BoardSnap is an iOS app that reads whiteboard photos and produces clean summaries and action items in about ten seconds. This competitor matrix template structures a side-by-side comparison of your market on a single board — then BoardSnap turns it into a shareable competitive brief.
Run this template when you're entering a new market, refreshing your positioning, or preparing for a sales conversation where you know a specific competitor will come up. It's also the right template for quarterly competitive reviews — redraw or update the board, snap it, and distribute the updated brief.
A 60-minute competitive mapping session with product, sales, and marketing produces more signal than three weeks of solo research scattered across spreadsheets and Notion docs.
Choose five to eight dimensions that actually drive purchase decisions for your target buyer — not everything your product does. Examples: mobile-first UX, whiteboard scanning, offline support, brand-aware output, pricing tier, integrations, team collaboration. Write these as rows.
Write your product in the leftmost column, then each key competitor. Limit to five competitors — more than five and the matrix becomes noise. If you have fifteen, group the minor ones and only show the top four plus one aggregate 'others' column.
For each cell: a symbol or score — checkmark (strong), tilde (partial), X (missing). Keep it binary or three-state; more granularity than that isn't readable on a whiteboard. Write brief notes in the cells where 'partial' needs explanation.
Add a weight column on the right edge — how much does this dimension matter to the buyer? Score 1–3. This turns the matrix into a weighted comparison, not just a feature checklist. The dimensions your buyer cares most about should be the ones where you win.
Bottom row: for each competitor, one word — their biggest gap. This is your attack surface. Where your gap intersects with high buyer importance and competitor weakness is your wedge.
Don't start with competitors — start with what buyers care about. Interview three customers or review five lost deals. The dimensions they mention are the rows. Generic feature lists are useless; buyer-voiced dimensions are the matrix.
Rows for dimensions on the left, competitors as column headers across the top. Leave the cells blank for now. Label every row and column clearly — BoardSnap reads labels.
Be honest about your column before filling in others. Teams that overrate themselves build misleading matrices. If something is partial, write a tilde — not a checkmark.
Fill in what the room knows from direct experience — trials, demos, customer conversations. Don't look things up mid-session; it breaks the flow. Mark cells with a question mark if you're not sure, and assign someone to verify.
Go through each row and mark buyer importance 1–3. This is usually the most productive debate in the session — what the team thinks matters vs. what buyers actually said matters.
Circle the cells where you're strong, the competitor is weak, and buyer importance is 3. That intersection is your positioning. Write the wedge sentence at the bottom of the board.
BoardSnap reads the grid structure, cell values, and labels. The output is a clean competitive summary with your wedge and gaps identified as action items.
A competitive matrix in a spreadsheet looks tidy but gets stale instantly. No one updates it. A whiteboard session forces the debate — someone will challenge a checkmark, and the argument is where the real insight lives.
BoardSnap preserves the board the moment the debate ends. The grid, the weights, the gap row — all read and summarized. The output arrives before anyone has left the room to start a Google Sheet that will be wrong by Friday.
Quarterly minimum for fast-moving markets; twice a year for stable ones. When a major competitor ships a new feature or changes pricing, redraw the affected rows immediately. Don't let the matrix drift more than 90 days from reality — stale competitive intelligence is worse than none.
Five is the practical limit for a readable whiteboard matrix. Include the three competitors that come up most often in sales calls, one emerging threat, and one incumbent. If a competitor never comes up in real sales conversations, they don't belong on the board.
BoardSnap uses Apple VisionKit for perspective correction and reads handwriting at normal whiteboard size. Cells that are very small or densely packed may produce partial reads — write larger than you think you need to.
The free tier includes one project and 30 boards. Pro is $9.99/month or $69.99/year and adds unlimited boards, unlimited projects, and AI chat so you can ask follow-up questions on any board you've snapped.
No exporting, no transcription. Snap the board, get the action plan.