How to Do SaaS Competitive Analysis in 2025

The market for SaaS businesses is constantly evolving. What worked yesterday may not work today, and what works today may be old news by tomorrow. If you want to gain the lead, you need to know what your competition is up to — what they’re getting right, where they’re dropping the ball, and what you can do to create your own niche. This is where competitor analysis for SaaS becomes helpful.

The global SaaS market is booming at an incredible speed, and it is estimated to grow to $908.21 billion by 2030, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 18.7%. In such a dynamic and competitive environment, competitive analysis is important, moving beyond optional and becoming mandatory.

In this blog, we will walk you through the process of performing a competitive analysis specifically in the context of the 2025 SaaS ecosystem. The idea is straightforward: provide you with transparent and actionable insights that allow your business to prosper.

What is SaaS Competitive Analysis?

Competitor analysis for SaaS is the systematic review of businesses that provide the same or similar products/services as you. It’s not merely watching what others do—it’s a means of recognizing their strengths, weaknesses, approach, and how they engage with their consumers. It is on this basis that you are deriving insights that are applicable to your offering and can be used to step up your competition and the value that you add.

SaaS competitive analysis, at its most basic level, is about understanding the larger market landscape. It helps you address such important questions as:

• Who are my key competitors, and what enables them to succeed?
• What is missing in the market that I can fill?
• How do I ensure my product is differentiated and leading on trends?

This isn’t about copying your competitors — it’s about learning from them. This knowledge allows you to make strategic decisions that reinforce your brand and your SaaS offering.

What Does SaaS Competitive Analysis Cover?

All elements of your competitors’ business are touched upon in a full competitive analysis. Here are the main places you need to pay attention to:

1. Product Features:

Start by evaluating the core features and functionalities of your competitors’ products. Begin with the basic features and functionality of your competitors’ products. Analyze how these features address customer pain points and their own unique value proposition. Ask yourself:

• What are the features you absolutely need in this space?
• What features do competitors talk about but don’t implement well?
• What does my product have that theirs does not?

As an illustration, a project management tool may provide strong task-tracking functionality but might be missing real-time collaboration features. This difference might be your chance to shine.

2. Pricing Models:

Pricing is a crucial element of any SaaS business. Study how your competitors structure their pricing:

• Do they offer free trials or freemium models?
• How are their pricing tiers set up? What features are included in each tier?
• Are there additional costs, such as onboarding or premium support?

By knowing how they price their products, you can better position your own product—whether you want to compete directly on price or add more perceived value at a slightly higher price point.

3. Marketing Strategies:

Marketing is what competitors use to lure and keep customers. By studying their strategy, you can find what works for them and what they may not be doing. Usually SaaS marketing services providers consider:

• What does their social media presence look like?
• What kind of content do they create (Blogs, webinars, whitepapers, etc)?
• Are they spending on paid advertising? If yes, which keywords or campaigns are they working on?

If a competitor is gaining traction through video tutorials, for instance, it might point to the notion that your audience prefers visual content.

Also read our comprehensive guide on SaaS Content Marketing: A Complete Guide for more insights.

4. Customer Feedback:

Customer reviews, feedback, and social media engagements show what people appreciate and why they’re dissatisfied with a competitor’s product. This feedback can help you:

• Do not make the same mistakes they did.
• Focus first on the features that customers are asking for.
• Present your competition with a challenging shell and break their balance in the market.

Platforms like G2, Trustpilot, and even Reddit can be treasure troves of untamed customer thoughts.

5. Market Positioning:

Knowledge of your competitors’ places in the market allows you to find your own. This includes:

• Who You Target: Are you all about startups, mid-sized businesses, or enterprises?
• How Do They Position Themselves? Do they focus on being affordable, having cutting-edge features, or great customer support?
• What Does Their Brand Voice Say: A more formal, casual, or hyper-technical one?

For instance, if a competitor is positioned as the budget-friendly option, you can position your product as the premium one with advanced features and better support.

