9 Top Competitive Intelligence Tools For Data Manipulation

Innovative companies use competitive intelligence to benchmark against competitors and see which ones are growing stronger or executing particularly well. Competitor analysis helps companies make better strategic decisions and rise to the top.

Below, you’ll read about some of the tools that you can use for data extraction and monitoring in competitive analysis projects.

These are a few of the tools that we use in competitor research for our customers to analyze competitors and understand what they are doing and what they plan to do next.

1. 80 Legs

The first competitive intelligence tool on our list is 80 Legs, a website with easy web scraping tools and cloud-based web crawling. Founded in 2009, 80 Legs makes accessing web data more accessible for your competitors when they’re doing competitor research. Competitors use this tool to set up and design their web crawls.

One of the biggest challenges for competitors is when the internet grows in size, the number of potential ad channels grows too. Since there is always a never-ending stream of new data online, competitors will try to keep up with the stream of publications so they can advertise the best channels.

With this in place, your competitors can now scan millions of websites each week. By building their custom crawls and competitor reports, they can process millions of websites and produce competitive analyses accordingly for their advertising clients.

80 Legs’s products include:

• Custom Web Crawling

• Giant Web Crawling

• Datafiniti

2. BatchGeo

The second competitive intelligence tool on our list is BatchGeo, a website that creates the fastest way to create Google Maps from spreadsheets. Competitors use BatchGeo to transform their data into useful maps.

With BatchGeo, you can view locations on a map, filter based on spreadsheets, and plug the data into a competitor analysis map. You can use the built-in competitor analysis features to get simple visualizations without complication.

Some of the BatchGeo features include:

• Excel Support

• Map Badges

• Embed Maps

• Map Open Data

• Map Grouping

• Data Analysis

• Sales Mapping

3. Digimind

The third competitive intelligence tool on our list is Digimind, an online tool that lets you analyze any topic with AI integration. Digimind provides insights and expertise for managing, monitoring and measuring competitor communications activity.

Digimind can help you monitor, visualize and share internal knowledge to support competitive intelligence efforts throughout the organization. In addition, with Digimind you can measure strengths and weaknesses to identify risks or opportunities in the market.

4. Diigo

The fourth competitive intelligence tool on our list is Diigo, a multi-tool for personal knowledge management. By using Diigo, you can improve your productivity when consuming online information as a team. With Diigo, you can:

• Use annotation tools to read more effectively

• Use the cloud to build a personal library

• Have web pages archived with saved links

• Use annotations and screenshots to provide feedback

• Organize competitor research

• Collaborate across groups

5. I-Metrix

The fifth competitive intelligence tool on our list is I-Metrix, a tool that has interactive data that provides quick and accurate financial statement data through Microsoft Excel. With I-Metrix, you can pull competitor reports directly to Microsoft Excel spreadsheets.

I-Matrix lets you:

• Build financial models

• Identify trends and anomalies

• Create snapshots visualizations

6. Import.io

The sixth competitive intelligence tool on our list is Import.io, which delivers web data through intuitive apps and expert services. Import.io lets you build and run an extractor in just a few minutes. Some of the features that Import.io offers are:

• Multi-URL training

• Auto-optimize extractors

• URL generator

• Website screenshots

• Download images & files

• Scheduling

• Point-and-click training

7. Maltego

The seventh competitive intelligence tool on our list is Maltego, which lets you increase the speed and precision of complex investigations. With Maltego, you can gather information efficiently from dispersed data sources and easily link or combine all the information into one graph. Maltego has dozens of integrations from over thirty-five data partners. With the Maltego transform hub, you can choose from a variety of data including:

• Public data sources

• CaseFile Entities

• Paid access to commercial transforms

• Access to integrations

8. Mechanical Turk

The eighth competitive intelligence tool is Mechanical Turk, a crowdsourcing marketplace that will make it easier for you to outsource repetitive tasks. Crowdsourcing helps you to break down time-consuming projects into more manageable tasks. Some of the benefits of Mechanical Turk include:

• Optimized efficiency

• Increased flexibility

• Reduced cost

9. Spotfire

The final competitive intelligence tool on our list is Spotfire, which will help you to analyze data at rest to predict trends through advanced analytics. With Spotfire, you can make discoveries in data through visual exploration. Features include:

• Visual analytics

• Custom analytic apps

• Embedded data science

• Real-time decisions

• Geoanalytics

• Sped-up production times

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