# 6 competitor analysis frameworks, and when to use each

> Frameworks only do one job in competitor analysis. Five classic ways to compare rivals, plus Wardley mapping, the only one that shows the industry moving.


Somebody on the team asks for a competitor analysis. What arrives is a four-box grid with eleven bullet points in it, half of them adjectives.

The grid is rarely the problem. The problem is that a framework got handed the whole job when it only does one part of it.

## Frameworks are one job out of five

A competitor analysis is a loop, not an artifact:

1. Find the rivals
2. Gather the evidence
3. Compare and present it
4. Act on what it says
5. Keep it current, then go round again

![The five-step competitor analysis loop, drawn on a case file: 1. Find the rivals, 2. Gather the evidence, 3. Compare and present, 4. Act on it, 5. Keep it current, then back to step one. Red pen notes mark who does what: Competitor Tracker & Co. watches the category, gathers the evidence every Monday and keeps the clock; comparing, presenting and deciding stay with your team.](/img/diagrams/competitor-analysis-loop.png)

Steps three and four belong to your team, and no tool should pretend otherwise — including us. The [competitor analysis manual](/competitor-analysis/) walks all five in full.

Frameworks serve the third step and only the third. Their job is to take a pile of evidence and force it into a shape a room can argue with.

Search for a competitor analysis framework and nearly every result is about that third step alone. Here are the boxes, here is what goes in them, good luck. The other four get a sentence each if they appear at all.

That is why so many decks contain a SWOT nobody reads twice. The framework was not the problem. It was handed a competitor list that flattered the team and evidence nobody had checked in months, and nothing in the process sent it back around.

<em class="it">A grid with no question in it is just stationery.</em>

## Five ways to compare and present

Sizing up rivals is not a new problem, and the shapes people use for it have been argued over in boardrooms for half a century. The BCG matrix dates to around 1970, Porter's Five Forces to 1979. That age is a feature: these are well worn, widely taught and there is a decent chance somebody in the room already knows the one you pick.

Which matters more than framework theorists admit. The best framework is usually the one your team reads without needing a preamble. A meticulous BCG matrix that three people understand loses to a rough SWOT the whole room can argue with, because the point of this layer is to produce a shared argument, not a correct diagram.

Each of the five takes the same evidence and forces a different argument out of it. Pick by the decision you owe someone rather than by which one you last saw in a deck.

**SWOT.** Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats. Serves internal alignment: getting a room to agree on where you stand before a planning cycle. Fast, and honest when the room is honest. Its failure mode is that it is a list rather than an analysis, and it absorbs opinion as though it were evidence.

**Porter's Five Forces.** Buyer power, supplier power, threat of new entrants, threat of substitutes and rivalry. Michael Porter published it in *Harvard Business Review* in 1979 and it still answers one question well: is this industry structurally worth being in. Use it before entering a market, not to plan next quarter.

**BCG matrix.** Market growth against relative market share, sorted into four quadrants. Built for portfolio allocation, so it answers which product lines get funded and which get harvested. It needs real share data. Without it, the quadrants are opinions with axes.

**Perceptual mapping.** Two attributes buyers actually care about, plotted as axes, with you and your rivals placed on the field. Answers positioning: where is the space nobody occupies, and is it empty because it is valuable or because it is worthless. Entirely dependent on what your rivals are claiming this month.

**Jobs to be done.** What customers hire the product to accomplish. It reframes the competitive set, usually uncomfortably, and answers who you are really up against. Often that is a spreadsheet, an intern or nothing at all, rather than the vendor your sales team names.

Five different arguments, one shared weakness. Each is a photograph. Take it, file it, and it starts aging immediately with no mark on it to say so.

## The sixth: Wardley mapping, which shows the movement

Wardley mapping belongs on the list but not in that group, because it is not a comparison grid.

Simon Wardley's method plots the components a user needs against how evolved each one is, running from genesis through custom-built and product to commodity. Two things make it different in kind. It has an anchor, the user need, so the map is oriented rather than free-floating. And it has a direction of travel: components move rightward toward commodity, and that movement is the subject.

Wardley calls the rules governing that movement climatic patterns, the things that happen to a landscape whether or not you act. The most useful one: as a component commoditises it lowers the cost of building on top of it, and things appear that were not previously worth attempting.

Watch it happen in our own industry. Three years ago a large language model was the expensive, custom, differentiating part of a product. It is now close to a utility you rent by the token. As that slid rightward the interesting work moved up the stack, and a layer that barely existed appeared above it: agents, tool protocols, MCP servers. Nobody shipped an MCP server in 2023. It is now close to table stakes.

A SWOT drawn in 2023 would say nothing about that, because it has no axis for it. A Wardley map drawn in 2023 would have shown the model layer sliding right and the space above it opening, which is the same conclusion available two years earlier.

That is why it earns the effort, and it is genuinely more effort than the other five. It is also the only one of the six that speaks to keeping the analysis current rather than only to presenting it.

## How to keep a competitor analysis current

None of these update themselves, and there are two different kinds of change to catch. Telling them apart is most of the skill.

**The evidence inside the boxes changes.** A rival restructures their tiers, drops a plan, rewrites the homepage above the fold. Your analysis still has the right shape. The contents are now wrong, and the artifact gives no sign of it.

**The landscape under the boxes moves.** This is what a Wardley map shows and the other five cannot: a component slides toward commodity, a new layer opens above it, and something that was not a competitor last year is now the thing to beat. Here fresh evidence does not save you, because the boxes themselves are asking the wrong question. You need a redrawn list, and sometimes a different framework.

The two arrive on different clocks. Porter's Five Forces describes industry structure, and structure moves over years. Wardley maps, BCG matrices and jobs-to-be-done work sit on quarters. SWOT and perceptual maps encode what your rivals are charging and claiming right now, which changes weekly.

So the two frameworks people reach for most often are the two that decay fastest, and neither announces it. A positioning map built on a rival's pricing page is wrong the week they restructure their tiers, and it is wrong silently. The map still looks finished.

The fix for the first kind is dull and it works. Put the date you checked and the source link beside every claim that can move, and send the whole thing round the loop on a fixed clock rather than when somebody remembers.

The fix for the second kind is a standing question, asked at every loop: has anything moved that changes not just our answers, but the shape we are pouring them into? The signals are usually visible before the reshuffle is. A rival's pricing page starts describing a different buyer. A category you had filed as adjacent begins writing comparison pages about you.

That watching is the job we do. This piece is one file in the [competitor analysis](/competitor-analysis/) manual, which covers the loop end to end. [Weekly competitor tracking](/) reads the pages where rivals actually change their minds, so whatever you fill in on Monday rests on last week rather than last spring. If price is the axis your map turns on, [competitor price monitoring](/features/competitor-price-monitoring/) is the narrower version of the same job.

*— C. T. Lucky*


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Source: https://competitortracker.io/blog/competitor-analysis-frameworks/
Updated: 2026-09-02