Best Competitive Analysis Tool: Semrush VS Ahrefs [2025]

Today’s digital environment demands more than just “good marketing” — you need to understand what your competitors are doing and how.

Competitive intelligence isn't about spying; it's about making smarter and faster decisions using data already out there.

It gives you the edge to predict market movements, uncover your competitors' winning strategies, and adapt before they do.

And to gather this data efficiently, you need the right tools.

In this article, I’ll explain how these competitive analysis tools compare so you can choose the one that fits your business needs and takes your marketing efforts to the next level, including:

1. What's a Competitive Analysis: Definition and Benefits
2. How to Choose the Best Competitor Analysis Tool: Key Features to Consider
3. Ahrefs vs Semrush: Which Is The Best Competitor Analysis Tool for E-commerce 2025?

Now, let’s see how Semrush compares to Ahrefs for competitor analysis!

What's a competitive analysis?

Competitive analysis is critical to understanding your market position and identifying growth opportunities.

It involves the systematic collection of data about competitors to evaluate their strategies, strengths, and weaknesses.

Ultimately, it's about understanding how your brand stacks up and where you can adapt to stay competitive in your industry.

Now let’s review:

1. How to conduct a competitive analysis?
2. What are the benefits of competitor analysis?

1. How to conduct a competitive analysis?

To conduct a competitive analysis, you’ll need to:

1. Identify key competitors, including direct competitors in your niche and companies that could impact your market.

2. Gather data on key performance metrics such as customer retention, average order value, lifetime value, pricing, etc.

Benchmarking these metrics against your own will help to identify performance gaps or areas where your competitors excel.

3. Examine your competitors’ product offerings, marketing strategies, ads, and customer experiences to identify best practices and weaknesses you can leverage for your growth.

4. Improve your strategy based on the insights and data you have gathered that best match your brand.

To explore this process further, check out our article, which teaches you how to benchmark competitors in five steps.

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2. What are the benefits of competitor analysis?

If you're looking to stay competitive and agile, regular competitive analysis is essential for your business.

By analyzing your competitors, you can gain actionable insights that strengthen your strategies and help you stay ahead in your industry.

The benefits of benchmarking your competitors include:

• Understand your market: Gain a clearer view of where your company fits within the industry by analyzing competitors' strengths, weaknesses, and trends.
• Compare performance: Track key metrics such as conversion rates and customer engagement to measure your performance against your competitors’.
• Identify strategy gaps: Identify areas where competitors are succeeding that you may have overlooked so you can address gaps and refine your approach.
• Improve your value proposition: Use competitive intelligence to enhance and promote what makes your company unique, giving you an edge over the competition.
• Adapt to market changes: Stay on top of industry trends and shifts by closely monitoring competitors' adjustments, which helps you stay proactive and innovative.

While other platforms only track email or SEO keywords, Panoramata offers a full suite by monitoring ads, trends, landing pages, and real-time updates.

How to Choose the Best Competitor Analysis Tool: Key Features to Consider

To choose the best competitive analysis tool for your business, consider factors like your budget, your business needs, the user experience and interface, and its data coverage.

Here is why:

• Ease of use: The tool should be intuitive and straightforward, allowing quick access to insights without a steep learning curve.
• Data Accuracy and Source Reliability: Ensure that the tool provides accurate, up-to-date data from trusted sources so that your decisions are based on reliable insights.
• Clear data visualization: Choose tools with customizable reports and automated dashboards to facilitate decision-making for your team.
• Real-time tracking: The tool should provide instant updates on competitors' email, ad, SMS, and website changes so you can stay on top of any changes in strategy.
• Website and landing page funnel tracking: Monitor changes to competitors' websites and landing pages to better understand their conversion strategies and how they adjust their value propositions over time.
• Social media analysis: If social media is key to your strategy, consider tools with social monitoring and analysis features.
• Integration: Ensure the tool integrates with your existing software, such as CRM or analytics platforms, to streamline your workflow.
• Cost-effectiveness: Balance price with features. Paid tools often offer more advanced insights, but ensure they fit your budget.
• Customer support: Choose tools with active customer support, resources, and tutorials for quick help and to remove the learning curve.

These features will give you the insight and agility to outperform your competition and adapt your strategies based on real-time market intelligence.

Ahrefs vs Semrush: Which Is The Best Competitor Analysis Tool for E-commerce 2025?

It’s 2025, and Semrush and Ahrefs remain top tools for competitor research and SEO analysis. But for e-commerce brands and marketers looking for real-time, cross-channel insights, Panoramata is a powerful alternative.

Let’s break down each tool:

1. Panoramata: Semrush and Ahrefs alternative
2. Semrush
3. Ahrefs

1. Panoramata: Semrush and Ahrefs alternative tool

Semrush and Ahrefs are industry standards for SEO competitor analysis, but if you need real-time, cross-channel marketing insights, Panoramata is purpose-built for e-commerce, SaaS, B2B and so many more brands.

If you want to know how your competitors’ marketing strategies work and how they make sales, Panoramata is the tool you may consider.

Otherwise, you may miss crucial marketing insights relying solely on traditional SEO tools.

Panoramata is designed for e-commerce brands and agencies that need real-time competitive intelligence across all channels.

Panoramata is designed for e-commerce brands and agencies. It helps centralize and simplify monitoring competitors' digital marketing strategies across all channels.

Unlike other traditional tools, Panoramata monitors competitors' emails, ads, SMS, landing pages, and social media in one platform.

This allows businesses to stay informed about their competitors' marketing moves.

