Competitive Intelligence Platforms: Nice-to-Have or a Budget Buster? An Honest Review for Lean Teams

Recently in product marketing there has been a growing category of software: Competitive Intelligence Platforms. These tools help different GTM teams conduct research on competitors, build sales enablement, and share learnings from the field.

While these tools are in their early stages my honest opinion of them is that they are nice-to-have’s but in a lean budget almost never worth it. The core capabilities of these tools generally includes:

1.     An AI-based research tool to filter through competitors and different types of content

2.     A content creation experience for building battlecards, FAQs, and other forms of sales enablement

3.     Automation and integrations to help improve the socialization and usage of enablement

I’ve talked to many startups that have considered purchasing one of the tools Klue, Crayon, and others, generally they come to the conclusion that these are too expensive and processes that can be easily recreated within a business. It also doesn’t help that platforms like Klue and Crayon charge by the number of competitor’s tracked, rather than seats. This makes it so that even if the tool is useful, for most companies it costs at least 20K annually. For me personally as a product marketer, this is simply not worth it. I would rather spend that 20K on a campaign and conduct research for it myself.

However, my bigger issue with these tools is that they simply do not do what they claim to. While I haven’t used all of the platforms out there, in my experience the AI filters and automation are almost useless. It is very hard to find the most important content and marketing from a competitor, and it usually requires individually reading every insight (and this is not at all how they market their platform). The content creation tools in platform aren’t much better.

I end up doing most things manually, from research to generation of collateral. It usually takes more time to use their research tools than to just do it myself.

I don’t mean to write off an entire software category in a few hundred words, and there are some good smaller vendors. But in general, as of 2024 I do not think the more well-known CI platforms are good purchases. Especially for PMM teams < 5.