SaaS competitor analysis: pricing, pages and ads
SaaS competitor analysis for B2B teams: pricing and packaging, changelogs, comparison pages, G2 reviews, brand bidding, LinkedIn ads and hiring, with a routine.
SaaS competitor analysis is mostly reading what rivals publish. B2B software companies announce a great deal in public before or as they ship it: on their pricing page, changelog, comparison pages, job ads and review profiles. The job is to read those on a schedule and turn them into decisions about pricing, positioning, content and sales.
Say you are the product marketer at a 30-person scheduling software company with four direct rivals. This is what to watch, and how often.
Pricing and packaging
Most SaaS pricing pages change once or twice a year, and the changes that matter are rarely the headline number. Our guide to tracking a competitor's pricing page covers capturing them. For SaaS specifically, look at:
- The value metric. Seats, usage, contacts, locations. A rival moving from per-seat to usage pricing is courting a different buyer.
- Where key features sit. Enterprise features such as single sign-on, audit logs and advanced permissions moving between tiers tell you who they want to upsell.
- The free tier and trial. Adding a free plan changes acquisition for the whole category. Shortening a trial suggests conversion pressure.
- "Contact sales" creeping down. When the middle tier loses its price, the company is usually moving upmarket.
For history, the Wayback Machine has archived many SaaS pricing pages for years. Our Wayback Machine guide shows how to build the timeline.
Changelogs: the roadmap in public
Many SaaS companies keep a changelog, release notes page or product updates blog. Subscribe to the RSS feed if there is one.
Read for direction, not features. Three months of entries often fall into a pattern: enterprise controls (moving upmarket), integrations with one ecosystem (a partnership), AI features (a positioning bet), or bug fixes and performance (a company catching up on debt). The pattern predicts their next quarter better than their marketing does.
New entries in their integrations directory are worth noting separately. An integration is often the start of a co-marketing campaign with that partner.
Comparison pages: what they say about you
Many SaaS companies publish "us vs them" and "alternatives to" pages. Find every page a rival has about you: search "[their brand] vs [your brand]" and "[your brand] alternatives", and check their site's footer and resources section.
These pages are what your prospects read before a sales call. Note each claim about you and check whether it is still true. If it is outdated, fix your own page, brief your sales team, and ask the rival politely to update theirs. Our guide to writing battlecards covers turning the claims into sales answers.
Reviews: G2 and the quarterly cycle
Many business software buyers read G2 and Capterra. G2 publishes its Grid reports quarterly, with review cut-off dates before each release.
That creates a visible rhythm. A rival whose review count jumps in the weeks before a cut-off is probably running a review campaign to move up a Grid. Note their counts monthly so you can see it happen.
Read the three-star reviews, not the five or the one. Three-star reviewers explain trade-offs in detail: "great for small teams but reporting is weak once you pass 50 users". That sentence is a positioning opportunity.
Search: content and brand bidding
Content. Note which topics each rival publishes on and which pages bring them search traffic. New programmatic pages (one per integration, one per use case, one per competitor) are a strategy, not a blog post.
Your brand. Search your own product name and look at the ads. Then check each rival in the Google Ads Transparency Center. Our guide to bidding on competitor keywords covers when to respond.
LinkedIn ads and hiring
LinkedIn ads. For B2B, LinkedIn is often where rivals spend on awareness. The LinkedIn Ad Library shows their ads, free.
Hiring. Job posts are the most honest roadmap a company publishes. Check each rival's careers page monthly, including the job board it links to.
| Job title | What it usually signals |
|---|---|
| Enterprise account executive, a new region | Geographic expansion |
| Partnerships or alliances manager | Channel strategy |
| Product manager for a named area | A new product line |
| Several SDRs at once | An outbound push into your segment |
| Head of a function they did not have | A gap they are filling |
A SaaS competitor analysis routine
| When | What to check | Where | Time |
|---|---|---|---|
| Weekly | Changelog entries, new ads | Changelog, ad libraries | 15 min |
| Weekly | Pricing page changes | Pricing page | 5 min |
| Monthly | Review counts and new three-star reviews | G2, Capterra | 20 min |
| Monthly | New comparison, integration and landing pages | Their sitemap | 15 min |
| Monthly | Open roles | Careers page | 10 min |
| Quarterly | Claims about you on their comparison pages | Their site, search results | 30 min |
What Figo covers for SaaS teams
Ours, so judge accordingly. Figo checks each rival weekly and covers their pricing page, new and changed pages including comparison and integration pages, new blog posts, Google keyword positions and estimated traffic, Google, Meta and TikTok ads, Reddit threads genuinely about them, and their Trustpilot rating where they have one.
It does not read G2 or Capterra, does not cover LinkedIn ads, and does not build battlecards, run win-loss analysis or connect to a CRM. A sales team of twenty or more that needs competitive content inside its CRM should look at an enablement platform instead.
Figo starts at $49 a month for three competitors and $99 for eight, which fits a product marketer or a founder who wants the Monday summary without the Monday hour.
Questions people ask
What should a SaaS competitive analysis include?
For each rival, their pricing and value metric, their target segment, what they shipped in the last two quarters, what they claim about you, what their reviewers complain about, and where they are hiring. One page per competitor is enough.
How do I find out what a SaaS competitor charges when pricing is hidden?
Ask prospects who evaluated them, check review sites where buyers sometimes mention price, and look at archived versions of their pricing page from before it went quote-only. Hidden pricing usually means a sales-led motion and a higher floor.
How many competitors should a SaaS company track?
Three to five closely, plus a watch list. The close ones are those that show up in your deals; the watch list is the adjacent tools and newcomers that could move into your category.
Should I build pages comparing my product with competitors?
Yes, if you keep them fair and current. Buyers search for comparisons, and if you do not answer the query a competitor or an affiliate site will answer it for you.
See it on your own competitors
Figo checks their ads, pages, rankings and reviews every week, then tells you what to do in plain words. Set up in two minutes.
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