How to Conduct a Competitive Audit for SaaS Companies

As a SaaS brand, knowing how your product measures up against your competitors is an essential part of any marketing plan. If you’re going to outperform your competitors and set yourself apart from the crowd, you need to know what they are doing first.  

This is where a competitive audit comes in. A well-performed audit will reveal how your top competitors are positioning themselves, which marketing strategies resonate with your audience, and most importantly, what you can do to fill any gaps in your market. 

Here, we offer a step-by-step strategy for conducting a worthwhile competitive audit for SaaS companies. For any SaaS company wanting to rebrand, develop a new strategy, or prepare for a new feature launch, this guide will show you how to stand head and shoulders above your competition. 

Why Conduct a Competitive Audit?

As with anything in business, before starting a competitive audit, you need to know exactly why you’re doing it – or else it’s a waste of resources. 

The key benefits of a competitive audit are:

• Crafting your unique value proposition: This helps you know exactly what your SaaS company offers, and why customers should choose you over other alternatives. 
• Market relevance: Knowing what competitors are doing and the degree of success they’re having and help inform your own strategies and offerings. 
• Identify potential opportunities: Researching what customers say about your product and your competitors is an easy way to identify ways to improve your product and marketing strategies. 
• Get ahead of your competitors: Out-competing your rivals is more than just offering a better product. If you post better content, offer better customer service, and position yourself with relevance to societal trends, you’ll already be in a better position to make more sales. 

Having convinced yourself of the importance of a competitive audit, here is a step-by-step process to conducting one that will benefit you and your clients. 

Define the Scope of Your Competitive Audit

First, know exactly what you want to achieve with the exercise.

This is important for several reasons. 

First, it gives you direction and also gives your audit purpose. The point of doing a competitive audit is to glean insights that you can turn into profitable business decisions. You need to know what you want to achieve before achieving it. 

The best way to do this is to ask yourself questions about your desired outcome for the audit:

• Am I trying to understand how competitors are positioning themselves?
• Am I trying to tweak my messaging to better resonate with the audience?
• Am I trying to identify industry price points?
• Do I want to offer a better product, refine my marketing, or improve my content?

Be as thorough as possible with this questioning. The more questions you have and the more granular your answers, the better your initial foundation for your audit will be – which will reveal superior results and ultimately, better business decisions.  

Identify Your Top Competitors

After defining the scope of your audit, you need to know who your top competitors are. 

Start by Matching Competitors to Your Objective

Not every competitor is relevant to every audit. 

For instance, if your scope is on refining messaging, your audit should prioritize competitors that are winning attention and converting in your category. These are the players your audience is already aware of and who you can learn from. 

Find your competitors in two main ways – search engines like Google and SaaS review websites like G2, TrustRadius and Capterra. 

For example:

• If you’re evaluating a freemium strategy, look at companies with lots of self-serve users. 
• If you’re targeting enterprise clients, audit competitors with solid B2B case studies and sales-driven funnels.

Aligning competitor selection to your audit goal ensures you’re benchmarking against the right targets.

Map Out Core Messaging

Once you’ve selected the right players, dissect how they position their product:

• What is their unique value proposition?
• Who are they speaking to, and how directly?
• Is the messaging customer-centric, feature-led, or outcome-focused?

Start with their homepage. Then, branch out to product pages, email sequences, LinkedIn ads, and landing pages. You’re looking for patterns and for gaps.

Evaluate Consistency and Differentiation

Strong positioning is consistent across channels. This means that any story any company is telling their audience needs to be clear and consistent whether someone’s reading an ad, a blog post, or an onboarding email.

Using a business email address like yourname@yourbrand.com for this onboarding email is important for higher open rates and clicks.

If a competitor’s branding revolves around unified communication services, but their messaging is inconsistent across touchpoints, that’s a gap you can take advantage of.

Ask yourself:

• Are they telling the same story everywhere?
• Does the tone shift between channels?
• Most importantly, do they stand out?

