Market analysis · 13 min read · Updated 1 Aug 2026
Competitive Landscape Template (Free Competitive Landscape Analysis)
A blank competitive landscape you can fill in today, plus the guidance for what belongs in each field. It covers the whole field rather than the three vendors you meet in deals, because the players that reshape a market are usually the ones nobody put on the map.
Copy pastes straight into Google Sheets or Excel with the columns intact. Downloads are free with a work email.
The competitive landscape template
This is exactly what you get when you copy or download. Blank fields are yours to fill in; each table ships with one example row to show the pattern, which you delete.
Market definition
Fill this in first, and expect it to be the hardest block. Every later row depends on where you drew this boundary.
- The market, as we define itThe job the buyer is hiring a product to do, not a category name
- Decision this informsThe choice this landscape is meant to unblock
- Segments we are splitting bySize, industry, region or buying motion
- Who is deliberately out of scopeAnd the reason, so a reader does not assume you missed them
- OwnerOne named person, not a team
- Date completed and next reviewWhen it was verified, and when it gets refreshed
1. The player map
First row is an example, delete it. Include indirect, replacement and potential competitors, not only the products you meet in deals.
| Player | Type | What they sell | Who they serve | Source (link + date) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ExampleAcme Analytics Pro | Direct | Competitive intelligence platform | Mid-market ops teams, 50-200 seats | Homepage, 12 Mar |
2. Segment leadership
First row is an example, delete it. A landscape with one leader is almost always a landscape drawn too coarsely. Different segments usually have different winners.
| Segment | Who buys, and what they weigh most | Who leads today | Why they lead | Where we sit |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ExampleMid-market SaaS, 50-200 seats | Ops lead; speed to first value | Us | Setup in days rather than weeks | Leading, but narrowly |
3. Positioning axes
First row is an example, delete it. Pick two axes the buyer actually chooses on. To plot this visually, use the free interactive positioning map linked below.
| Player | Axis 1 position | Axis 2 position | Quadrant they occupy | Evidence for the placement |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ExampleAcme Analytics Pro | Broad suite | High setup effort | Broad and heavy | Their onboarding docs + 3 reviews |
4. Scale and momentum
First row is an example, delete it. Record observable signals rather than market share percentages you cannot source. Direction of travel matters more than current size.
| Player | Scale signal | Momentum signal | Direction of travel | Source (link + date) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ExampleAcme Analytics Pro | ~180 staff, Series B | 22 open enterprise sales roles | Moving up-market | Careers page + funding release, 12 Mar |
5. Forces shaping the market
First row is an example, delete it. The five rows below follow Porter's five forces. Replace the strength and trend columns with what you can actually observe in your market.
| Force | What it looks like in this market | Strength | Trend | Evidence |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ExampleThreat of new entrants | Adjacent workflow vendors adding competitor tracking | Rising | Worsening for us | Two launches in the last six months |
6. Whitespace and unmet needs
First row is an example, delete it. This is the section that makes a landscape worth building rather than reading. Whitespace with no evidence behind it is wishful thinking.
| Unmet need or underserved segment | Evidence it exists | Who serves it today | Why it is still open | How hard it would be for us |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ExampleTeams that need relevance filtering, not more alerts | Complaint shared across all four leading tools | Nobody convincingly | Hard problem, weak incentive to fix | Aligned with what we already do |
7. Watch list
First row is an example, delete it. Players and developments that are not threats today but would change the map if they moved. Each needs a trigger, not a feeling.
| Watch item | Type | Why it could matter | Trigger that escalates it | Where we check |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ExampleLarge CRM vendor | Potential entrant | Distribution we cannot match | They ship or acquire competitor tracking | Their changelog and acquisitions page |
8. So what: decisions and owners
First row is an example, delete it. A landscape that ends in a picture changes nothing. Every row needs a person and a date.
| Finding | What we will do | Owner | By when | How we will know it worked |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ExampleNo player owns relevance filtering | Lead positioning with signal relevance rather than coverage | Marie, PMM | 30 Apr | Relevance appears in more inbound demo requests |
How to fill in your competitive landscape
How to define the market before mapping the competitive landscape
This block is short and it decides everything. Draw the boundary too narrowly and you produce a map of three vendors that misses the substitute quietly winning most of your deals. Draw it too widely and you produce a poster with forty logos that supports no decision at all. The test is whether the boundary matches how your buyer thinks about their options, not how your category thinks about itself.