Key features include:

1. Real-time competitor tracking: Get instant updates on website changes, catalogs, and landing pages.

No need to subscribe to newsletters or manually track - Panoramata's searchable database gives you access to over 3 million collected emails, ads, and more from top e-commerce brands, so you can find what you need with a simple search.

2. Funnel tracking: Monitor how competitors change their landing pages and merchandising strategies over time to gain insight into how they improve conversion rates.

3. Benchmarks and Insights: Compare your performance to the competition with detailed benchmarks on email strategies, ad performance, domain rankings, and traffic data.

These insights help you understand where you stand and provide inspiration for refining your marketing efforts.

4. Curated content collections: Browse marketing content grouped by seasonal events like Black Friday and Christmas to find inspiration for your next campaign, all in one place.

5. Shareable lists: Create swipe files by saving and organizing competitor content, then share these collections with your team to collaborate on new ideas.

Its focus on e-commerce sets Panoramata apart from tools like Semrush, Ahrefs, or even SimilarWeb.

While other platforms only track email or SEO keywords, Panoramata offers a full suite by monitoring ads, trends, landing pages, and real-time updates.

This makes it a cost-effective solution for agencies and brands looking for comprehensive competitive intelligence.

Pricing

Panoramata offers three pricing tiers to accommodate different business needs, all billed monthly:

• Startup: Access to up to 6 months of historical data and track up to 20 brands
• Professional: Access up to 3 years of historical data and track unlimited brands
• Advanced: Access unlimited historical data and track unlimited brands
• Enterprise: Contact the support for more info

Each pricing plan is designed to meet the needs of different business sizes and competitive intelligence requirements.

2. Semrush

Semrush is a leading digital marketing toolkit for businesses looking to improve their online visibility and content marketing strategies.

With a wide range of tools covering SEO, PPC, content marketing, and social media management, Semrush allows users to monitor their performance and gain insight into competitors' strategies.

Key features include

• Keyword Research: Discover and track high-value keywords to improve your search rankings.
• Competitor Analysis: Uncover organic and paid strategies, including top-performing keywords and ads.
• Backlink analysis: Track backlinks to analyze and optimize link-building strategies.
• PPC Insights: Dive into competitors' paid search campaigns to identify key ad copy and bidding strategies.
• Content Optimization: With its content tools, create SEO-friendly articles that drive traffic.

Semrush is popular for its comprehensive data, user-friendly interface, and ability to integrate with platforms like Google Analytics and Google Ads, making it a complete solution for digital marketers.

Pricing

It offers several subscription tiers starting at $139.95/month and scaling up with additional features and user permissions.

3. Ahrefs

Ahrefs is an SEO powerhouse known for its world-class backlink analysis and comprehensive SEO insights.

It's designed for marketers, content creators, and SEO specialists who want to optimize their website's organic traffic and outperform competitors in search rankings.

Key features include:

• Site Explorer: Analyze competitor websites for organic traffic, backlinks, and ranking keywords.
• Keyword Explorer: Find high-traffic keywords and filter by keyword difficulty, search volume, and related terms for better results.

• Backlink Analysis: Get extensive data on referring domains, anchor text, and backlink profiles.
• Content Gap Analysis: Identify content topics that competitors rank for and that you miss to fill the content gap and expand your SEO reach.
• Site Audit: Detect technical SEO issues on your site and get recommendations for improving your site's overall search engine performance.

Ahref’s intuitive interface and real-time updates give users a clear picture of their SEO performance and that of their competitors.

Pricing

Pricing starts at $199/month for the Lite plan and scales up with additional features and higher limits.

Which Competitor Analysis Tool Should You Use?

Semrush and Ahrefs are excellent for SEO and digital marketing analytics, but their strengths differ.

Panoramata is a better choice for brands seeking real-time competitor tracking tools.

• Choose Panoramata if you need real-time, multi-channel competitor tracking, especially for SaaS, B2B, e-commerce brands, or agencies focused on ads, emails, and landing pages.
• Choose Semrush for a comprehensive marketing toolkit covering SEO, PPC, content, and social media.
• Choose Ahrefs if your primary focus is deep SEO research, backlink analysis, and content gap discovery.

Ready to start your own competitive analysis? Grab your free competitive analysis template below. If you’d like to learn more about Panoramata, book a demo with us or take it out for a spin by signing up here.

FAQ

1. What is the main difference between Semrush and Ahrefs? 

Semrush offers a comprehensive set of tools for SEO, PPC, and content marketing, while Ahrefs focuses more on SEO, especially backlink analysis. Both are powerful, but your choice depends on whether you need an all-in-one marketing tool or a more SEO-focused solution.

2. Which tool is better for competitor analysis, Semrush or Ahrefs? 

Both tools provide extensive competitor analysis features, but Panoramata offers a better way to help you take strategic decisions for your own company, based on all the different marketing data they can gather about your competitors. Semrush excels in keyword research and paid search insights, while Ahrefs is renowned for its backlink tracking and content gap analysis. Depending on your strategy, either can effectively support competitive benchmarking.

3. Is Semrush or Ahrefs more beginner-friendly?  

Both softwares can get quite complicated if you’re not a marketing expert. Semrush has a good interface with various tutorials and guided workflows, making it a bit more accessible for beginners. Ahrefs, while highly powerful, might require more familiarity with SEO concepts, though it also offers extensive educational resources. Panoramata has a user-fiendly interface accessible for anyone, whether you’re already familiar with marketing concepts or not.