Competitor analysis template: the four tabs, the twenty columns, and the two outputs that make it worth filling in

A competitor analysis template is worth filling in only if it ends in two short outputs: one page the sales team can carry into a call, and a queue of decisions with owners and dates. Everything else is a spreadsheet nobody opens twice. So the sheet below has four tabs and about twenty columns rather than forty: a set-up tab naming five competitors and why each is on the list, a positioning tab holding their own words, an evidence tab holding what they spend and claim, and a decisions tab where every row becomes match, beat or skip. The columns are the template. The discipline is the five competitor limit and the rule that no row leaves the sheet without a decision attached.

This page is the sheet. For working out who your competitors actually are, which is a different exercise and usually produces a surprising list, see competitor analysis as a repeatable method, and for the message teardown that fills tab two, competitive analysis in marketing.

The four tabs

Tab	What it holds	Who reads it
1. Set-up	The five competitors, the category each one is in, why it is on the list, the date and the owner	Whoever inherits the sheet in six months
2. Positioning	Their own words: who they say it is for, the promise, what they position against, the proof, the gaps	Marketing, and the sales one pager comes out of here
3. Evidence	Channels, pricing, product, hiring, reviews, with a source and a date against every cell	Anybody who challenges a conclusion later
4. Decisions	One row per finding: match, beat or skip, with an owner and a date	The person running the quarter

Four tabs is the whole design. The usual failure is a fifth tab of feature comparisons, which is a product exercise rather than a marketing one and which expands until it consumes the project.

Tab 1: set-up, which takes ten minutes and saves the whole exercise

• Competitor name, and the one sentence version of what they sell.
• Category: direct, substitute or insurgent. Two direct, two substitutes, one insurgent is the shape that produces decisions. Substitutes include doing nothing, doing it in house and using a spreadsheet, and they win more deals than most competitor sheets admit.
• Why they are on the list, in one line. Usually because sales meets them, not because they rank.
• Date completed, and owner. An undated competitor sheet is actively dangerous a year later, because somebody will quote it as current.

Tab 2: positioning, in their words rather than yours

Column	What goes in it	Where the evidence is
Who it is for	The buyer they name, copied exactly	Homepage headline, navigation labels, the industries in the footer
The promise	The single claim repeated everywhere	The sentence under the headline, and their advertisements
Positioned against	What they define themselves as not being	Comparison pages, and the words unlike, without and instead of
Proof offered	Named customers, numbers, certifications, review scores	Homepage, case studies, trust strip
Price position	Published, on request, or hidden, and the range if shown	Pricing page, and any plan comparison
What they do not say	The absent subject, which is often the weakness	No pricing page, no security page, no integrations list, no named team
Positioning in one sentence	For this buyer, we do this thing, unlike that alternative	Your synthesis. If you cannot write it, they have no position and that is the finding

Tab 3: evidence, with a source against every cell

• Channels they are visibly spending on, and how you know. Advertisement transparency libraries, sponsorships you can see, the events they appear at.
• Content cadence, meaning how often they publish and what kind. Two columns: volume and type.
• Review position, the count and the average on the two platforms that matter in your category, plus whether they reply to complaints.
• Hiring, from their own careers page. Open roles are the most honest statement of strategy any company publishes.
• Product and packaging changes, from their changelog, release notes or new pages.
• Source and date, on every row. This column is what separates analysis from assertion, and it is the first one people drop.

Tab 4: decisions, which is the only tab anybody outside marketing will read

One row per finding, and three allowed values in the action column.

• Match. They have something we need to have: a comparison page, a security page, a published price, a faster response time. Cheap and usually overdue.
• Beat. Somewhere we can be demonstrably better and can prove it. Pick two of these per quarter and no more.
• Skip. Something they do that we deliberately will not. Writing the skips down matters as much as the rest, because it stops the same debate restarting every quarter.

Add an owner, a date and a one line expected effect. A decision tab with twenty rows and no owners is a wish list, and the honest number of live rows for a small team is three.

The scoring, and why one to three beats one to ten

Where you need to score, use three values with written definitions: 1 means weaker than us, 2 means comparable, 3 means stronger than us. A ten point scale invites debate about whether something is a six or a seven, which consumes the hour you were going to spend deciding what to do. Define each value in the sheet so a colleague scoring it next quarter lands in the same place.

Filling it in, in a day

• First hour. Tab one. Ask sales who comes up in deals, and resist adding a sixth name.
• Next two hours. Tab two, one competitor at a time, copying their words rather than paraphrasing them. Paraphrase is where bias enters.
• Next two hours. Tab three. Timebox it, because this is the tab that expands without limit.
• Final hour. Tab four, with the people who will do the work in the room. Decisions made without them become decisions nobody takes.
• Then write the one pager from tab two: five competitors, one positioning sentence each, and the one claim you can take from them. That is the document that gets used.

Refreshing it

Quarterly is enough for most categories, and three events should trigger an early refresh: a competitor changes their homepage promise, a new name starts appearing in your lost deals, or your own win rate moves without an internal explanation. Keep the old version rather than overwriting it, because the change between two dated sheets is more informative than either sheet alone.

Five ways this goes wrong

• Too many competitors. Twenty rows produces a document and no decisions. Five is the limit, and the five change over time.
• Features instead of message. A feature grid tells you what to build, not what to say, and marketing cannot act on it.
• No dates and no sources. Within a year the sheet is quoted as current and is wrong, which is worse than having none.
• No skips recorded. So every quarter somebody re-proposes the thing you already decided against.
• Nobody owns it. A shared sheet with no name against it ages into a screenshot in a deck.

Competitor analysis templates: what people ask

What should a competitor analysis include?

Who each competitor is aimed at, the promise they make, what they position against, the proof they offer, where they spend, what they charge, and what you are going to do about each finding. The last item is the one most templates omit and the only one that changes anything.

How many competitors should be in it?

Five: two direct, two substitutes and one insurgent. The substitutes matter more than people expect, because doing nothing and doing it in house are the most common alternatives to buying from anybody.

Spreadsheet or document?

Spreadsheet for the comparison, document for the output. The sheet is where the evidence lives and the one pager is what people read. Trying to make one artefact do both produces a deck that is too long to use and too shallow to trust.

How is this different from competitive intelligence?

Scale and tempo. A competitor analysis is a periodic exercise producing a snapshot and a decision queue. Competitive intelligence is a standing process that monitors continuously and feeds the sheet. Start with the analysis, because a monitoring process with no baseline has nothing to compare against.

Who should own it?

One named person in marketing, with sales contributing the competitor list and the objections. Ownership by committee is why these documents go stale.

Should competitors be named in public content?

Naming them accurately and fairly is usually the stronger move, and comparison pages are among the highest intent pages any company publishes. The rule is simple: write nothing you would be embarrassed to have the competitor read, and nothing you cannot evidence.

One row most sheets are missing

Add a column to tab three: which competitors get named when a buyer asks an assistant for a recommendation in your category. It is public evidence like everything else on that tab, it takes ten minutes to gather by asking the question the way a buyer would phrase it, and it frequently disagrees with the search results you are used to. A competitor who is invisible in search but named consistently in those answers is a finding your current sheet cannot produce, and so is the reverse. Record the question, the date and the names, exactly as you would any other dated source. Our note on why a competitor gets recommended and you do not covers what to do once that row is filled in.