The market, as we define it
Write it as the job being hired for, not the category label: "how mid-market product marketing teams keep track of what competitors are doing" rather than "competitive intelligence software". The job framing is what brings spreadsheets and manual processes onto the map, and they are usually a larger competitor than any vendor.
Decision this informs
Name the question: "Which segment do we build for next?" or "Is the category consolidating around suites?" A landscape built without a decision becomes a slide that gets reused for two years without being re-verified.
Segments we are splitting by
Choose the split that changes who wins: company size, industry, region, or self-serve versus sales-led. Pick one primary split. Two make the map unreadable and three make it a database.
Who is deliberately out of scope
State it explicitly with the reason: "Enterprise-only vendors above 2,000 seats: no pipeline overlap." This single line is the difference between a reader trusting your coverage and a reader assuming you did not know about someone.
Owner and dates
One named person, the date the claims were verified, and the next review. Landscapes decay silently: nothing in the document changes when the market does, which is precisely why the date has to be visible.
How to fill in the player map in a competitive landscape
Most landscape documents are really a list of the three or four products that show up in deals. That is a competitive analysis, not a landscape. The point of this section is to force the wider field onto the page, including the options your buyer considers that your sales team never sees, because those are where category shifts come from.
Player
The product, at the level you meet it. If a company sells several and you only ever compete with one, name that one and note the parent.
Type
Use four values. Direct: a similar product to the same buyer. Indirect: solves the same problem differently. Replacement: what they use instead of buying anything, most often a spreadsheet, a manual process or an internal build. Potential: an adjacent player who could enter. The replacement row is the one teams skip, and "no decision" is frequently the outcome that beats you most often.
What they sell
One line, in their framing: "competitive intelligence platform". Keep it short. Depth belongs in the competitor profile this row should link to, not here.
Who they serve
Segment and deal shape: "mid-market ops teams, 50-200 seats". Read their case study titles and customer logos rather than their about page, which describes ambition rather than reality.
Source (link + date)
Link and date every row. In six months this column tells you which rows to re-check first, and it is the reason a refresh takes an hour rather than a week.
How many rows
Eight to fifteen for most markets. Fewer and you are describing your deals rather than the market; more and every row gets one line and the map stops discriminating between players.
How to fill in segment leadership
A landscape that names a single overall leader is almost always drawn too coarsely. Markets are rarely won uniformly: one player leads with enterprise buyers, another owns self-serve, and a third quietly dominates one industry. This section is where a landscape stops being a picture and starts telling you where you can actually win.
Segment
Concrete enough to recognise in a deal: "mid-market SaaS, 50-200 seats", not "the mid-market". Four to six segments is usually the useful range.
Who buys, and what they weigh most
Both halves matter: "ops lead; speed to first value". The buyer and the criterion together explain the leadership answer, and the criterion is the part that changes when a segment flips.
Who leads today
Answer honestly, including the segments where the answer is not you. A landscape in which you lead everywhere will not be believed by anyone who has sat in a losing deal, and it discredits the sections they cannot check.
Why they lead
The mechanism, in one line: "deeper reporting for teams with a dedicated analyst". If you cannot state why, the leadership claim is an impression and should be marked as one.
Where we sit
Plain language: "leading, but narrowly", "credible challenger", "not present". "Not present" is a legitimate and useful answer, and pretending otherwise is how teams end up funding a segment they were never in.
How to choose positioning axes for a competitive landscape
The two-by-two is the most recognised form of a competitive landscape and the most frequently misused. Its value comes entirely from the axes, and the common mistake is choosing axes on which you happen to score well. The right test is whether a buyer would recognise both axes as things they genuinely traded off. To plot this visually, the free interactive positioning map linked below does the drawing.
Choosing the axes
Pick two criteria from real buying conversations: "broad suite versus focused tool" against "heavy setup versus fast setup". Avoid axes where one end is obviously worse, such as "good versus bad support": nobody positions themselves at the bad end, so the map has one populated corner and no information.
Axis positions
Use short labels rather than invented scores: "broad suite", "high setup effort". A number implies a precision you do not have, and a reader will ask how you calculated it.
Quadrant they occupy
Name the quadrant in words: "broad and heavy". Naming the quadrants is what makes the map arguable, and a map nobody can argue with has not said anything.
Evidence for the placement
Every placement needs a basis: "their onboarding docs + 3 reviews". Unsourced placements are how these maps become internal opinion drawn as fact, then presented to a board.
