--- title: "Competitor analysis template (free, copy it)" description: "A competitor analysis template you'll keep up to date: the table to fill in, what to save per competitor, and how to see what changed on their site." source: https://savepad.app/blog/competitor-analysis-template --- [Blog](https://savepad.app/blog) · 1 May 2024 # A competitor analysis template that isn't a sh*tty Google Doc A competitor analysis template you'll keep up to date: the table to fill in, what to save per competitor, and how to see what changed on their site. *Two competitors' pricing pages side by side in Savepad, with last quarter's snapshot next to today's* **TLDR** - Every company has a competitor analysis. It’s always a Google Doc. It’s always from 18 months ago. - It goes stale because it’s a summary of pages that kept changing. So keep the pages too, right next to the summary. - Below: a one-table template to copy, a list of what to save per competitor, and a quarterly routine that takes an hour. ## Why the doc always dies Somebody writes it for a board meeting. Positioning, pricing, features, a SWOT. It’s great for about six weeks. Then the competitor changes their pricing, launches a new tier and rewrites their homepage, and nobody updates the doc, because updating a doc is nobody’s job. Six months later someone asks “what did they charge before?” and nobody knows. The doc says one thing, the site says another, and there’s no copy of what it said in between. ## The template Copy this into whatever you like. One row per competitor. Keep it short, because short gets updated. | What to note | Competitor A | Competitor B | Competitor C | | --- | --- | --- | --- | | One-line pitch (their words, from the homepage) | | | | | Who it’s for (who they show in their logos and case studies) | | | | | Pricing model (per seat, usage, flat) | | | | | Cheapest paid plan | | | | | What they lead with (the first feature on the homepage) | | | | | Where they beat us (be honest) | | | | | Where we beat them | | | | | Last checked | | | | The “their words” bit matters. Paraphrasing a competitor’s pitch is how you end up arguing with a version of them that doesn’t exist. ## What to save for each competitor The table is the summary. These are the receipts. *A mock pricing page for a fictional SaaS, Lumen* 0719 · lumen.io · pricing · Q3 *A mock homepage hero for a fictional dev tool, Tidepool* 0816 · tidepool.dev · homepage *A mock welcome email for a fictional SaaS, Northwind* 0913 · email · day 1 The receipts behind the table: their pricing page, their homepage hero, and the onboarding email they send on day one. All fictional, obviously. - **Homepage.** The hero, the logos, the first three sections. - **Pricing page.** All of it, including the FAQ at the bottom where the real limits live. - **Signup and onboarding.** Sign up with a real address and save every email for the first two weeks, in order. - **Their ads.** Search them in the [ad libraries](https://savepad.app/free-tools/ad-library-search). Meta, LinkedIn and Google all show what’s running. - **Changelog and launch posts.** What they shipped, and how they talked about it. ## The quarterly routine 1. **Re-save the homepage and pricing page** for each competitor. 2. **Put last quarter’s next to this quarter’s.** What changed? Price, plan names, headline, who’s in the logos. 3. **Update the table**, and the “last checked” row. 4. **Write three bullets** of what changed, in the doc people actually read. An hour, four times a year. The doc stays true because the evidence is right there. ## Doing it in Savepad This is the job the [competitor research use case](https://savepad.app/use-cases/competitor-research) is for. Save a competitor’s pricing page and Savepad keeps a full-page screenshot and a reading copy. Turn on page history and it snaps the page on a schedule, so “what did they charge in March?” has an answer, with a diff of what changed. Onboarding emails go in as a sequence, in the order they arrived. The table lives wherever your team reads things. The pages live in a folder per competitor. Link the two. For the pricing page itself, the [pricing page examples](https://savepad.app/blog/pricing-page-examples) post is a good sense check of what “normal” looks like right now. [Join the waitlist](https://savepad.app/#waitlist) ## Read these next - [What goes in a creative brief (with a template you can copy): A one-page creative brief template for ads, landing pages and campaigns, what each section is for, and why the references section matters more than the rest.](https://savepad.app/blog/creative-brief-template) - [A swipe file template you can steal (folders, tags and the lot): A ready-made swipe file structure for marketers, designers, PMs and devs: the folders, the tags, the note to write on every save, and the weekly routine.](https://savepad.app/blog/swipe-file-template) - [SaaS pricing page examples, and what each one is doing: Pricing page patterns worth copying, from three tiers with a highlighted middle to one flat price, plus how to keep tabs on competitors' pricing when it changes.](https://savepad.app/blog/pricing-page-examples)