Why SaaS Competitive Analysis is Not Spying

It should be noted that competitor analysis for SaaS doesn’t encourage copying or unethical practices. It’s about collecting publicly available information and leveraging it to make better business decisions. This can include:

• Watching the user experience by signing up for free trials
• Look at their public expertise: blogs, videos, posts.
• Looking into their digital trails like an SEO strategy or ad campaign.

The object is not to mimic competitors but to identify the opportunities where you can improve. For instance:

• If their user interface is crammed and overwhelming, you get to give them a more simplistic, friendly UI.
• For example, if their features are great but the support is terrible, you can mention that you have a responsive support team.

Viewing competitive analysis as a learning opportunity allows you to arm your business with a foundation for creating innovative solutions in a saturated SaaS environment.

Why Does SaaS Competitive Analysis Matter?

The SaaS sector is witnessing phenomenal growth, which is expected to burgeon from $273.55 billion in revenue in 2023. To know more about the expected global figure, it will stand around $908.21 billion in 2030. Faster growth also means a more competitive market. More than 80% of businesses use at least one SaaS application, which means that customer expectations for these interactions are higher than ever. To flourish here, you must:

• Identify subculture trends before they go mainstream.
• Adjust to changing consumer demands.
• But you need to stay ahead of the competition, fighting for the same market.

That is where SaaS competitive analysis comes into play to take you where you want to go. When you know your competitive landscape, you’re not just responding to changes in your marketplace—you’re anticipating them and setting your product up for extended success with right strategies around SaaS link building services, content marketing and so on.

Benefits of SaaS Competitive Analysis

If you’re unsure if it is worth your time and effort, here are some real-world advantages of competitive analysis.

1. Build a Strong Unique Value Proposition (USP)

Your unique selling proposition (USP) is the thing that differentiates your product from the crowd. You can see what other players in the market are focusing on and where you can angle for differentiation by looking at your data. For example:

• Are your rivals too heavily focused on enterprise clients? You could carve a niche for yourself with small companies.
• So, what do they need a friendly interface for? That could be your edge.

While differentiation is key to developing a strong USP, it’s not enough to say your business is different from the competition–you must make sure you are better as well, in a way that matters to your target audience. As SaaS companies are generating over $1 million in revenue and now number over 8,550 as of 2023, getting noticed is essential for your success.

2. Stay Relevant in the Market

Markets shift constantly. Horn and horned features from last season are now the norm. Monitoring competitors can give you insight into altering trends and expectations. This allows you to pivot before your product goes stale.

As an example, AI-driven solutions have become one of the fastest-growing SaaS segments, with estimated CAGRs from 15% to 30%. If your competitors are integrating AI, remaining relevant may mean looking at building similar capabilities into your product.

3. Identifying New Opportunities

Competitive analysis is not only about threats; it’s about opportunities, too. By examining your competitors, you can identify customer segments or needs that are not adequately being served in the marketplace. For example:

• One competitor might have an excellent product but terrible customer support. You could fill that space with better service.
• If no one is focusing on a particular industry or geography, that could be your opportunity.

Almost a staggering 56.67% of the world’s SaaS companies are located in the United States, yet emerging economies beginning from Europe to Asia exhibit an impressive growth stimulus. You can take the opportunities based on the identification of gaps in these domains.

4. Give Advantage Over the Competition

When you know what your competitors are doing, you can anticipate their moves and make a strategic response. For example:

• If they release a new feature, you can be ready with messaging one-upping them.
• If they lower their prices, you can decide whether to undercut them or tout your value.

Public SaaS companies had a median growth rate of 22% in 2023 compared to private SaaS companies, which grew at a 35% median rate. This expansion means there is an extremely steep competitive landscape, and small competitive advantages can translate into very high volumes.

5. Improved Customer Experience

To understand your competitors, you need to understand their customers. You can learn about preferences and dislikes from reviews, feedback, and support interactions. In-depth product reviews help you elevate your own product and the customer experience.

