How To Write a Competitor Analysis as An Intern: 10 Steps
If you're an intern who just got asked to look into "a few competitors" with basically no other direction, you're not alone. It sounds vague on the surface, but underneath it is a fairly mechanical process: figure out who you're actually comparing, decide what matters, and organize what you find so someone else can use it in five minutes instead of fifty.
This guide walks through ten steps for producing a competitor analysis that holds up, from picking the right competitors in the first place to turning your findings into an actual recommendation instead of a pile of screenshots. Whether this is your first internship deliverable or your fifth, the same steps apply.
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This guide covers the 10 steps behind a solid competitor analysis, from picking three to five competitors to turning findings into a recommendation your manager can actually act on. A good competitor analysis compares against a fixed set of criteria, not just a list of interesting facts about other companies. Use the product you're analyzing yourself before writing about it; secondhand impressions are the easiest way to get it wrong. It's useful for any intern handed a research or analysis project with little upfront direction.
Why is competitor analysis often an intern's first real assignment?
A competitor analysis usually gets handed to an intern because it's genuinely useful work that doesn't require deep institutional knowledge to start. You don't need years at the company to look at a competitor's pricing page or read through their reviews; you just need to be methodical about how you look. That combination, real usefulness plus a low barrier to entry, is exactly why it's such a common early assignment.
It's also one of the more common first projects on a program like Ladder Internships, where students get placed on real work at startups and nonprofits and often start by mapping out who else is solving the same problem before proposing anything new. A manager who assigns this isn't testing whether you already know the market; they're testing whether you can build a clear picture of it from scratch. More on that below.
What separates a strong competitor analysis from a weak one?
Most weak competitor analyses fail for the same reason: they read like a collection of trivia about other companies instead of an argument about where your company stands relative to them. A strong one has a point of view, built from research, not just a research summary with no conclusion attached.
The ten steps below take you from an open-ended assignment to a document a manager can actually act on. They're written in order because each one depends on the one before it; skipping a step usually shows up later as a weaker final recommendation.
Step 1: Figure out who your competitors actually are
Start by separating direct competitors (companies solving the same problem the same way) from indirect ones (different approach, same underlying need). Ask your manager who they already have in mind before you start from scratch; they usually have two or three names already, and building from that list is faster than guessing.
Keep the final list short; three to five companies is usually enough. A list of twelve competitors isn't more thorough; it's just harder to compare cleanly, and a manager reading it will lose the thread of which ones actually matter.
Step 2: Pin down what you're comparing them on
Before you open a single competitor's website, decide on your comparison criteria: pricing, core features, target customer, positioning, whatever the actual question calls for. Doing this first keeps you from collecting whatever's easy to find and calling it analysis.
The criteria should come from the actual business question, not a generic template. If the project is about pricing strategy, spend most of your time there. If it's about product gaps, spend it on features and reviews. A tailored criteria list is what separates a useful analysis from a padded one.
Step 3: Start with public information
Company websites, pricing pages, app store listings, and press releases will get you most of the way on the basics. This is also the fastest part of the process, and it's tempting to stop here because it feels complete.
Treat everything from this stage as a starting draft, not a finished picture. Marketing copy describes how a company wants to be seen, not necessarily how the product actually performs, which is exactly why the next few steps matter.
Step 4: Use the product yourself when you can
If a free trial, demo, or public version exists, use it. Sign up, click through the onboarding, do the thing a real customer would do. Firsthand experience surfaces details that a features list on a website will never mention, like how confusing the signup flow is or how long it takes to see any real value.
This step is also where a lot of interns cut corners, since it takes real time. Don't skip it if it's available. Secondhand impressions are the easiest way to get an analysis wrong, and a manager can usually tell the difference between someone who used the product and someone who only read about it.
Step 5: Read customer reviews and social proof
Reviews, forum threads, and social comments reveal what marketing copy won't: actual pain points real users are running into. A company's own website will never tell you their checkout flow is confusing or their support is slow to respond.
Look for patterns across many reviews rather than reacting to one angry comment. A single one-star review might be an outlier, but the same complaint showing up across ten reviews is a real signal worth including in your analysis.
Step 6: Map out pricing and positioning
Put every competitor's pricing tiers side by side, including your own company's if relevant, so the comparison is visible at a glance rather than scattered across separate notes. Note what's included at each tier, not just the headline number.
Then look past the numbers to positioning: who is this company clearly building for, and who are they clearly not building for? A competitor's pricing page and marketing language usually say more about their target customer than any "About us" page will.
Step 7: Write down what they're doing well, honestly
It's tempting to downplay a competitor's strengths so your own company looks better by comparison, but that instinct produces a less useful document, not a more flattering one. A manager needs an honest picture to make good decisions, not a pep talk.
Give credit where it's earned. If a competitor's onboarding is genuinely smoother or their support response time is genuinely faster, say so plainly. An analysis that only finds weaknesses in every competitor reads as biased, and biased research gets trusted less, not more.
Step 8: Write down where they're falling short
This is where the reviews and hands-on testing from earlier steps pay off. Look for recurring gaps: features users keep requesting, complaints that show up again and again, a support process that clearly frustrates people.
Be careful to separate an actual weakness from something that's just different. A competitor charging more isn't automatically a weakness if their product justifies it. The goal here is an accurate read on where they're vulnerable, not a list of anything that looks bad on the surface.
Step 9: Organize the findings into something scannable
Raw notes are not a finished deliverable. Put your findings into a simple, consistent format; a side-by-side table works well, with the same categories repeated for every competitor so a reader can scan across rows instead of hunting through paragraphs.
Consistency matters more than polish at this stage. If you compare pricing, strengths, and weaknesses for one competitor, make sure every competitor gets the same three categories, even when there's less to say about one of them. A gap in the table is still useful information.
Step 10: Turn it into a recommendation, not just a summary
A list of facts about competitors isn't the actual deliverable; the "so what" is. End the document with a short section that says what this all means for your company: a gap worth pursuing, a pricing mismatch worth addressing, a feature everyone else has that you don't.
This is also usually the point where an intern's work gets noticed, since it's the step that takes real judgment rather than just research effort. On a structured program like Ladder Internships, this is exactly the kind of push a dedicated coach gives, moving a student from "here's what I found" to "here's what I'd actually do about it."
How do you present these findings once the analysis is done?
Once the document exists, don't just send it and move on. Walk your manager through it, or at minimum, flag the one or two findings you think matter most, since a busy manager may skim rather than read closely, and the strongest insight in the whole document can get lost if you don't point to it directly.
If you're building this kind of research skill before an internship even starts, a program like Ladder Internships is one way to practice it against a real product instead of a hypothetical case study, since each student works alongside a manager at an actual startup or nonprofit who genuinely uses the research produced. That kind of real feedback loop is hard to replicate on a school assignment graded only by a rubric.
Common questions about writing a competitor analysis as an intern
1. Do I need special software to do this?
No. A simple document or spreadsheet is enough for almost every internship-level competitor analysis. The quality comes from the research and the comparison criteria, not the tool used to present it.
2. How many competitors should I actually include?
Three to five is the usual range. Fewer than that and you may be missing an obvious comparison; more than that and the analysis becomes harder to read and rarely adds proportional insight.
3. What if my manager doesn't tell me what to compare?
Propose your own criteria based on what the project seems to actually need, then confirm it with them in one short message before you start researching. That quick check saves you from redoing work built on the wrong assumptions.
4. What if I can't find much public information on a competitor?
Note the gap directly rather than guessing or leaving it blank. "Limited public pricing information" is a real, useful data point, and it's far better than filling the space with an assumption that turns out to be wrong.