Before assessing each competitive intelligence tool below, consider the key features you need for your business. Each of these platforms offers unique strengths in social listening, analytics, or benchmarking.
We’ve highlighted their key features, what sets them apart, and who they’re best suited for.
1. Brandwatch (Benchmark)
Brandwatch is a leading social listening platform, and its Benchmark feature is a standout for competitor analysis.
Brandwatch Benchmark allows you to instantly compare your social performance against a database of 100,000+ brands across all major social networks (Facebook, Instagram, X, YouTube, TikTok, and more).
Track and compare virtually every social metric imaginable – from post-level engagement (likes, comments, shares) and audience growth to share of voice, reach, impressions, and sentiment.
This breadth helps pinpoint exactly where competitors are outperforming you, or vice versa.
Brandwatch uses AI to surface trends and anomalies. You get automatic highlights if a competitor’s mention volume spiked due to a viral event or if your sentiment took a dip after a campaign, and it provides context for why.
Brandwatch is more than a competitor analysis tool. The platform offers actionable benchmarking by combining competitive insights with its wider social media management tool.
Improve your overall marketing strategy when spotting gaps and opportunities, analysing audiences, scheduling content, and using social listening to predict future trends. Benchmark is part of an overall social management package designed to help brands flourish and stay ahead of their competitors.
Brandwatch is best for
Mid-size to enterprise brands and data-driven marketing teams that need in-depth, cross-platform market analysis will thrive with Brandwatch’s competitor analysis tools.
If you want a top-tier solution to continuously benchmark and improve your social media performance, Brandwatch is hard to beat. Brandwatch also offers robust social listening and consumer intelligence beyond just competitor benchmarking.
2. Talkwalker
Talkwalker excels at real-time monitoring and analytics across social media and beyond.
It monitors content in 150 million sources – including all major social networks, blogs, news sites, forums, and even transcripts from TV and radio. This breadth ensures you catch competitor mentions and conversations wherever they happen (not just on the big-name platforms).
A standout feature is Talkwalker’s ability to recognize logos and keywords in images, videos, and audio. It also supports analysis in multiple languages, making it ideal for global brands tracking competitors worldwide.
The tool provides highly customizable dashboards with widgets for sentiment over time, share of voice, mention maps, and more. You can slice and dice competitor data to compare specific rivals, campaigns, or even regions.
Talkwater is best for
Analysts who require in-depth social listening. If you need to monitor competitors across social, news, and online chatter with precision, and you have the resources for a premium solution, Talkwalker is alongside Brandwatch as one of the best.
3. Meltwater
Meltwater is a long-established player in social media monitoring, offering a unified platform for news, social media, and competitive insights.
While it’s primarily used by PR and marketing teams to keep track of traditional media output, in recent years it has intensified its focus on social media, too.
This blend of traditional press and media monitoring with social listening enables you to see when your competitor is featured in a news article, on a blog, or trending on X – all in one feed. If a rival launches a campaign that gets both press coverage and social buzz, Meltwater captures the full impact.
The platform provides benchmark reports comparing your brand’s media presence and engagement with others. You can track share of voice across both social conversations and news mentions, giving a holistic view of who leads the discussion in your industry.
Meltwater can also identify influential voices and journalists in your niche, much like Brandwatch. If you notice competitors getting mentions or shares from certain influencers, you might discover those through Meltwater and engage them for your own brand.
Meltwater is best for
PR and marketing teams at mid-to-large companies. Meltwater is good if you want a single tool to monitor competitors across both social media and traditional media.
4. Sprinklr
Sprinklr is an enterprise-grade platform that covers competitor analysis, with social media management and customer service added on too. It’s known for handling huge volumes of data and has robust AI capabilities.
Sprinklr is an omnichannel management suite. Users can track rivals on social media while also monitoring how they’re performing in other channels (like customer care response times, reviews, etc.) if that data is integrated. It provides a 360-degree view of competitor activities.
Sprinklr’s AI can automatically categorize mentions, detect sentiment, and even recommend actions. For example, it might identify that a competitor’s product launch is getting unusual traction on a niche forum, alerting you to investigate or respond.
Like Brandwatch, it’s scalable. You can track hundreds of social accounts and top-performing keywords, with permission controls for who sees what. This is great for global companies doing competitor analysis across regions or product lines.
Sprinklr is best for
Large enterprises that need a very advanced solution. Sprinklr is best suited for those with a dedicated analytics team to leverage its full potential and for those who value integrating competitor insights with overall customer experience data.
5. Mention
Mention is a social listening tool ideal for real-time monitoring of brand or competitor mentions across the web and social media. It has carved out a niche for being simple and affordable, which is great for smaller teams.
Mention alerts you whenever a keyword (like your competitor’s name or product) is mentioned online. It scans Facebook, X, Instagram, etc., as well as blogs, news sites, and forums. You can watch mentions roll in, almost like a social media feed.