If customers talk about your competitor’s complex setup process, you can highlight how easy it is to onboard with you, for example. Customer success is crucial for the growth of SaaS businesses as customers naturally scale up over time with their renewals and expansion, ensuring future growth.

How to Conduct SaaS Competitor Analysis

Now that we’ve explained why it’s important, let’s dive into the how. Competitive analysis is a multi-phase project that can give you a clearer, deeper understanding of your market, your competitors, and how your SaaS product fits within that larger picture.

1. Identify Your Direct and Indirect Competitors

The first step of any competitive analysis is identifying who your competitors are. Competitors typically fall into two broad categories:

• Direct Competitors: These are businesses selling the same or similar products to the same audience as you. So, for example, if your SaaS solution is a project management tool, your direct competitors are other companies that offer project management software like Trello, Asana, or Monday. com.
• Indirect competitors: These companies provide a solution to the same problem as your product but in a different category or way. If your SaaS tool is task management centered, a tool like Slack, which is a collaboration tool, is also an indirect competitor.

1. How to Identify Competitors:

• Google Search: Search for specific keywords related to your product on a search engine and identify the companies that come up regularly.
• Industry Reports: You can often find major players in specific niches in reports by outlets like Gartner, Forrester, or CB Insights.
• Customer Insights: Interview your customers or leads as to other tools they’re evaluating or have tried in the past
• Social Media and Forums: Find out where your target market frequents online, then look to see which brands have been mentioned there.

Do not focus your research merely on well-known brands. New players or niche competitors can be equally relevant. Smaller companies may fail to innovate more quickly, and dismissing them could mean failing to capture valuable insights.

1. Analyze Their Products and Services

Now that you have a list of who your competitors are, it’s time to understand their services thoroughly. Take help from SaaS SEO services agencies here.

Key Questions to Ask:

• What are their core features?
  Create a takeaway fact sheet of what each competitor is providing. What features do they emphasize that you don’t currently have? Are there gaps in their offering that you can fill?

• What solutions do their products provide?
  Learn how they establish their position in relation to the customer pain points that their product resolves. That can give you signals about what the market wants most.

• What is their product’s strength/weakness?
  Identify what they do well and what they do poorly. For instance, their offering may have tons of features but be difficult to learn, while your solution uses simplicity as the differentiator.

Tools for Product Analysis:

• Free Trials: Test out competitors by signing up for their free trials.
• Customer Reviews: To know what customers have to say, go through customer reviews on sites like G2, Capterra, or Trustpilot.
• Feature Comparison Tools: You can map competitors’ features against yours using tools like FeatureMap.

Keep in mind that your aim here is to spot optimization potentials for your own offer. If a competitor’s product is feature-rich but overwhelming, then you can make simplicity and ease of use your differentiator.

1. Analyze Their Marketing Strategies

When it comes to a competitor’s marketing strategy, what do you have in mind when you think of it? How does a competitor attract, engage, and replicate customers? Analyzing how others do it allows you to discover strategies that might be working for them or where you can easily outperform them. Don’t forget to take help of SaaS content marketing services can help here.

Areas to Analyze:

1. Social Media Presence:
   • Which platforms are they engaged with?
   • How often do they post?
   • What content works the best (e.g., are videos better than infographics or tutorials)?
2. Email Campaigns:
   • Do they segment their audience?
   • Are they sending personalized messages?
   • What kind of offers or CTAs does it have?
3. Paid Ads:
   • What keywords or phrases are they optimizing for?
   • Are their advertisements feature-centric, pricing-centric, or testimonial-centric?
   • Do they use retargeting ads to remain top of mind for prospects?

How to Monitor Competitor Marketing:

• You can use analysis tools like SEMrush or SpyFu to analyze competitors’ SEO strategies and paid ads.
• Sign up for their newsletters to see how they cultivate leads.
• You can follow their social handles and check the type of content they are posting.

By familiarizing yourself with their marketing playbook, you can improve your own clever strategy to garner attention and popularity.

