# Competitor analysis: frameworks, templates and how to run one > A working manual for competitor analysis: how to run one without it rotting, which framework answers which question, templates to copy and dated examples. Competitor analysis is the work of finding out what your rivals are doing, deciding which of it matters and acting before your customers tell you. Most guides stop at the boxes. This one is about the running of it: what to gather, how often, and how to stop the whole file going soft three weeks after you built it. Everything here is written from the same casework we do for clients every Monday. Where a piece goes deeper than a hub page should, we link out and get out of the way. ## How to do a competitor analysis Five steps that feed each other. Run them as a loop on a fixed clock, not as a project with an end date. **1. Find who you are actually up against.** Three to five rivals you lose deals to, plus whoever your customers mention unprompted. Not the twenty on the market map. This list flatters you if you let it, listing peers instead of substitutes, and it goes stale as new entrants arrive and incumbents get acquired. Our [industry files](/industries/) track that movement across 50 SaaS categories. Redraw the list on a schedule. **2. Gather the evidence.** Pick the pages where a rival is obliged to be honest: pricing, product and feature pages, the changelog, the comparison pages they write about you. A press release says what they want you to think. A pricing page says what they are willing to charge. Record the date you checked and the URL beside every fact, because undated notes are the most common cause of a rep saying something false with total confidence. **3. Compare and present it.** Pour the evidence into a shape your team can argue with. That is what the [frameworks](/blog/competitor-analysis-frameworks/) are for, and the best one is usually the one your team already reads without a preamble. **4. Act on it.** The step most teams skip. An analysis that changes no price, no roadmap item, no battlecard line and no sales conversation was a reading exercise. Deciding to do nothing counts, as long as somebody decides it out loud and it goes on the record. **5. Keep it current, then loop.** Evidence decays and the landscape moves underneath it. Weekly is the smallest interval that catches a pricing restructure before your reps meet it in a call. Quarterly is how teams end up quoting a tier that stopped existing in March. Then go back to step one, because the competitor set changes too. ![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) Most guides cover step three and wave at the rest. The other four are where analyses actually fail. ## Competitor analysis frameworks A framework is a question with a shape, and picking the wrong one produces a tidy artifact that decides nothing. SWOT settles internal alignment, Porter's Five Forces answers whether a market is worth entering, Wardley mapping decides build versus buy. They also rot at very different speeds, and only one of them shows the industry moving underneath you. We matched [six competitor analysis frameworks](/blog/competitor-analysis-frameworks/) to the decision each one answers, with Wardley mapping as the sixth and the odd one out. ## Competitor analysis templates Templates are where good intentions go to die, usually because nothing in the grid records when it was last true. The fix is structural: split the stable half from the moving half and give them different review clocks. Our [sales battlecard template](/blog/battlecards-go-stale-dossiers-do-not/) does exactly that, dates every claim that can move and is free to copy with no form in the way. The [weekly competitor analysis template](/blog/weekly-competitor-dossier-template/) puts the Monday report on the same clock: what changed, the evidence, the likely motive and the recommended move. It also comes as an [Excel file](/files/competitor-analysis-template-weekly-dossier-v1.xlsx) with a blank form, a running signals log and a worked example, no signup in the way. ## Competitor analysis tools The tool question is really a question about how much reading you want to do yourself. Page-change alerts tell you something moved. Weekly dossiers tell you what moved, whether it matters and what to do next. Spreadsheets work fine until the watchlist outgrows the attention you have. We wrote up [the tools small SaaS teams actually use](/blog/best-competitor-monitoring-tools-small-saas/), including where a cheaper option is the honest answer. ## Competitor analysis examples Worked examples beat method essays. The [recorded demo](/demo/) replays a real case end to end: the pages watched, the changes caught and the read filed on each one. For raw material, the [company files](/companies/browse/) hold dated, sourced records of what real companies changed on their own pages, which is what a competitor analysis looks like before anyone tidies it into a grid. Analysis is just noticing, written down with a date on it. --- Source: https://competitortracker.io/competitor-analysis/ Updated: 2026-09-05