LinkedIn Competitor Analysis: Tools and a Repeatable Method

November 8, 2026

On LinkedIn, competitor analysis usually means three things: how fast their audience grows, what content earns engagement, and what they advertise. LinkedIn gives you some of this for free. This post covers the free tool, the paid ones, and a scorecard you can build from public data.

Start with LinkedIn's built-in competitor analytics

If you admin a Company Page, open Analytics, then Competitors. From LinkedIn's help page LinkedIn help:

Free Pages can track 1 competitor. Premium Company Pages can track up to 9.
It shows followers (total and new in the period), organic post metrics and engagement rates.
Trending posts show competitors' top original posts from the past 30 days, refreshed daily: 1 competitor on free Pages, up to 3 on Premium.

It is the only tool that shows LinkedIn's own engagement data for competitors. Its limits are the number of competitors and that you can't export everything into your own reports.

Paid tools

Tool	Price (vendor page)	Notes
Rival IQ	Drive $239 a month, 10 companies, 14 days free	Lists LinkedIn Page Analytics pricing
Socialinsider	Adapt $82 a month, up to 20 accounts, 14-day trial	Competitor benchmarking on all plans; competitor accounts count toward the limit pricing
Hootsuite	Standard from $99 per user a month, up to 5 competitors	Professional $199 for up to 20 plans
Sprout Social	Competitor reports from Professional, $299 per seat a month billed yearly	Part of a full suite pricing

Check which networks each tool covers for competitors, not just for your own accounts, before you buy.

The scorecard

Metric	How	Why
Followers and 30-day growth %	Two snapshots, 30 days apart	Momentum
Posts per week	Count over 8 weeks	Effort
Median reactions per post	Median of last 20 posts	Typical result
Reactions per 1,000 followers	median / followers x 1,000	Efficiency across sizes
Comment ratio	comments / reactions	Conversation, not just applause
Format mix	% text, image, document, video	Where they invest
Employee amplification	Do staff reshare? Check a few top posts	Reach that follower counts miss
Active ads	LinkedIn Ad Library	Paid priorities

The method, step by step

Choose 5 competitors and your own Page as the baseline.
Snapshot followers today, then again in 30 days.
Pull 8 weeks of posts per company. Fill the scorecard.
Read the top 5 posts of each company. Write topic, format and hook for each.
Check the Ad Library for each company. LinkedIn keeps ads for one year after their last impression and shows extra detail for EU-targeted ads Ad Library help.
Write three actions: one format to test, one topic to own, one message gap to fill.

LinkedIn engagement is concentrated: a company's top posts are often employee stories, hiring news or a founder's view, not product updates. If that is true for your competitors, it is probably true for you.

Also look beyond the company page. On LinkedIn, founders and executives often reach more people than their company does. Note which competitors have a visible leader posting regularly, and read that person's public posts the same way. You don't need to store anything about them; the goal is to see which topics their audience responds to.

What not to do

Competitor analysis does not need their employees' data. Leave staff lists and personal profiles alone. LinkedIn's User Agreement prohibits scraping and copying profiles section 8.2, and company-level public data answers every question above.

How to do it with ScrapeIO

Use the LinkedIn company API for each company's public page and follower count, the LinkedIn company posts API for their posts, and the LinkedIn ads search API for their ads. Five competitors over 8 weeks usually takes a few dozen calls at 1 credit each, and the same key covers their Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube for a cross-network view.

Sources

Checked on 8 November 2026 from each vendor's own pages. Prices and limits change; follow the links before you decide.

100 free credits, no card. Credits never expire.

Get API key