You came for a competitive analysis template — the columns, the headings, something to drop into a doc or a slide before the next strategy review. It's below; take it. But know what you're buying: a competitive analysis is a snapshot of a moving market, and the market moves the week after you finish. A rival reprices, reframes its positioning, ships the feature you called a gap — and your beautifully formatted table is now quietly wrong, with no way to tell which rows. Draftlize gives you the same eight fields — and makes each one a card an AI agent reads and writes, linked to the positioning decision it informs, so when a competitor moves, everything that rested on the old read flags itself stale.
This is the whole template — fill one block in for each competitor you track. It works in a doc, a wiki, a spreadsheet, or a slide. Use it as-is; it's a perfectly good competitor analysis template. The next section is about what changes when each field stops being text and becomes a card that knows when it's gone stale.
The one you're sizing up, named plainly. Direct rival, adjacent tool, or the "good enough" status quo (a spreadsheet, doing nothing) — the last is the competitor most analyses forget to list.
The criteria you're judging on — the ones that decide a deal, not a feature checklist. Pick the four or five that actually move a buyer; a comparison across twenty dimensions hides the two that matter.
Where they genuinely beat you, stated without flinching. The honest version is the only useful version — a competitive analysis written to make you feel good is a competitive analysis you can't act on.
The gaps you can press: a missing capability, a clumsy workflow, a segment they underserve. Note whether each is structural (hard for them to fix) or temporary (shipping next quarter) — it changes everything.
How they frame themselves and what they charge — the headline claim, the model (per seat, per use, flat), the published price. This is the field that rots fastest, because pricing pages change without telling you.
The one thing you do that they can't easily copy, against this specific competitor. Not a feature list — the wedge. If you can't name it per rival, the analysis just surfaced a real strategy problem.
The move this comparison implies: a threat to defend against, an opening to take. An analysis with no "therefore" is trivia. This is the field a reader actually opens the document to find.
The date you last confirmed any of the above against reality. The single most important field and the one every template omits — without it, you can't tell a current read from a fossil.
That's the template. Below: why the market makes it obsolete the week you finish — and what we do about it.
A competitive analysis captures rivals on the day you wrote it. But competitors don't hold still — they reprice, rebrand, ship. The "Last verified" date you (probably didn't) record is the only thing standing between a current read and a fossil, and a doc has no way to age a row or warn you it's stale.
The "Their positioning & pricing" field decays fastest of all. A competitor quietly changes its pricing page and your slide still shows last quarter's number — so the differentiation you built on it, and the deal you're trying to win with it, are both running on stale intel nobody flagged.
The analysis is most accurate the minute the strategy review ends, and never that accurate again. By next quarter a real fraction is wrong, and you can't tell which fraction — so the whole document gets quietly distrusted, which is worse than not having one. It gets rebuilt from scratch instead of updated.
In Draftlize the template isn't a static table — every competitor observation is a typed card with those exact fields: Competitor, Dimensions, Strengths, Weaknesses, Positioning & pricing, Differentiation, Threats & opportunities, Last verified. Structured, addressable by ID, and citable from a positioning decision or a thread instead of buried in a slide deck.
Link each competitor card to the positioning decision it informs. When a competitor reprices or repositions and you update its card, every decision and spec that rested on the old read turns stale automatically — the way a build system invalidates everything downstream of a changed file. Your differentiation can't keep quietly resting on a number that's no longer true.
Claude Code or Cursor, over MCP, reads every relevant competitor card before it drafts your positioning, your launch copy, or the next spec — and writes new observations back into the same shape. The analysis stops being a document for a reviewer who never returns and becomes context that gets read on every turn.
A competitive analysis template tells you what to write down about a rival. It can't tell you when the rival moved and made it wrong.Keep the eight fields. Let the substrate keep them current.
A competitive analysis is a structured comparison of your product against rivals across the dimensions that matter — strengths, weaknesses, positioning, pricing, and differentiation — so you can see where you genuinely win and where a competitor threatens you. Its job is to inform positioning and strategy, not to collect logos.
For each competitor: the dimensions you compare on, their strengths and weaknesses, their positioning and pricing, your differentiation against them, the threats and opportunities they create, and the date you last verified it. That last field — last verified — is what tells you whether the read is current or a year stale.
Continuously in spirit, formally each quarter or before a major launch or positioning decision. The trap is treating it as a one-time deliverable: a rival reprices or repositions and the analysis is quietly wrong, so the durable approach is to update the competitor you touched rather than rebuild the whole document.
Each competitor is a card linked to the positioning decision it informs. Update a rival after they reprice and every decision or spec that rested on the old read flags itself stale — so your differentiation cannot keep quietly resting on a number that is no longer true.
Take the template above, or spin up a project and let the agent fill it in from your existing research — then keep every competitor read, and the positioning that depends on it, current for you as the market moves.
Start free with $5One click creates a project with these exact sections as typed, linked cards. Answer them with the agent — and when a decision changes later, every dependent section flags stale instead of silently drifting. $5 free credit on signup, no card required.