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Getting started with Rival Radar
Add your competitors, pick the pages worth watching, and set up alerts. About ten minutes, and the free plan needs no card.
Updated November 9, 2026
Watch how, in short videos
Rival Radar watches your competitors' own pages on a schedule, works out when something real has changed, and tells you what it was in plain English. You set it up once and then only hear from it when something moves.
This is the whole setup, start to finish. You can do all of it on the free plan with no card: three competitors, two pages each, checked twice a day.
Step by step
Add your competitors
Open Competitors and press Add competitor if you know who they are, or Find my competitors if you'd rather describe your business and have Rival Radar search for them.
Let it scan their site
Put in their name and domain and press Scan site. Rival Radar looks over their site and comes back with the pages it found: pricing, features, homepage, changelog, careers and the rest.
Pick the pages to watch
Tick the ones that matter. On the free plan that's two per competitor, and the pricing page is nearly always one of them. Press Add competitor to finish.
Set your own website
In Settings, fill in Your website. It stops Rival Radar suggesting you back to yourself, and it is what the Compare card on each competitor measures their pages against.
Choose when to be emailed
In Settings, then Manage notifications, pick a Minimum severity. Notable and major changes is the default and suits most people. Add a Slack or webhook address here too if you want it in a channel.
Add anyone else who should see it
Still on the notifications page, add Report recipients. They get the same digest you do, without needing an account.
Leave it alone
The first check of each page runs as soon as you add it. After that it runs on its own, and the Dashboard shows everything found, newest first.
What you see on the first day
A page has to be checked twice before there's anything to compare, so the first check is a baseline rather than a change. On the free plan that means your first real alert can be up to twelve hours away.
Two things fill in sooner. Plans and prices are read off a pricing page on its first check, so the Pricing card on a competitor usually has something in it within a few minutes. And Rival Radar goes looking in the Internet Archive for earlier copies of every page you watch, which can be months of history before you've watched them for a day. See earlier versions of a page.
If the dashboard looks empty on day one, that's it working. Nothing in the feed means nothing has moved yet.
How many competitors to start with
Three is a good number, and it's what the free plan gives you. Pick the ones you actually lose deals to or get compared against rather than everyone in your category. There's more on choosing them in the guide on what to track and how often.
You can swap one out later. Deleting a competitor frees the slot, though it does remove the changes recorded for them.
Where everything lives
- Dashboard: every change found across every competitor, newest first, plus a row showing when each page was last checked.
- Competitors: one card per competitor. Open one for its pricing, hiring, history, activity and the pages being watched.
- Settings: your account, your own website, your plan, and notifications.
Questions
Do I need a card to start?
No. The free plan watches 3 competitors with 2 pages each, checked twice a day, and never asks for a card. You only enter one if you move to a paid plan.
How long before I see my first change?
A page has to be checked at least twice for there to be anything to compare, so expect your first real alert within one check interval: up to twelve hours on the free plan. Plans and prices on a pricing page, and any history found in the Internet Archive, show up sooner than that.
Do the competitors know I'm watching them?
Rival Radar fetches their public pages the way any visitor or search engine crawler would. It doesn't sign in, fill in forms, or identify you to them.
Start watching your competitors
Three competitors, two pages each, checked twice a day. Free, and no card.
Start watching for free