You can set up alerts specifically for competitors to see what people are saying about them. The analytics are basic but useful – for example, a weekly summary of how many mentions each competitor received, along with the sentiment breakdown (positive/negative).
Mention is best for
Startups, small businesses, or solo marketers who need basic competitor listening without the hefty price tag. It’s ideal if you want to be notified about competitors in real time and get a sense of buzz, but you don’t need deep analytics or long-term reporting.
6. Brand24
Brand24 is a social media monitoring tool that offers a balanced set of features. It’s often praised for its user-friendly dashboard and strong sentiment analysis, making it easy to track how competitors are perceived online.
With Brand24, you can start tracking competitor mentions in minutes. It covers major social media platforms, news sites, blogs, videos, and podcasts. Simply input your competitor’s brand name (and any related keywords or hashtags), and Brand24 will start collecting mentions and comments about them.
Brand24 automatically tags mentions as positive, negative, or neutral, so you can gauge the sentiment around a competitor at a glance.
It also shows an “Influence Score” for each mention or source, which helps you identify if an important media outlet or influencer is talking about your competitor.
Brand24 is best for
Small to mid-sized businesses and agencies that want a cost-effective yet capable monitoring tool will benefit from using this competitor analysis tool. Brand24 is good if you need to track brand mentions and sentiment for a handful of competitors and present those findings in neat reports.
7. Keyhole
Keyhole is a social media analytics tool known for its hashtag tracking capabilities. Over time, it has evolved to provide competitive analysis and social media benchmarking, with a particular focus on campaign performance and influencer campaign metrics.
If your competitors often run campaigns around specific hashtags or keywords, Keyhole is extremely handy. You can track how a campaign hashtag is performing for them and compare it to your own campaign’s hashtag performance.
You can analyze any public social media account’s stats. This is ideal for getting competitor insights like average engagement rate, most engaging posts, posting frequency, and follower growth over time.
Keyhole also helps identify which influencers and accounts are engaging with a competitor’s campaign. Plus, it highlights top-performing content, so you might quickly see, for example, that your rival’s video post on TikTok is driving most of the engagement for their campaign.
Keyhole is best for
Marketing teams and agencies that focus on campaign-level analysis and influencer marketing. If you frequently run social campaigns (or want to dissect your competitors’ campaigns), Keyhole provides targeted insights.
8. Rival IQ
Rival IQ is a tool built for social media competitor benchmarking. It’s extremely straightforward for comparing social performance metrics across multiple competitors, and is popular for digital agencies and in-house social media teams conducting audits.
Simply input your social media accounts and those of your competitors. The tool then creates “landscape” dashboards that display key metrics at a glance, including follower counts, new posts per week, and engagement rates per post, for everyone in your competitive set.
Rival IQ also delves into content, revealing which types of competitors’ posts perform best. This helps you identify ideas or trends to boost your content strategy – maybe videos are performing exceptionally well for them, or perhaps posts about Topic X consistently receive unusually high engagement.
Users also get alerts if a competitor has an engagement spike or when they post new content. This way, you can quickly check out what they’re doing.
Rival IQ is best for
Social media managers and agencies who want a dedicated competitor benchmarking tool that’s ready from the first minute. Rival IQ is ideal for regularly reporting on social media key performance indicators (KPIs) versus competitors.
9. Sprout Social
Sprout Social combines social media management with competitor analysis in a single platform. It has built-in social listening to monitor competitors’ mentions across major networks, alongside your own social media scheduling and publishing.
You can compare your Facebook, X, and Instagram profiles against selected competitors. Sprout’s reports show side-by-side stats like audience size, growth, engagement rates, and posting frequency.
Sprout Social also includes AI-powered features like sentiment analysis and trend detection. It can summarize how audiences feel about your brand vs. competitors, and highlight trending topics in your industry, which is valuable for spotting PR opportunities or threats early.
Sprout Social is best for
Social media teams at small to mid-sized businesses that need an easy-to-use platform that covers both day-to-day social media management and competitor insights.
10. Hootsuite (w/ Talkwalker)
Hootsuite leveled up its competitor analysis game by acquiring Talkwalker in 2024. Now, Hootsuite offers social listening and competitive benchmarking powered by Talkwalker’s technology – all inside the familiar Hootsuite dashboard.
Hootsuite provides post scheduling and inbox management, while Talkwalker offers monitoring of competitors’ mentions. It’s a unified solution for doing and observing.
The platform includes Talkwalker’s AI, which automatically summarizes data, detects spikes in conversation, and even forecasts trends.
Hootsuite’s new listening module enables you to benchmark your brand against others on social media. You can learn about competitors’ strengths and weaknesses, and inform decisions on content and positioning.
Hootsuite (w/ Talkwalker) is best for
Existing Hootsuite users and social media managers who want to consolidate tools. It’s ideal for teams that handle publishing and now want to “keep an eye on competitors” in the same place.
