Competitor Analysis Template for Founders, With Evidence Columns

• A competitor analysis template compares your company with competitors on the same dimensions. HubSpot's version has four steps and Carnegie Mellon's slides list 17 questions to ask about each company.
• In the text of the three pages read for this article, none names a column for the source of a claim, its date or a confidence rating. This page adds all three.
• The ledger has nine columns, one row per claim. A four-level confidence rubric (High, Medium, Low, Unknown) sets how much weight each row bears.
• The filled example is a ledger of the three pages behind this article, not market data. Five of its eight rows are High, and all five record only what a page says.

What is competitor analysis, and what does this template add?

That is how HubSpot's template page describes it. The page calls the exercise an essential step in starting a business and one that stays important through the life of the company.

The template here keeps the standard layout, with competitors in columns and dimensions in rows, then changes the unit of work. Each cell becomes a row with its own source, date and confidence, so a number you copied from a pricing page last spring cannot pass for one you checked this week.

What do the pages ranking for this keyword leave out?

In the text of the three pages read for this article, none names a column for the source of a claim, a date or a confidence rating. They tell you what to compare and where to look, but not where to write down how you know. The table shows the match field by field.

The method is simple. A field counts as listed when the extracted text of the page names it. The Figma page extracted to 143 words, most of them comments, so its column says nothing about the template itself.

Three limits apply. The search results also listed Miro, Canva, PandaDoc, Semrush, Notion, Smartsheet and others, which were not read, so this table does not speak for them. HubSpot's downloadable spreadsheet sits behind a contact form and was not opened. And a page can leave a field out of its text and still include it in a file.

Who counts as a competitor?

A competitor is anything your customer uses to solve the problem today, whether or not it resembles your product. The Carnegie Mellon slides put it in those terms: any way the customer is solving the problem now is competition.

The same slides split competitors in two. Direct competitors offer similar products and services. Indirect competitors solve the same problem for the same target market with a different product or service.

For a founder the indirect list is usually the more useful one, because it includes the spreadsheet, the agency and the habit of doing nothing. Put those in the competitor column too. A row for “a spreadsheet kept by the founder” needs the same source, date and confidence as a row for a funded rival.

What are the nine columns of the template?

The ledger has nine columns, and each row holds one checkable claim about one competitor. Copy the header row below into a spreadsheet, then fill one row per claim.

Competitor | Dimension | Claim | Source | Source type | Date seen | Observed or inferred | Confidence | Re-check by

The table explains each column and says where it comes from. The first column and the dimension list draw on the Carnegie Mellon slides, and the evidence columns, four to nine, are Kanso's additions.

Two habits keep the ledger honest. Write the claim as a sentence a stranger could check, and write “Unknown” when you looked and found nothing. An empty cell tells the next reader nothing, while Unknown tells them the search was done.

How do you set the confidence column?

You set it by starting from the kind of source and then lowering it one level if the claim is inferred or outside its re-check window. The rubric below uses four levels, and it is Kanso's suggestion, built on the ranking of sources in Kanso's own content standards and untested on any team's data.

The ranking underneath puts a primary document first, then original data or a named study that states its method, then reputable trade reporting, and last a competitor's or practitioner's article. The rubric is that ranking turned into a column.

One distinction matters more than the rest. Confidence rates the claim you wrote, not the source it came from, so a row that says “the slides state X” can be High while a row that says “X is true of markets” is Low. The filled example below shows both on the same source.

Which dimensions should the rows cover?

The rows should cover the questions that decide whether a buyer picks you or them, and the Carnegie Mellon slides give a ready list. They ask 17 questions about each competitor, from where it is located to whether it is expanding or cutting back, plus an open “other”.

The table groups those 17 questions into ten dimensions. The last two columns are Kanso's suggestions: the kind of source that usually answers the question, and a default re-check window you should change to suit your market.

The same slides list example features to compare, such as price, quality, service, ease of use, security and availability. They add that a full matrix will be messy, and that the matrix in an investor pitch summarizes the strongest competitors on the most important features.

The slides also suggest researching competitors that no longer exist. In the ledger, a closed competitor's row is useful for a different reason: its Re-check by cell can say “never”.

Where do you find each claim, and how much does each source weigh?

You find claims in seven places, and each has a different ceiling on confidence. The Carnegie Mellon slides list the seven: customer discovery interviews, competitors' advertising, competitors' sales brochures, newspapers and magazines, competitors' or comparison websites, online sites that rate products, and your own business and professional network.

HubSpot's page is shorter. It says to find competitor details online, by calling a colleague or through personal experience in the market.

A competitor's own advertising shows the split clearly. It is a primary document, so a row that records what the ad says can be High, but a row that records the ad's promise as fact is Low until something independent backs it.

Interviews deserve their own mention. Threads in r/startups and r/ProductManagement, listed in the research for this page, show founders and product managers asking how to find their competitors and where to start. The Carnegie Mellon slides list customer discovery interviews first, and the customer research sprint shows how to run them in a week.

What does a filled-in competitor analysis look like?

A filled-in ledger looks like the table below, which describes the three pages read for this article. It is a worked example of the template, not market data, and every row is drawn from the extracted text read on 29 October 2026.

Two rows are worth reading closely. Row four is Unknown, because the spreadsheet was never opened and a guess would hide that. Row six is Low even though it was read directly, because the slides state a rule of thumb about price, service and quality and give no evidence for it.

