What Is a UX Competitive Analysis & How To Conduct One

A user experience (UX) competitive analysis helps you understand how your website stacks up against competitors—and why that matters for conversions. Every day, customers compare online shopping experiences—often without realizing it. When a competitor makes it faster or easier to complete a task, that small edge can be enough to win the sale.

Conducting a UX competitive analysis can give you clarity on how your UX design influences the tasks you want users to complete on your website, from browsing to conversion and sales. With that clarity, you can make targeted changes that improve efficiency and strengthen your competitive position. Read on to learn how to identify competitors, analyze their task flows, evaluate usability, and turn your findings into actionable improvements. 

What is a UX competitive analysis?

A UX competitive analysis examines how competing websites help or hinder users completing key tasks like signing up for a newsletter, making a purchase, or submitting a contact form. 

This process involves comparing your direct and indirect competitors, documenting usability issues across your task flows, and deciding whether the features on your site make completing tasks easier or harder. 

A UX competitive analysis isn’t looking at visual design, per se, but rather how the features of your site (navigation systems, information design, etc.) work to support your business goals. The analysis will give you data you can use to make targeted UX changes. Analysis tools like user research, heuristic evaluation (reviews that check against established best practices), and usability testing can help you see how users interact with your competitors’ websites, noting where things work and where they don’t. 

For example, a competitor might have a frictionless path from when a user lands on an ecommerce page to the actual sale, a process you can apply to your own site. On the other hand, visitors to competitor sites might have trouble finding and completing a contact form, leading to lost sales. Insights like these can show you where to streamline or simplify your own user paths.

Reasons to perform a UX competitive analysis

• See how users complete tasks
• Understand your competitors
• Spot recurring usability issues
• Document strengths and weaknesses

A UX competitor analysis gives you a clearer picture of how well your current experience serves users compared with others in your space. When you understand how people complete tasks on different sites, you can spot friction early, understand user expectations, and make informed design decisions that strengthen your own UX design.

See how users complete tasks

Your competitors already provide a solution to your potential users, who may want to compare service plans, filter products, or sign up for services. Understanding those customer journeys in greater detail gives you opportunities to reduce friction in your own user experience so you can better serve your shared audience. 

Understand your competitors

Direct competitors offer the same products and services as you. Indirect competitors offer different products or services but target a similar audience, and therefore often use a similar UX design. Analyzing both types of competitors gives you a clear view of interaction patterns across a wider swath of potential users—helping you spot design conventions your audience already expects. 

Spot recurring usability issues

A thorough UX analysis will help you spot the usability issues that many competing sites share, like confusing labels, hidden actions, too many clicks or steps, or limited or delayed feedback opportunities. A UX competitive analysis can help you identify these patterns early so you don’t replicate them. When you see an issue crop up across multiple sites, that’s a prime opportunity to design a cleaner, more intuitive alternative for a market advantage. 

Document strengths and weaknesses

Many of us know when a site feels confusing, but a solid UX competitor analysis makes sure the reasons why are clear, breaking down the user flows step by step. You’ll want to track aspects like clarity of labels, the number of clicks needed to complete a task, where users hesitate or get lost, and whether the next action in the user flow is obvious. This clear analysis will help you make better UX design decisions going forward. 

How to perform a UX competitive analysis

• Identify competitors
• Compare features
• Analyze task flows
• Evaluate usability
• Benchmark performance
• Gather user feedback and research
• Synthesize your findings

A thorough UX competitive analysis breaks your competitive research into clear categories so you can compare competitor experiences consistently. When you examine features, task flows, usability, and user behavior through the same lens, you can more easily spot patterns that shape user expectations and find opportunities to strengthen your own UX.

Identify competitors

Begin your analysis by identifying your direct competitors—those businesses that offer the same products or services and solve the same problems for your audience. Next, list indirect competitors, which offer different products or solutions to the same audience. Both direct and indirect competitors shape user expectations, but indirect competitors do so through similar task flows rather than similar offerings, giving you a clearer picture of the competitive landscape. Note the specific tasks each competitor supports, so you have a clear baseline to compare across sites. 

Start by listing businesses your customers mention during sales conversations, in reviews, or on social media. Then use tools like Google search results, Similarweb, or industry directories to uncover additional competitors. Keep a short list of five to 10 competitors so your analysis stays focused and manageable.