Make more than one map
The strongest use of this section is two or three maps with different axis pairs. If your advantage only appears on one pairing, that is a finding about how narrow the advantage is, and it is better learned here than in a deal.
The empty corner is the point
Look at where nobody sits and ask whether that is whitespace or a place nobody wants to be. Both answers are useful, and the second one is more common than optimistic strategy decks suggest.
How to fill in scale and momentum
Teams want market share percentages here and almost never have a defensible source for them. Published share figures for most software categories are either analyst estimates behind a paywall or vendor marketing. The honest alternative is better anyway: record observable scale signals and, more importantly, direction of travel. A smaller competitor accelerating matters more than a larger one standing still.
Scale signal
Something observable: headcount from public profiles, funding raised, published customer counts, review volume on a major site. Name the measure so it can be re-run identically next quarter.
Momentum signal
The strongest one available is hiring: "22 open enterprise sales roles". Job postings reveal strategy months before websites do, and they are public. Review velocity and release cadence work as secondary signals.
Direction of travel
One line: "moving up-market", "consolidating into a suite", "flat, maintaining". This is the column a reader actually uses, and it is the one that ages best.
Source (link + date)
Every signal gets one. If you use an estimate from a third party, name the third party and the date, and mark it as an estimate rather than a measurement.
If you must estimate share
Say what it is built from and give a range: "roughly 15-20%, derived from published customer counts, order-of-magnitude only". A sourced range is defensible; a precise unsourced percentage will be quoted back at you in a board meeting and will not survive it.
How to fill in the forces shaping the market
The five rows follow Porter's five forces: rivalry among existing competitors, threat of new entrants, threat of substitutes, bargaining power of buyers, and bargaining power of suppliers. Used as a checklist it is genuinely useful, because it catches pressures that a player map cannot show. Used as a scoring exercise it becomes a homework assignment. Fill the middle column with what you can observe in your market, and leave a force out with a note if it is not material.
Rivalry among existing competitors
How the current players actually fight: "discounting on multi-year deals", "feature parity within two quarters". The observable is what matters, not an intensity rating.
Threat of new entrants
What the real barrier is, and whether it is falling: "adjacent workflow vendors adding competitor tracking". In software the barrier is usually distribution rather than technology, which is why a large platform adding a mediocre version of your product is more dangerous than a good startup.
Threat of substitutes
The non-product ways buyers solve the problem: a spreadsheet, a manual weekly review, an agency, or deciding to tolerate it. This is the row that connects back to the replacement competitors in the player map, and it is usually the strongest force in a young category.
Bargaining power of buyers
Look for concentration and switching cost: "low switching cost, annual contracts, procurement involved above 100 seats". If your buyers can leave cheaply, that constrains pricing more than any competitor does.
Bargaining power of suppliers
For software this often means infrastructure, data sources, model providers or a platform you depend on for distribution. It is frequently marked not material, which is a legitimate answer, but write the line rather than deleting the row so the next reader knows it was considered.
Strength and trend
Keep it to plain words: rising, steady, falling, and whether it is getting better or worse for you. A number here implies a model you do not have.
How to fill in whitespace and unmet needs
Whitespace is the reason to build a landscape rather than read one. It is also the section most likely to become wishful thinking, because an empty space on a map is not the same as an opportunity. Every row needs evidence that buyers want the thing, and an honest answer to why it is still unserved. Most whitespace is empty for a reason.
Unmet need or underserved segment
Stated as the buyer would: "teams that need relevance filtering, not more alerts". Needs, not features. A feature nobody has built is not automatically a need nobody has met.
Evidence it exists
Something outside your own conviction: review complaints, lost-deal reasons, support requests, search demand. Our study of 500 verified G2 reviews of the four leading competitive intelligence tools found irrelevant alerting was the one complaint shared by all four at material frequency, which is the shape of evidence this column is asking for.
Who serves it today
Be specific, including "nobody convincingly" or "a manual process". If a player already serves it well, it is not whitespace, and it belongs in the segment table instead.
Why it is still open
The most important column and the one usually left blank. Common honest answers: the problem is hard, the segment is too small to fund, incumbents have no incentive to cannibalise, or regulation makes it unattractive. If the only answer is "nobody has thought of it", be suspicious.
