How to present competitor analysis

To present competitor analysis in slides, put the alternatives a customer actually weighs on one slide, including the spreadsheet or supplier they use today, and compare them on the three to six things that decide the purchase. Choose a table when buyers weigh several criteria, a 2x2 when two dimensions genuinely separate the field, and a status quo comparison when nobody is really selling against you. Write your own weakness into the grid, and put the date and source of every price in a caption under it.

Three formats, and when each fits

Almost every competition slide takes one of three shapes. The question page on competitive landscape slides defines them; this section is about choosing between them with real slides in front of you.

The landscape table. Rows are competitors and columns are what a buyer checks. The Series A deck example on this site, for Plumbline, an invented company that gets construction subcontractors paid faster, uses five columns: competitor, pricing, strengths, weaknesses and positioning. Its rows are construction ERP suites at $40K or more a year, invoice factoring at 2.5 to 4% a month, waiver point tools at $99 a month, email and spreadsheets at no cost, and Plumbline at $390 to $1,900 a month. A table wins when the buyer weighs several criteria at once, which describes most business purchases.

The 2x2. Two axes, four quadrants, names inside each. The investment memo deck example places an invented industrial coatings business on breadth of offering against depth of expertise, with quadrants called Specialists, Leaders, Laggards and Generalists. It fits when two dimensions really decide who wins the work. It fails when the axes were picked afterwards so the company sits alone in the top right corner.

The status quo comparison. Two columns: what the customer does today and what changes. The accelerator application deck example compares Chalkline, an invented reading software company, with paper reading records and a trained specialist the school may not be able to fund. No vendor is named, because for most primary schools the competitor is the current routine.

Michael Porter’s Harvard Business Review article on the five competitive forces makes the point that applies to all three: managers tend to define competition too narrowly, as if only today’s direct rivals counted, when customers, suppliers, potential entrants and substitute products shape the market too. That is why email and spreadsheets earns a row in the Series A table.

Choosing the rows or the axes

The criteria are the argument. Choose them from how the buyer decides, not from the features you are proudest of.

Start with the questions a buyer asks in a first call and turn each into a row or a column. The SaaS pitch deck example, for Quillstack, an invented document control product for accounting firms, compares four options on price per seat, client portal, audit trail and e-sign, the four things an audit partner checks before buying. It stops there. A fifth feature column is usually one only the seller cares about.

For a 2x2, test the axes by asking whether a real competitor could score high on one and low on the other. Breadth and depth pass: the memo lists a defence only finisher as deep and narrow, and fabricators with a spray booth as broad and shallow. Price and quality usually fail, because nobody describes themselves as expensive and poor. Label both ends of each axis, so nobody reads the grid backwards.

Always include doing nothing. The fintech pitch deck on this site, for an invented invoice funding company, compares its product with bank factoring and with simply waiting 54 days to be paid. Waiting is what a supplier gets by doing nothing, so it belongs in the grid beside the paid options.

Honest comparisons: put your weakness in the grid

A competition slide where your column wins every row reads as marketing, and investors discount the whole table. The Series A deck’s final row writes Plumbline’s own weakness in the weaknesses column: only 22 states covered today. That one cell makes the four rows above it believable, and it sets up the ask, because the use of funds slide pays for waiver rules in 28 more states.

Give ground to a rival where it is true. The go to market deck on this site, for an invented UK workforce software company entering Germany, credits the local incumbent with a works council playbook and lists its own weakness as no German reference customer yet. The product launch deck compares a new air purifier with two rivals across nine rows and leaves one of them ahead on room size and the other ahead on price.

Then say why the gap closes or does not matter. Sequoia’s business plan outline puts the whole job in one line under competition: “Who are your direct and indirect competitors. Show that you have a plan to win.” The weakness is half of that sentence. The plan is the other half, and it usually lives on the next slide or on the ask.

Sources and dates on the slide

Competitor prices and features change, and a stale number is the easiest thing in a deck to attack. Put the source and the date in a caption under the table rather than in your head.

The SaaS deck’s caption says its prices are list prices per seat per month, read from public pricing pages in August 2026. The product launch deck says competitor pricing was checked on 8 August 2026 at three national retailers. The fintech deck says its factoring terms are the median of three quotes its customers shared. Each tells the reader how old the number is and where it came from, so a disagreement becomes a question about the source instead of about the founder.

Label estimates as estimates. The go to market deck says its prices are indicative annual figures for a 400 staff operator, taken from published rate cards and buyer interviews, which is honest about both the method and the size of customer the numbers apply to.

What investors look for

Investors use the competition slide to test whether a founder understands the market. Geoff Ralston’s guide to seed fundraising in the Y Combinator library lists a market landscape slide, “including competition, macro trends, etc.”, and then asks: “Is there any insight you have that others do not?” The Australian Investment Council’s business plan outline asks the same things in more detail: who your competitors are, what share of the market they hold, their strategic positioning, their strengths and weaknesses, and the barriers to new entrants.

Barriers are the row founders leave out. The angel pitch deck on this site, for an invented oyster hatchery, ends its competition table with years of pedigree data: zero to three for the regional hatcheries, nine for its own line. That row answers the next question in the room, which is why a well funded rival could not copy the business within a year.

The slide also has to agree with the rest of the deck. If the table says a rival is cheaper, the pricing and unit economics slides should explain why buyers pay more anyway. The post on pitch deck structure covers where competition sits in the slide order at each stage.

Nine competition slides compared

The table below this article shows how nine example decks on this site draw the competition slide: the format, what each compares on and what each concedes. Six use a table, one uses three column cards, one compares against the status quo and one uses a 2x2. Every one of the nine gives ground somewhere, which is the pattern worth copying.

Common mistakes

• Claiming no competition. The investor knows the customer is doing something today. Put that something on the slide.
• Axes chosen to win. If the company sits alone in the best quadrant, the axes will be questioned before the company is.
• Ticks without values. A tick for price tells the reader nothing. Write the price.
• A wall of logos. Logos show who exists, not why a buyer would choose you.
• Undated prices. A number without a date looks like a guess even when it is not.
• A table that contradicts the pricing slide. Check the two slides side by side before the deck goes out.

Build it

Comparison is the largest role in the slide library, with 31 layouts of its own and 42 once cross listed designs are counted, and the page on comparison slides shows them. Among them is a competitive landscape table with Competitor, Pricing, Strengths, Weaknesses and Positioning columns, the same columns as the Series A slide, and a competitor 2x2 whose quadrants start as Specialists, Leaders, Laggards and Generalists.

Three facts shape how you use them. A matrix quadrant holds typed entries, not plotted points, and a 2x2 can switch to a SWOT and back while a 3x3 stays a 3x3; the page on 2x2 matrix slides covers the axis and pole labels. A table you build yourself grows to 20 rows and 8 columns, every cell is left aligned, and an optional caption sits under it. When the generator researches a topic, the findings shape the copy but sources are never printed on the slide, so type the source and the date into the caption yourself. The guide to adding charts, maps and diagrams to slides shows how to add a matrix or a framework diagram, Porter’s five forces included, and edit it.