| name | competitor-analysis |
| description | Compare two or more companies, products, or platforms across pricing, features, positioning, and docs. Use this skill whenever the user says "compare X vs Y", "how does X stack up against Y", "alternatives to X", "competitive landscape of …", "X vs Y vs Z", or asks for a competitor matrix. Uses search to discover competitors when the user only names a category, then scrape for each competitor's homepage, pricing page, and features/docs. Returns a normalized comparison matrix as JSON.
|
| category | Research |
Competitor Analysis
Structured side-by-side comparison of competing products. Designed for search + scrape; no interact needed for typical marketing/pricing pages.
When to use
- User names 2+ companies or products: "compare Vercel, Netlify, Cloudflare Pages"
- User names a category only: "best CDNs for edge functions" — search to discover the top 3–5 players, then analyze
- User asks for alternatives: "what are the alternatives to X?"
- User wants a feature matrix or positioning summary
Do NOT use for single-vendor deep-dives — use deep-research or structured-extraction instead.
Strategy
-
Identify competitors.
- If the user listed them, use that list.
- Otherwise search once:
"top <category> providers 2026" or "<product> alternatives". Pick the 3–5 most-cited.
-
For each competitor, gather three pages:
- Homepage — one-line positioning, target audience
- Pricing page (usually
/pricing or /plans) — tiers, units, free tier, enterprise gate
- Features or product page — top 5–10 capabilities, any standout differentiators
-
Fan out when scale warrants.
- 2–3 competitors: stay in the orchestrator, scrape serially or with parallel tool calls.
- 4+ competitors: use
spawnAgents, one worker per competitor. Each worker gets the 3 URLs above and returns a normalized sub-object.
-
Normalize before formatting.
- Align pricing tiers by role (Free / Pro / Team / Enterprise) even when vendors name them differently.
- Call out where a competitor has a capability the others don't.
- Flag anything missing (e.g. "Enterprise pricing is contact-sales only").
-
Call formatOutput once at the end with the full matrix.
Quick start
await agent.run({
prompt: 'Compare Vercel, Netlify, and Cloudflare Pages on pricing, edge functions, and free tier generosity',
skills: ['competitor-analysis'],
format: 'json',
})
await agent.run({
prompt: 'Compare the top 4 vector databases for production RAG workloads',
skills: ['competitor-analysis'],
format: 'json',
})
Output schema
Every run should produce an object with this shape (add fields as the user's prompt demands):
{
"category": "Edge hosting platforms",
"competitors": [
{
"name": "Vercel",
"url": "https://vercel.com",
"positioning": "Frontend cloud for Next.js and React",
"pricing": [
{ "tier": "Hobby", "price": 0, "unit": "month", "limits": {} },
{ "tier": "Pro", "price": 20, "unit": "seat/month", "limits": {} }
],
"strengths": [],
"weaknesses": [],
"freeTier": true,
"enterpriseContactOnly": false,
"sources": []
}
],
"summary": "One-paragraph takeaway comparing the field.",
"bestFit": {
"budgetConscious": "",
"enterprise": "",
"developer": ""
}
}
Tips
- Pricing pages lie by omission. Always look for overages, egress costs, and seat minimums that show up only in a footnote.
- Marketing copy is noise. Prefer the pricing page and docs over the homepage for factual claims.
- If a scrape returns 404 on
/pricing, search "<vendor> pricing" before guessing another URL — vendors often move these pages.
- Populate
strengths and weaknesses from evidence, not opinion. "Has a built-in KV store (competitor docs do not mention one)" is fair game; "better DX" is not.
- Always include
sources: [...] on every competitor object with the URLs you actually scraped.
See also