How hard it would be for us
Relative to what you already do: "aligned with what we already do" or "would require a different sales motion". Whitespace that requires becoming a different company is not an opportunity, it is a distraction with a nice diagram.
How to fill in the watch list
The watch list holds what is not a threat today but would redraw the map if it moved. Its purpose is to convert vague anxiety into specific, checkable triggers. Without triggers, a watch list is a place where worries go to be forgotten, and the entrant everybody vaguely worried about arrives unannounced anyway.
Watch item
Name it: a specific adjacent vendor, an open-source project, a regulatory change, a platform policy. "AI" is not a watch item; "our two largest competitors shipping assistant integrations" is.
Type
Potential entrant, substitute, regulation, platform shift, consolidation. The type suggests where to check and how often.
Why it could matter
The mechanism, in one line: "distribution we cannot match". If you cannot describe how it would actually reach you, it is background noise and belongs off the list.
Trigger that escalates it
A specific, observable event: "they ship or acquire competitor tracking". When the trigger fires, the item moves into the player map and into the next report. This is what makes a watch list operational rather than decorative.
Where we check
The source and the cadence: "their changelog and acquisitions page, monthly". A watch item with no check is a note, and notes do not fire.
How to fill in the decisions section of your competitive landscape
Landscape documents have the worst ratio of effort to change of any competitive artifact. They take a week, they look impressive, and they end in a picture. This block is what converts the map into things someone owns. If nothing here changes as a result of the mapping, the honest conclusion is that the market did not need mapping this quarter.
Finding
Traceable to a section above: "no player owns relevance filtering". If a finding cannot be pointed to on the map, it came from somewhere else and should be sourced there.
What we will do
A concrete move: "lead positioning with signal relevance rather than coverage". Landscape decisions are usually positioning, segment focus or roadmap sequencing, and all three are specific enough to write down.
Owner
A named person: "Marie, PMM". Strategy findings assigned to leadership as a group are the ones that reappear, unchanged, in next year's version of this document.
By when
A real date. For positioning changes, the date the new messaging ships, not the date the decision is made, so the row can be closed against something observable.
How we will know it worked
Something you can check: "relevance appears in more inbound demo requests". Landscape decisions are slower to show results than tactical ones, so choose a leading indicator and say that is what it is.
Three to five rows
A landscape producing fifteen decisions has produced none. The map's job is to narrow the field of possible moves, and a long list means it did not do its job.
Sourcing and upkeep: keeping a competitive landscape from going stale
These rules apply to every section above. Competitive landscape documents fail in a characteristic way: they are built once with real effort, presented well, and then reused for two years while the market moves underneath them. The structure is rarely the problem. The boundary, the evidence and the refresh are.
The boundary is the biggest source of error
More landscape analyses are wrong because of where the line was drawn than because of anything inside it. Re-ask at each refresh whether the market you defined still matches how buyers frame their options, and be willing to redraw it rather than adding rows to the old shape.
Include what buyers consider, not what your sales team meets
Indirect options, internal builds and doing nothing belong on the map. They are invisible to a pipeline-based view and they routinely take more deals than any named vendor.
Never publish an unsourced market share number
Give observable signals and a direction instead, or an explicitly labelled range with its basis. A precise share figure with no methodology is the single fastest way to lose a strategy discussion, because the first question will be where it came from.
Separate observation from interpretation
"22 open enterprise sales roles" is an observation. "They are moving up-market" is an interpretation. Keep both, mark which is which, and name what would confirm the interpretation so the next refresh can check it.
Refresh on triggers, not only on a calendar
Twice a year as a floor, and immediately on a funding round, an acquisition, a new entrant or a visible repositioning. Those four events invalidate more of the map than six months of ordinary drift.
Keep the previous version
The difference between this landscape and the last one is usually more decision-useful than either on its own. A map that has never changed is not evidence of a stable market; it is usually evidence that nobody re-checked it.
How to roll out your competitive landscape
- 1Copy or download the blank template. Use Copy to paste it straight into Google Sheets or Excel with the columns intact, or download the CSV, Notion or PDF version.
- 2Define the market as a job, not a category. Write what the buyer is hiring a product to do. This is what brings spreadsheets, manual processes and doing nothing onto the map, and they take more deals than most teams admit.
- 3Delete the example rows. Each table ships with one example row so the pattern is obvious. Remove it before you circulate the landscape.
- 4List eight to fifteen players across all four types. Direct, indirect, replacement and potential. A map of only the products you meet in deals is a competitive analysis, not a landscape.
