When working on a SaaS product, it’s often too easy to get completely obsessed with the product you’re building. That’s perfectly normal, but it’s not because it’s normal that it’s good for your business’ success. Without going ballistic either, it’s more than good practice to review what competitors are doing and how they position their products. Often, you will be launching a product in an existing market (which is a good sign and usually simpler than facing a complete greenfield and evangelizing all the things!!!).

Okay, but you may be running a small SaaS, a MicroSaaS even, which means every second counts, and you’re OK with spending time monitoring your competitors, though you would rather focus on building your product, getting backlinks to improve your SEO, and ultimately getting more sales.

In this article, let’s review how to do a basic competitive analysis so that you can cover the main things to monitor among your competition without spending ages compiling the data.

Identify competitors

The very first step is to identify who your competitors are. Maybe you already know, maybe you already know just some of them. That’s OK.

It really depends on the maturity of your business, but if you’re only starting, you shouldn’t bother too much with what we call indirect competitors. Netflix needs to know their main competitor is Fortnite. It’s not as important for you to know that your product may not be used because of some second-order effect. Let’s keep things simple and focus on direct competitors. The ones that you already know because they essentially do the same thing as you. They may have a similar name, similar branding, and of course will evolve in the same product category (for instance, they will be listed in the same categories on Capterra or G2).

So, step one, make the list of these competitors. Do that in something simple like a Google Sheet. No need to go crazy, there is no value in spending time formatting this. All you need is a table with competitor name, competitor URL, and comment to get started.

Tip: once you know one competitor, a simple way to discover more is to search on Google for “alternative to {competitor name}”, usually the auto prediction will give you some good first insights.

Analyze their product offering

Once you have identified your competitors, that’s where the work really begins! Your goal now is to try to map their features as shown on their publicly facing assets such as on their website, documentation (help center), or Apple/Google Play page. It’s often frustrating, when you try to understand your competitors, not to see what their product really does (so definitely register for their product to try it, if it’s possible). When it’s not possible, it’s OK. Focus on what your competitors communicate. What they communicate is what they want their prospects (who may be hesitating between them and you) to think about them. If they had a great feature it would already be advertised on their website or app (modulo a couple of months if it’s in soft launch, but you can’t control everything).

Identify table stake features

Just focus on what you and others can see, that’s already a brilliant way to grasp what your competitors are into and what you need to do to either match their offering or even surpass it. Back in the SEO days, there used to be a strategy called the skyscraper strategy, which was about considering an article as a skyscraper, and when a competitor had such an article, all you had was to try to get just a little better (= higher) to attract more customers. Sounds silly but at the end of the day, a small difference is enough to attract/convince a prospect and turn them into a customer of your product instead of your competitors.

Analyze pricing page

A big part of understanding the offering is to analyze the pricing of your competitors too.

On the website, we advise focusing on the home page, identifying their USPs (unique selling points), then, moving to common sub-pages such as pricing or solutions/features pages. If you’ve done your analysis right, just with these pages you will know 80% of what your competitors do, and whether your product can compete or needs to be improved to do so.

Evaluate positioning and marketing

This may be more complex and less practical but there are a couple of quick things you can do to know if they are advertising and what their advertising looks like. This is both useful to gage the capacity of your competitor, and understand how they speak to their target customers (aka target audience):

• Use the Meta Ads library or similar tools from TikTok and al. This is great especially if your competitor is big enough and spending decent budgets on ads (think thousands of USD per month)
• Perform Google searches on the main keywords they use on their website to see if they target these with SEM ads (Search Engine Marketing). We find that the wording in ads is often a bit more straight to the point and it can be revealing.
• Check on YouTube for any videos made by your competitor – producing a video is often a big investment in time and money, even if the competitor you’re analyzing is fairly big. This means a lot of thoughts and efforts were likely put into its production, and therefore, critical aspects of their positioning should be in them. If the videos are dull, then it’s possible that marketing and branding are a weakness of your competitor, and it’s therefore a relevant angle of attack to attract more customers!

In the end, try to empathize with your prospective users, and think what they would think when they see your competitor’s website and consume its content. How would they feel when exposed to the value proposition of your competitors? Yes, that’s a bit harder than doing a 1:1 feature comparison, but if you focus on identifying recurring or key messages on the website homepage, and try to put yourself in your customers’ shoes, you should be able to get there. I can be useful then to use a small sentence to describe how that specific competitor differentiates in its positioning. This exercise forces to extract the main point of that competitor and can then be used when you build your comparison table. For instance, a competitor can be labeled as focusing on “speed and simplicity” or “all-in-one” or “highly visual”, etc. If you are working as a team, it’s also fun to do this labeling exercise as a group and see how everyone perceives the competition.

Compile your findings

As you progress for each competitor, simply add a column in your competitor monitoring sheet, and add the information you have gathered. Nothing shiny, and no need to go too far because the whole purpose of this sheet is to be relevant, to the point and also easy to update. This is often referred to as a competitor matrix or competitive analysis matrix, and if you’re new to this, rest assured this is just a two way table, nothing more.

Here is a basic example for a competitive matrix of the project management software category:

Criteria	Jira	Linear	GitHub Issues
Target Audience	Enterprises, Agile teams	Startups, fast-moving teams	Developers, open-source communities
Core Features	Advanced workflows, custom fields, reports	Fast UI, keyboard shortcuts, backlog management	Integrated with GitHub repos, simple issue tracking
Ease of Use	Steeper learning curve	Intuitive, minimal interface	Simple and familiar for GitHub users
Integrations	Extensive (Atlassian suite, Slack, etc.)	Limited but essential (Slack, GitHub)	Extensive and unbeatable integration with GitHub
Pricing	Free for small teams, paid for premium features	Free for up to 10 users, paid tiers for teams	Free with GitHub, paid for advanced features
Customization	Highly customizable workflows and fields	Limited customization	Minimal customization
Customer Support	Comprehensive (documentation, community, support)	Limited (focus on self-service)	GitHub community, standard support
Differentiator	Feature-rich, scalable for large teams	Speed and simplicity	Integrated with code hosting platform

How often should you compare your competitors?

We recommend having a look at competitors at least once a quarter, but it may be needed to perform a competitive analysis more often depending on how active your competitors are. This recommendation is indeed based on the fact you have to conduct a manual competitor analysis. If you rely on a tool to automate your competitor monitoring, then checking what your competitors are up to becomes much simpler, and you can approach the problem differently.

• When working on a new project or feature, you can review your competitors as part of your discovery process. Without the painful data collection part, doing this essentially boils down to reviewing data.
• When you just want to watch your competitor, you can instead rely on alerting to check what is happening when it’s happening.

In conclusion, staying on top of your competitors is crucial for maintaining a competitive edge, even more so in the fast-paced world of SaaS. While it’s easy to be too focused on your own product, taking the time to analyze competitors' offerings, pricing, and positioning can provide invaluable insights. By understanding their strengths and weaknesses, you can make informed decisions to enhance your own product and attract more users.

The process doesn't have to be overly complex or time-consuming. A straightforward competitor matrix can help you track essential data and make strategic adjustments as needed. Regularly updating your analysis—whether quarterly or in response to significant changes—ensures that you remain agile and responsive to market dynamics without spending years on compiling and refreshing your data!

Ultimately, balancing your focus between product development and competitive analysis will empower you to build a product that not only meets the needs of your customers but also stands out in a crowded marketplace.