Compare features

Document the main website features each competitor includes as they relate to the user experience. Note whether each feature is easy to understand and use at a glance. This focus will help keep you centered on what matters: how users move through the site. 

To do this, manually review each competitor’s site. Then, create a spreadsheet of the features that appear on core pages, such as product pages, collection pages, or checkout. As you scan the page, look for common UX elements—like search bars, filters, size guides, product badges, image galleries, variant selectors, or pop-ups—and note what each feature does and how easy it is to understand or use at a glance. Keep this focused on what appears on the page itself; you’ll evaluate how these features perform across a full task flow in the next step.

Analyze task flows

Document the steps needed to complete a core task within a competitor’s site. Track clicks, decision points, points of confusion, and those moments where users have to backtrack or guess what to do next. Putting these flows side by side will show friction and help identify where your own UX design can improve, streamline, and simplify the experience so you can build a competitive advantage. 

To map these flows, pick one key task—such as finding a product, adding an item to cart, or signing up for a newsletter—and manually complete it on each competitor’s site. Write down each step in a simple list or numbered outline, noting every click, pause, or moment of uncertainty. 

Use your own experience as the first indicator of where the flow feels smooth or where it slows you down; these early impressions help surface obvious friction points before you validate them with users later. If helpful, record your screen using a tool like Loom so you can replay tricky parts. Then compare your lists side by side to see where competitors reduce steps or make the experience feel simpler—as well as where they introduce extra effort or unnecessary detours.

Evaluate usability

Perform a basic heuristic review, checking the key tasks for clear labels, predictable actions, visible next steps, and timely feedback (such as instant button responses or confirmation messages). Document any moment you hesitate, backtrack, or need to reread something so you can compare patterns across competitor sites.

When you’re ready to review usability in detail, a simple usability checklist is a good way to review each competitor site, focusing on common heuristics like clarity, consistency, and feedback. Manually walk through the same task on each site and look for issues such as unclear labels, hidden controls, inconsistent patterns, or missing feedback. Use screenshots or brief notes to capture any problem areas so you can compare them easily later. 

You’ll often capture task-flow insights and usability issues during the same walkthrough—the difference is simply what you’re looking for at each step. Task-flow analysis focuses on the sequence of steps a user takes to complete an action, while usability evaluation examines how clear and intuitive each individual step feels.

Benchmark performance

Measuring each website’s key tasks against the same criteria helps you see which experiences make it easier for users to complete tasks—and which ones block progress. Common benchmarks include the number of steps needed per task, the number of clicks or interactions required to progress, the task success rate (you can measure this after the next step when you gather feedback from other users), where users get stuck, and overall time to completion. 

Complete each core task a couple of times per competitor to confirm your results are consistent. Create a simple table or spreadsheet and log the steps, clicks, abandonment points, and completion times side by side. In this context, benchmarking means comparing competitors to each other using the same criteria—not measuring them against an industry average.

Focus on clear, measurable differences—such as a site that finishes a task in half the clicks or one that consistently causes delays—so you can quickly see which competitors feel fast and predictable versus slow and confusing.

Gather user feedback and research

Your own usability testing is valuable, but you’ll want to find other users to run through the same tasks you’ve defined on the competitor sites as part of your broader UX research. This step comes after performance benchmarking so you can see whether the patterns you observed hold true for real users—and uncover issues numbers alone can’t fully explain. 

Have your users think aloud so you can see where their expectations don’t match what the interface presents—where they pause, scan for missing information, misinterpret a button, or choose an unexpected path. 

Recruit a few users from your customer base, social media audience, or email list. You can also use a research platform like Respondent or dscout. Give each person the same task to complete on every competitor site and ask them to talk through what they’re thinking as they go. Take note of where they hesitate, make wrong guesses, or look confused. 

Even informal tests with friends or colleagues can reveal meaningful friction points—any fresh set of eyes can help you spot issues you might miss on your own. 

Synthesize your findings 

After reviewing these elements, teams typically pull their findings into a simple synthesis framework—often a SWOT analysis. This brings everything together in one place, helping you see strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats at a glance.

From here, you can prioritize which UX improvements to tackle first. A competitor’s strength might reveal a gap in your own experience worth closing. A shared weakness across the market might signal an opportunity to stand out. The goal is to turn observations into a shortlist of changes that directly support your business goals. 

You can build a SWOT analysis using any lightweight tool, such as a Google Doc, Notion page, or a visual whiteboard like Miro or FigJam.