The count follows from the rubric. Of eight rows, five are High, one is Medium, one is Low and one is Unknown, so 5 divided by 8 gives 62.5 percent High. But all five High rows record only what a page says, which is why a High share on its own is a poor measure of how well a market is understood.

How do you use the ledger once it is filled?

You use it by acting on High and Medium rows, verifying Low ones before they go anywhere public, and treating Unknown as a to-do. That rule is Kanso's suggestion, and it is the reason the confidence column exists.

1. Sort by confidence and read the Low and Unknown rows first. Each is either a check to run or a claim to drop.
2. Filter to one dimension and compare competitors on it, so you compare like with like.
3. Pick the strongest competitors and the features that matter most to your buyer. That is the summary the Carnegie Mellon slides suggest for investors.
4. Write your own competitive advantage last. The slides list what can count as an unfair advantage, including deep domain expertise, authority, a unique solution, patents and the ability to scale, and tell you to describe yours.
5. Carry only High and Medium rows into a pitch or a public page, with the source and the date beside each.

The last step matters most if you publish comparisons. Kanso's teardown of ten “X vs Y” pages looks at how those pages earn trust, and the next step after the ledger is the positioning method for early-stage SaaS.

Excel, Word, PDF or slides: which file format should you use?

Use a spreadsheet for the working ledger, because one row per claim needs sorting and filtering. HubSpot offers its template as Excel, Word, PDF, Google Sheets and Google Docs files, as of 29 October 2026, so the format is a matter of habit, not of the template.

A Word or PDF file suits the finished summary that a co-founder or an investor reads. A slide suits the pitch, and the Carnegie Mellon advice applies: show the strongest competitors and the most important features, not the whole matrix. The search results for this query also list slide-template sites such as SlidesCarnival, SlideEgg and Slidesgo, which were not read for this article.

Whatever the format, keep the source and date columns attached to the rows. A summary slide can drop them from view, but the ledger behind it should keep them, so that anyone who asks where a number came from gets an answer.

There is no download file on this page, and none is claimed. Copy the header row into a spreadsheet and the tables above give you the rest.

How much time should a founder spend on this?

Spend a fixed block, then stop, because the ledger exists to support a decision and not to be finished. The research for this page contains no measurement of how long a competitor analysis takes, so any figure here would be a guess.

The concern is real. A thread in r/startups raises the worry that time spent on research is time not spent earning, and it also says you will not know what to do without talking to your target market. Those two points pull in different directions, and the ledger lets you act on both.

• Set a time block before you start and write the end time on the sheet. A founder with no end time keeps adding rows.
• Stop adding competitors when new rows stop changing your decision.
• Spend the last part of the block on customer conversations, since the Carnegie Mellon slides put interviews first among their sources.
• Leave Unknown rows visible instead of filling them with guesses to look finished.

These stop rules are Kanso's suggestion. No source read for this article tests them.

How do you keep the ledger current?

You keep it current by sorting on the Re-check by column and reading only the rows whose date has passed. The dates come from the dimension windows above, which you should shorten for fast-moving markets and lengthen for slow ones.

When you re-read a source, change the Date seen and the claim if it moved, and leave a note in the claim itself, such as “was X, now Y”. A ledger that overwrites without a trace loses the one thing a competitor timeline is good for.

If you would rather have a tool track competitors, Kanso's Competitive Intelligence tracks competitors with sources. The ledger on this page works without it, and is worth keeping as the plain version of what any tool should record. Plans are on the pricing page.

If your competitor information also feeds a brief for a writer, the same discipline applies. The content brief template uses a source log with a claim and a date for each source, which is the same idea at article scale.

What is documented and what is Kanso's analysis?

The facts below come from the named pages as of 29 October 2026, and the judgments are Kanso's. Keep them apart when you decide how far to rely on each.

• Documented: HubSpot describes competitive analysis as assessing the strengths and weaknesses of your company and other companies in your market, and gives a four-step method.
• Documented: HubSpot offers its template in Word, Excel, PDF, Google Sheets and Google Docs, and its page says to enter contact details to download.
• Documented: the Carnegie Mellon slides define direct and indirect competition, list 17 company questions, example features and seven places to find information, and say an investor matrix should summarize the strongest competitors.
• Documented: the Figma community page's extracted text is 143 words, mostly comments.

• Analysis: the nine-column ledger, the grouping of the 17 questions into ten dimensions and the default re-check windows.
• Analysis: the four-level confidence rubric and the confidence ceilings for each place to look.
• Analysis: the claim that three pages read do not name a source, date or confidence column. It rests on extracted text, not on the files themselves.
• Analysis: the use rules and the time-block stop rules.

What this page lacks is a team that used the ledger and a measured result from using it. No test, survey, customer or Kanso data was supplied for this topic, so the page claims none, and it does not show that evidence columns improve a competitor analysis. It also does not cover the McKinsey or Porter frameworks, for which the research held no primary source.

Competitor analysis template: frequently asked questions

Sources

• Free Competitive Analysis Template (Word, Excel, PDF, Google Sheets, Google Docs), HubSpot
• Competitive Analysis (slide deck, undated), Swartz Center for Entrepreneurship, Carnegie Mellon University
• Competitive Analysis Template, Figma Community
• Thread: struggling with competitor analysis, Reddit, r/ProductManagement
• Thread: how to ascertain market competitors, Reddit, r/startups