- 5Split leadership by segment. A landscape with a single overall leader is drawn too coarsely. Different segments usually have different winners, and that is where the actionable finding lives.
- 6Choose positioning axes a buyer would recognise. Both ends of each axis must be a legitimate choice. Draw two or three different pairings rather than one, and use the free positioning map tool to plot them.
- 7Give every whitespace row an honest reason it is still open. Most empty space on a map is empty for a reason. If the only explanation is that nobody thought of it, be suspicious.
- 8Finish with three to five owned decisions. Positioning, segment focus or roadmap sequencing, each with a named person and a date. A landscape that ends in a picture changes nothing.
Competitive landscape FAQ
What is a competitive landscape?
A competitive landscape is a structured view of every option a buyer has for solving the problem your product solves: direct competitors, indirect alternatives, replacements such as spreadsheets or internal builds, and potential entrants who could arrive. It also covers how the market is segmented, who leads where, and which forces are reshaping it. The defining difference from a competitor list is that it includes options your sales team never meets in a deal.
What is another word for competitive landscape?
Competitive environment, market landscape, competitive arena and market map are all used for roughly the same thing. "Competitive environment" tends to appear in academic and strategy contexts, "market map" usually implies the visual output rather than the underlying analysis, and "competitive landscape" is the common term in product marketing. The differences are conventional rather than substantive, so pick one term and use it consistently inside your organisation.
How do you write a competitive landscape?
Define the market as the job your buyer is hiring a product to do, and say explicitly who is out of scope. List eight to fifteen players across four types: direct, indirect, replacement and potential. Split leadership by segment rather than declaring one overall winner. Place the players on two axes a buyer would genuinely trade off. Record scale and momentum signals rather than unsourced market share. Work through the forces shaping the market, identify whitespace with evidence and an honest reason it is still open, then finish with owned decisions.
What should be included in a competitive landscape analysis?
Eight blocks: the market definition and what it excludes; the player map across all four competitor types; segment leadership; positioning axes; scale and momentum signals; the forces shaping the market; whitespace with evidence; and a decisions block with owners and dates. The two most commonly omitted are replacement competitors, meaning what buyers use instead of buying anything, and the decisions block. The first makes the map wrong; the second makes it pointless.
What is an example of a competitive landscape?
Take competitive intelligence software. The direct players are the established platforms, the indirect ones are broader market intelligence and social listening tools that cover part of the job, the replacement is a spreadsheet maintained by a product marketer plus a set of alerts, and the potential entrants are CRM and workflow vendors with the distribution to bundle a basic version. Segment leadership differs: one player leads enterprise, another leads self-serve, and the spreadsheet still wins most of the mid-market. That last observation is the kind a vendor-only map cannot produce.
What is the difference between a competitive landscape and a competitive analysis?
A competitive analysis goes deep on three to five named competitors you actually meet in deals, comparing them against the buyer's criteria to inform a specific decision. A competitive landscape goes wide: it maps the whole field including alternatives you never face directly, and it is about the shape of the market rather than head-to-head comparison. Use the landscape to decide where to play, and the competitive analysis to decide how to win where you already are.
Should a competitive landscape include indirect competitors?
Yes, and it should also include replacements and potential entrants. Restricting the map to direct competitors is the most common error in landscape analysis, because it mirrors your pipeline rather than your buyer's options. In most categories the largest single competitor is the status quo: a spreadsheet, a manual process, or a decision that the problem is tolerable for now. A landscape that cannot show that is describing your sales process, not your market.
What are the four types of competitive environments?
In economics, market structures are usually grouped into four: perfect competition, with many sellers and an undifferentiated product; monopolistic competition, with many sellers and differentiated products, which is where most software markets sit; oligopoly, with a few dominant sellers; and monopoly, with one. The label is less useful than what it implies about your pricing power. If your market is monopolistically competitive, differentiation and positioning determine your margin, which is a direct argument for keeping the positioning axes section of this template honest.
What is a 2x2 competitive landscape, and what are the quadrants?
A 2x2 places competitors on two axes chosen from the buyer's trade-offs, producing four quadrants. The quadrants have no fixed names: they are defined by whatever axes you chose, which is exactly why the axes matter more than the diagram. The common failure is selecting axes on which you land in the flattering corner, and the reliable test is whether both ends of each axis are a legitimate choice a real buyer might prefer. If one end is obviously worse, the map has one populated corner and tells you nothing. Our free interactive positioning map builds this chart for you.
