardown shows what they see when they arrive. coExploro reads the first four types and none of the last three, so use an SEO tool or an ad library beside a teardown for those.

Two readings of the same page can disagree, and a competitor analysis should record the disagreement instead of picking a winner. The Slack sample, captured on 29 October 2026, has a finding that each of the four plan cards on Slack’s pricing page showed a price, with Enterprise+ priced per user a month when paying annually. On 31 October 2026, read from our network in Europe, the Enterprise+ card showed ‘Contact sales for pricing’ instead. The two readings do not say whether Slack changed its offer between the two days or showed another version of the page to another place, so an analysis that quoted either one as Slack’s current top price would state more than it knows. Write the date and the place beside each reading, keep the disagreement open, and treat any later reading as a new observation with its own date rather than the answer to the old question. Not every re-check disagrees: with yearly billing selected, Calendly’s pricing page still priced its Standard plan per seat a month on 31 October 2026, the unit the sample captured on 29 October shows. How coExploro makes a capture explains what one can and cannot show.

• Observed by us

  Seen from our network in Europe, Slack’s pricing page showed the Enterprise+ card with ‘Contact sales for pricing’ in place of a price, while Pro and Business+ still showed a price per user a month.

  verified Oct 31, 2026 · Source: slack.com/pricing (opens in a new tab)

• Observed by us

  With yearly billing selected, Calendly’s pricing page still priced its Standard plan per seat a month.

  verified Oct 31, 2026 · Source: calendly.com/pricing (opens in a new tab)

• Each of the four plan cards shows a price in USD · Slack

  Evidence: when paying annually · Seen on slack.com/pricing, pricing page, Enterprise+ plan card, under the $45 price · Captured Oct 29, 2026 · Indirect evidence

• Two price units sit side by side · Calendly

  Evidence: /seat/mo · Seen on calendly.com/pricing, pricing page plan cards, after the Standard and Teams prices · Captured Oct 29, 2026 · Indirect evidence

• Competitor analysis examples, and the evidence behind each one
• SaaS competitor analysis: read two products side by side
• How to tear down a rival’s product, in five steps
• UX competitive analysis: a template and a worked example
• What a product manager can learn from a rival’s public pages
• A five-step framework for reading a rival’s product