If several competitors use the same value prop (e.g. “All-in-one platform for remote teams”), that’s an opportunity. It tells you the market is saturated with sameness. Your job is to find a new angle that speaks more clearly – or more boldly – to what your audience truly cares about.

Analyze Pricing Strategy and Features

Pricing is one of the most revealing parts of a SaaS business. It reflects not just what a company charges, but what it values and how it expects customers to grow with the product.

Start with the Basics

Look at each competitor’s pricing page and answer the following:

• How many pricing tiers do they offer?
• Is there a free plan or free trial?
• Are trials gated with a credit card?
• Do they show monthly vs. annual pricing?
• Are contracts flexible, or is there a push toward long-term commitments?

These details tell you a lot about their acquisition and retention strategy. Freemium typically signals a focus on volume and self-serve growth. Gated trials and annual contracts usually point to a more sales-led or enterprise model.

Map Features to Price Points

Next, compare the features included at each tier. Which features drive upgrades? What’s locked behind a paywall? Are there usage-based limits (like seats, storage, or API calls)?

The goal is to understand how your competitors are packaging their value and how your pricing compares.

Also note:

• Are features bundled logically?
• Is there a clear “hero feature” at each tier?
• Do any of the competitors offer à la carte pricing or add-ons?

Look for Strategic Clues

How competitors price their products can hint at their broader market strategy. For example:

• Large discounts on annual plans tend to hint at cash flow priorities.
• A steep price increase between tiers could indicate a deliberate push toward higher-value customers.
• Simpler pricing models might suggest they’re targeting smaller teams or international markets

These insights help you get an idea of how you can package your own pricing to achieve your business goals. 

Track Content and SEO Strategy

Content is more than just blog posts – it’s how SaaS companies educate, build trust, and generate inbound demand. A solid content strategy often signals a mature growth engine.

Start with Their Blog and Resource Center

Use tools like Ahref or SEMrush to audit your competitors’content performance:

• What keywords are they ranking for?
• Which pages bring in the most traffic?
• Are they targeting bottom-of-funnel terms (e.g. “best CRM for agencies”) or sticking with top-of-funnel content?

This gives you a sense of their SEO priorities and where your brand might have room to compete.

Pay Attention to Content Formats

Next, look at the types of content they’re producing:

• Are they publishing thought leadership, how-to guides, or industry reports?
• Are they running webinars, case studies, or interactive tools?
• Is their content written for practitioners, buyers, or both?

This helps you understand who they’re trying to reach and how seriously they invest in education and brand authority. Mapping out these insights in a content calendar can also help you spot gaps and opportunities to differentiate your strategy.

Evaluate Link Building and Authority

Despite what you might be hearing among AI and SEO “experts”, domain authority still matters.

To this end, check whether your competitors are building backlinks from reputable sources or just blogging into the void.

Look for:

• Guest posts or features on high-authority sites
• Partnerships or co-marketing efforts
• Content that’s being cited or shared by others in the space

If they’re gaining traction and your brand isn’t, that’s a signal to rethink your link building strategy.

In short: Are they playing to win in search or just checking the content box?

Use Social Listening to Gauge Market Sentiment

Seeing what customers say about your competitors is one of the key parts of any audit.  

What a company is saying about themselves in their content strategy is one thing – but what others are saying about them is what offers you the chance to out compete them.

This is why social listening is probably the most important part of any SaaS competitive audit. It really gives you the chance to see exactly what your target audience is saying and feeling about your competitors. 

Track Brand Mentions and Engagement

Use a tool like Mention to monitor competitor mentions across platforms. Look at:

• What types of posts are generating the most buzz?
• Are customers praising specific features or complaining about support?
• Which influencers or partners are engaging with their content?

These signals help SaaS companies understand what’s resonating and what isn’t. For e-commerce stores and startups, this kind of real-time brand intelligence can reveal not only how competitors are perceived but also what messaging connects best with target audiences.