What are Porter's five forces of the competitive landscape?
Rivalry among existing competitors, threat of new entrants, threat of substitutes, bargaining power of buyers, and bargaining power of suppliers. Michael Porter introduced them in 1979 as a way of explaining why some industries are structurally more profitable than others. In a competitive landscape document they work best as a checklist that catches pressures a player map cannot show, particularly substitutes and buyer power, rather than as a scoring exercise.
Is Porter's five forces still relevant today?
Partly, and it is worth being specific about which parts. The standard criticisms are fair: the model takes a static snapshot of an industry whose boundaries it assumes are stable, it was built for manufacturing-era industries with clear supply chains, and it handles platforms, network effects and complementors poorly, since a partner who makes your product more valuable fits none of the five forces. What survives is the underlying question, which is where profit pools sit and who can capture them. For a software landscape, the two forces that still do real work are substitutes, because the status quo competes with you, and buyer power, because low switching costs constrain pricing more than any rival does. Use it as one checklist among several, not as the analysis.
Is there a Porter's five forces template?
Section 5 of this template is one: five rows, one per force, with columns for what the force looks like in your market, its strength, its trend and the evidence behind that judgement. It is deliberately built as a table rather than the familiar diagram, because the diagram encourages a rating with nothing behind it while a table forces an observation and a source into every row.
What are the three basic competitive strategies?
Porter's generic strategies: cost leadership, differentiation, and focus. Because focus divides into cost focus and differentiation focus, the framework is often presented as four, and Thompson, Strickland and Gamble's strategy textbook extends it to five by adding a best-cost provider strategy. All the variants trace back to the same three. In landscape work the useful application is diagnostic rather than prescriptive: label which strategy each player is actually running, then check whether their recent moves are consistent with it. Inconsistency is usually the earliest visible sign that a competitor is changing direction.
What is the current competitive landscape?
There is no general answer, and any page that offers one is describing a market that is not yours. A landscape is specific to a market definition, a segment split and a date, which is why this template puts all three in the header. What is generally true is that most landscapes are older than their owners think: if the document has no verified date on it and nobody can say what changed since the last version, treat it as historical rather than current.
How many competitors should a competitive landscape include?
Eight to fifteen players for most markets, spread across direct, indirect, replacement and potential. Fewer than eight usually means you have mapped your pipeline instead of your market. More than fifteen and every row gets a single line, which produces a document that looks thorough and separates nothing. If your market genuinely has more players, split it: map the ones that matter in detail and keep the rest as a named watch list.
How often should you update a competitive landscape?
Twice a year as a floor, and immediately after a funding round, an acquisition, a visible repositioning or a new entrant. Those four events change more of the map than six months of ordinary drift. The practical enabler is the source column: if every row carries a link and a date, a refresh takes an hour. If it does not, the refresh takes a week, which means it happens once and the document quietly becomes historical.
How do you present a competitive landscape visually?
Three formats do most of the work. A two-by-two positioning map for the trade-off story, a segment table for who leads where, and a simple grouped list by competitor type for coverage. Resist combining them into one diagram: landscape visuals fail by trying to encode five variables into one chart, which produces something that looks authoritative and cannot be read. Lead the presentation with the decisions block and keep the visuals as support.
Who should own the competitive landscape?
Product marketing usually owns it, with product contributing capability judgements and sales contributing what buyers actually compare against. Strategy or corporate development often owns it in larger organisations. What matters more than the function is that one named person owns the refresh, because a landscape decays silently: nothing in the document changes when the market moves, so nobody notices until a decision is made on a two-year-old map.
Can you build a competitive landscape in Excel or Google Sheets?
Yes, and it is a good fit, since most of this template is tabular. Use Copy above to paste the structure into a sheet with the columns intact, or download the CSV, with one tab per section and a chart tab for the positioning axes. The limits are the usual ones: a spreadsheet never notices a new entrant, and the source column only helps if someone opens the document and re-checks the links.
What are the most common mistakes in competitive landscape analysis?
Five recur. Drawing the market boundary around your product category rather than your buyer's problem. Including only direct competitors, which hides the status quo that wins most deals. Declaring one overall leader instead of splitting by segment. Publishing market share numbers with no defensible source. And ending in a diagram rather than owned decisions, which is why landscape documents are so often admired, filed, and reused unchanged for two years.
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