Introducing Competitor API - Real-time Automated Competitor Research
I'm happy to share that the Competitor Listing Endpoint, under the Competitor API, is now generally available! The Competitor Listing Endpoint takes a target company's website and returns a list of competitors by their corresponding website URLs. In other words, we have taken what used to take hours of research and compressed it into a real-time synchronous API call that takes approximately 30s to complete.
Sample Data and Data Quality
To be as unbiased as I can be, I decided to run the data sampling and quality test through Claude via NinjaPear's MCP.
This is my prompt:
Can you help me to sample a couple of companies for the competitor listing endpoint, in a way to review the quality of results (for a blog post)? I want you to try it with companies of different sizes/niches. You can use the competitor listing endpoint on production. Compile your findings in tabular format.
Claude's Response
NinjaPear Competitor Listing — Quality Review
Summary
| Company | Niche | Size | # Found | Top Product Overlap Competitors | Quality Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Stripe | Payments | Large | 23 | PayPal, Adyen, Square, Paddle, Braintree, Airwallex | Excellent. Core payment competitors are spot-on. Keyword overlap section includes banks (Chase, BoA) — tangentially relevant but not direct competitors. |
| Notion | Productivity / Docs | Large | 16 | Coda, ClickUp, Airtable, Slite, Obsidian, AppFlowy | Very strong. Nails both commercial (Coda, Airtable) and open-source alternatives (AppFlowy, Anytype). |
| Linear | Issue Tracking | Mid | 18 | Plane, Shortcut, Huly, Atlassian (Jira), GitHub, ClickUp, Asana | Excellent. Captures the full spectrum from dev-focused (Plane, Shortcut, Huly) to broader PM tools (Asana, Monday). |
| Mailchimp | Email Marketing | Large | 14 | MailerLite, Brevo, Constant Contact, Klaviyo, ActiveCampaign, ConvertKit | Strong. All major email marketing platforms present. Keyword overlap includes adjacent CRM/marketing tools (HubSpot, Salesforce, Hootsuite). |
| Figma | Design | Large | 18 | Penpot, Sketch, UXPin, Adobe, Framer, Axure, Miro | Excellent. Covers prototyping (Axure, ProtoPie), open-source (Penpot), and AI newcomers (Creatie, Visily). Keyword overlap adds Canva/Webflow — reasonable adjacent tools. |
| Calendly | Scheduling | Mid | 18 | Cal.com, TidyCal, SavvyCal, Acuity, Chili Piper, Doodle, Reclaim.ai | Very strong. Hits niche scheduling tools (SavvyCal, TidyCal) and enterprise options (Chili Piper). Zoom/Webex in keyword overlap is sensible. |
| Vercel | Cloud / Hosting | Mid | 15 | Netlify, Cloudflare, Render, DigitalOcean, Fly.io, Railway, AWS, Azure | Excellent. Great mix of direct (Netlify, Render, Railway) and broader cloud (AWS, Azure). Even picks up self-hosted alternatives (Coolify, Dokploy). |
Overall Assessment
| Dimension | Rating | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Precision | High | Product overlap results are consistently relevant — very few false positives. |
| Recall | High | Covers major known competitors plus lesser-known/niche alternatives that add value. |
| Categorization | Useful | The "product overlap" vs "organic keyword overlap" distinction works well. Product overlap competitors are consistently stronger matches. |
| Niche discovery | Strong | Picks up emerging/small competitors (Huly, Dokploy, Coolify, Creatie.ai) that most databases miss. |
| Edge cases | Minor | Some keyword-overlap results are tangential (e.g., banks for Stripe, Dribbble for Figma), but the separation makes this easy to filter. |
Standout Observations
- Small/emerging competitors surfaced well — Huly.io, Plane.so, Dokploy, Coolify, and Creatie.ai are all real but lesser-known alternatives that demonstrate depth beyond just listing the obvious players.
- Two-signal approach works — "Product overlap" competitors are consistently the most relevant, while "keyword overlap" adds broader context without polluting the core list.
- Cross-niche accuracy — Results are strong whether the company is in payments, design, email marketing, or dev tools. No niche bias detected.
- Count range — 14–23 competitors per query gives enough breadth without overwhelming noise.
Use-cases
As an entrepreneur, I honestly believe in dog-fooding. So I'll start with why the Competitor Listing Endpoint is going to be very useful for me.
- I'm going to be able to find all the competitors of my ideal customers that signed up on NinjaPear and prod them into using NinjaPear. To be specific, the Competitor Listing Endpoint makes this process effortless.
- Better onboarding experience on NinjaPear. Imagine: I'll be able to tell every new user who logs into NinjaPear who their competitors are and ask if they want to generate a report of their competitors' customers.
And that's just off the top of my head. For you, the use-cases are limitless.
You can:
- Quickly identify a prospect's competitors before a call.
- Use NinjaPear's Company Monitor and monitor your competitors for competitive intelligence.
Pricing
The Competitor API will cost 2 credits per competitor returned, with a minimum of 5 credits charged per API call.
Try it out today!
Sniff and snuff out your competitors today. Start by identifying an exhaustive list of them. Try it out now at no credit cost:
curl -X GET \
"https://nubela.co/api/v1/competitor/listing?website=stripe.com" \
-H "Authorization: Bearer demo-api-key"
Questions? Send us an email at hello@nubela.co!