Don’t miss to read our Wytlabs expert insights on A Complete Guide To SaaS Product Marketing.

5. Consider Your Competitor’s Pricing Strategy

Pricing is everything in SaaS. As customers tend to compare pricing plans before making a decision, you need to know where your competitors lie.

What to Look For:

• Free Trial or Freemium Model:
  Do they offer a trial period before a customer makes a full commitment? If so, what does that trial look like?

• Pricing Tiers:
  What are the tiers in their pricing, and what features come with each? Do they have an entry-level plan, and what is it compared to yours?

• Hidden Costs:
  Do you have additional charges for onboarding, premium support, or integrations?

Key Insight: SaaS spending is growing at a rate of 17.7% in 2024, projected to total $232 billion. This indicates that there is so much offered to the customers but, they are looking for a quality solution and they are willing to pay for it but, they need to see transparent and competitive pricing.

Check your competitors’ pricing. Keep an eye on how their pricing model compares to your own. Are you providing adequate value for the cost? Or can you establish yourself as the cheaper alternative without compromising on quality?

6. Review Customer Interactions and Feedback

One of the richest sources of competitive insight is customer feedback. What you learn from reading the reviews, comments, and social media posts:

• What a competitor’s customers love about its service.
• What frustrates them?
• What functionalities do they wish were built?

Where to Find Feedback:

• Review Platforms: G2, Capterra & Trustpilot
• Social Media: Review comments on competitors’ posts or monitor brand mentions.
• Support Forums: Check forums or community pages to see the level of questions/complaints customers are asking.

For instance, if customers lament a competitor’s poor customer support, this is one place you can really shine. Take this feedback and apply it to your own product so as not to make similar oversights.

7. Pinpoint Market Gaps

A robust competitive analysis doesn’t simply call out what others are up to — it also identifies what’s absent. One of these market gaps can be the key to propel your SaaS business to success. Whether it is about website design or strategy find ou the gaps and work on them. A good SaaS website design agency can help here.

How to Identify Market Gaps:

1. Identify sectors or geographies your competitors are not pursuing. Germany’s SaaS market, for instance, is projected to swell from €6.85 billion in 2020 to €16.3 billion by 2025. Entering these markets might be a big deal for them.
2. Find features nobody is providing but that customers want. For example, if none of your competitors integrate with a certain popular tool, this is something you may want to add to your roadmap.
3. Find under-served customer segments. But if most of your competitors target large enterprises, there may be a gap in small businesses or startups.

8. Identify Your Place in the Market

When you’ve gathered all this information, it’s time to take stock of where you are. This step consists of a frank assessment of your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT).

Ask Yourself:

• What is your best competitive advantage? Examples of these would be: Improved customer service, simplified pricing,and  special features.
• What areas do you need to step up in to stay competitive? (e.g., legacy UIs, lack of integrations)
• Is there low-hanging fruit that you’re not actively capitalizing on?

An understanding of your position will keep your efforts directed toward the places that will generate the largest growth.

9. Update and Refine Your SEO Strategy

Before diving into the details of how our SaaS ranking is good for you, let us tell you a bit about competitive analysis that falls into an essential part of SaaS marketing — SEO.

Focus Areas:

Keywords: Consider using tools such as Ahrefs or SEMrush to discover keywords for which your competitors rank. Are there important keywords they missed?

Content Strategy: Scrutinize the kind of content that they do really well, whether it is blogging, case studies, or whitepapers. And what can you create that is even more valuable?

Look for Backlinks: Find out where competitors are getting backlinks. For your site or relationship with the same publications?

Optimize your traffic with competitor insights with your SEO strategy.

Want more insights? Do read our guide on 12 Brilliant SaaS Marketing Campaigns & Their Learnings.

Conclusion

The best part of a SaaS competitive analysis is that it’s about being informed and making decisions based on opportunities. By role modeling your competitors, you can create a better product, relate better with your audience, and ultimately carve out your own niche. In a high-speed industry like SaaS, that level of understanding isn’t optional; it’s a key to success.

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