Spot Customer Frustrations and Gaps

Dig into comment sections, replies, and tagged posts. You’ll often uncover confusion about pricing or product limitations, missing features or integration requests and UX complaints that never make it into official reviews.

These small details are often the seeds of product or positioning opportunities. If customers are asking questions competitors aren’t answering, you have a chance to step in with a better solution, especially in sectors like unified communications, where clarity around features, integrations, and pricing is key to standing out.

The comments and reviews sections also critically provide you with insight into terminology that your audience uses – which in turn you can insert into your copywriting so that you resonate with your customers on a closer level. 

Monitor Sentiment Over Time

It’s not just what people say. It’s how they feel. Use sentiment tracking to see how opinions shift during launches, outages, or leadership changes. Brands with volatile sentiment may have deeper trust issues, while consistently positive sentiment usually reflects a strong product-market fit and loyal base.

Study Their Growth 

Great positioning and content are only part of the story. To fully understand a competitor’s strategy, you need to analyze where they find leads and how they acquire, activate, and retain users.

Identify Their Acquisition Channels

Start by looking at where their traffic and leads are likely coming from:

• Are they investing heavily in paid ads on Google or LinkedIn, or perhaps YouTube?
• Do they rely on partnerships, integrations, or affiliates?
• Are they driving growth through organic channels, like SEO or community?

While you can’t directly access a competitor’s analytics, you can compare trends by analyzing your traffic sources. By connecting GA4 to Looker Studio, you can visualize your acquisition data and spot shifts in demand, which may indicate where competitors are gaining traction.

Watch Their Platform Strategy

Next, look at where they’re building a presence:

• Are they consistently publishing on LinkedIn, YouTube, or Podcasts?
• Do they sponsor events, host webinars, or publish newsletters in their space?

Where they show up tells you where they believe their audience is paying attention and where your brand might need to compete.

Look for Signs of Experimentation

Growth-focused companies leave behind clues. Pay attention to tactics like:

• Aggressive onboarding emails or live chat nudges
• Referral programs, discount codes, or affiliate campaigns

These efforts suggest a culture of iteration, and they often point to what’s working behind the scenes.

If your competitors are testing new acquisition strategies or investing in overlooked channels, don’t just take notes. Think about what you can learn, adapt, or do better.

Assess Their Cybersecurity

SaaS applications are among the most targeted businesses for cyber attacks. Given the often sensitive nature of data handled by SaaS companies, more clients are tightening how they assess third-party vendors. 

Therefore, it’s absolutely vital that in your competitive audit, you look at what your competitors are doing to position themselves as leaders in the security of their and their customers’ data. 

Start by Reviewing Each Competitor’s Security Posture

Look at how your competitors talk about data security:

• Do they have a dedicated security page?
• Are their compliance certifications clear and easy to find?
• Do they address security head-on, discussing topics such as identity theft and fraud in plain language, or just dump technical jargon?

Next, Audit Security-Driven Features

Identify which security features your competitors productize. For example:

• Do they offer audit logs, data encryption, or regional data storage?
• Is there any mention of regular security audits or breach response plans?

The importance of a compliant, updated, and continuously monitored security posture cannot be overstated. Regardless of what your competitors are doing, you must double down on your own cybersecurity posture, and if your competitors aren’t, you should tell everyone what you’re doing differently to protect your clients. 

Wrapping Up

A competitive audit for SaaS companies is all about understanding your competitors’ strategies so you can enhance your own. 

If you do your audit well, you can clarify your own positioning vs. your competitors, you can refine price points, improve your messaging, and identify feature, service and growth potentials which your competitors haven’t yet noticed. 

To take it a step further, add social listening to the mix. With Mention, you can track competitor mentions, measure sentiment, and uncover gaps in real time – giving you a clearer view of where the market is headed, and how your brand can lead the way.