Looking for an Instagram competitor analysis tool that shows you more than a follower count? NapoleonCat lets you analyze other Instagram accounts the same way you analyze your own, and see exactly what’s working for them.
Instagram Competitor Analysis Tool– Analyze Any Account
Trusted by:
Supported platforms
Followed profiles: Analyze any Instagram account, not just your own
Not sure how to monitor a competitor Instagram profile you have no access to? You don’t need it.
Add any public account as a followed profile and NapoleonCat tracks it right beside the accounts you already manage in the Social Inbox, with the same date ranges and the same charts. No permissions to ask for, no spreadsheet to keep up.
Posting frequency: Monitor what your competitors are doing on Instagram, week by week
Posts by day shows you how often they publish, and the format counters show what they’ve quietly switched to.
One quarter it’s 44 carousels and 36 Reels, the next the Reels number climbs and the carousels drop, and you watch that decision happen before anyone writes a trend piece about it. All without opening a single one of their profiles.
Best times to post: See the best days and hours to post, from their results and not your guesses
Post engagement by days of the week and by hours break their whole quarter down into when they published and what it earned them.
So you can spot the hour they keep posting into that gets them nothing, and the one they barely use that gets them everything. Instagram competitor monitoring that changes your calendar.
Post types: See which formats earn the most engagement: Reels, carousels or photos
Should you be making more Reels? Their numbers answer it for you. Post engagement by post type ranks every format a competitor publishes by what it earns, so “we should do more video” stops being an opinion someone defends in a meeting and turns into a number you can point at.
Top posts: See your competitors’ best posts, ranked by engagement rate
Posts by engagement rate lines up everything they published, best first, with the caption, the thumbnail, the likes and the comments.
Their single strongest post of the quarter, sitting at the top of a list. Read the caption, look at the format, and you know what their audience turned up for.
Hashtags: See which hashtags really earn your competitors the most engagement
The Hashtags tab counts every tag they use and puts the average engagement right next to it. It’s usually a surprise (a brand’s own main hashtag is often its worst performer), and it saves you from copying a tag list that looks busy and does nothing at all.
Comparison sets: Put your Instagram profile side by side with your competitors’ profiles
Instagram competitive analysis works better on one screen than in two browser tabs. Build a benchmarking set and multiple accounts line up side by side in the same table, over the same period, with the average across the set underneath.
It replaces the Instagram comparison resources you’d otherwise be building by hand every month.
Automated reports: Send competitor numbers to your clients without building a single slide
You already send a monthly report. Now it can carry the two accounts your client keeps asking about, packaged into a PDF with graphs, white-labeled and emailed on a schedule you set once. In the same platform where your Auto-moderation rules are already answering comments. So you don’t have to.
Try the Instagram competitor analysis tool free for 14 days
Here’s why our clients love NapoleonCat
Join businesses that keep an eye on their competitors without leaving the tool they already use for comments and DMs.
NapoleonCat saves up to one-third of a full-time position. That’s time we would otherwise spend manually moderating thousands of comments each month using the Meta Business Suite, profile by profile and comment by comment. Time we can now use for growth. NapoleonCat is the best tool of its kind on the market, and it’s still constantly evolving and improving by introducing new AI features.
It’s hard to imagine our work without a tool that includes so many valuable features. It won’t be an overstatement when I say that NapoleonCat saves us multiple full-time positions that would be dedicated to just moderating comments or manually generating reports.
NapoleonCat gives us the full picture of social media interactions. It’s easier to pick up urgent threads that need taking immediate action. And with conversation history, it’s much easier to continue the work of another team member while they’re out of office.
We work with multiple clients, and with NapoleonCat, we don’t waste time switching between multiple software tools. We can also deliver reliable data from a single source. We tested other social media moderation and analytics tools before, but none of them lived up to what NapoleonCat delivers. They’re the best, and I personally love using the tool. 🙂
NapoleonCat is now an indispensable tool that we use for moderation and analytical purposes, as well as content publishing. We’re curious to see new capabilities of the tool and test its new uses, for example, to moderate TikTok ad comments, as we predict this social media channel to become more and more important for our clients.
It’s the first social media engagement tool we have ever tried that is truly intuitive and that makes it easy for us to include the clients in the process. The service and support is great and personal. And the value for money is great!
We were looking for a tool that would allow us to consolidate and manage comments and private messages from Messenger in one place. Analytics and reports were also very important to us, as they would show us the level of our social media customer service. That’s why, in 2017, we decided to choose NapoleonCat.
See how NapoleonCat compares to its alternatives:
| Feature | NapoleonCat | Hootsuite | Sprout Social | Agorapulse |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Networks you can track competitors on | ✅ Instagram, Facebook and YouTube | ⚠️ Instagram, Facebook, X | ⚠️ Instagram, Facebook, X | ⚠️ Instagram and Facebook only |
| Best days and hours to post, from a competitor’s own results | ✅ Yes (by weekday and by hour) | ❌ Your own accounts only | ❌ Your own accounts only | ❌ No |
| Engagement per post format (Reels, carousels, photos) | ✅ Yes | ⚠️ Listening add-on | ⚠️ Post counts by format, not engagement | ✅ Yes |
| Competitor posts ranked by engagement rate | ✅ Yes (with caption and thumbnail) | ⚠️ Listening add-on | ✅ Yes | ✅ Yes (six posts) |
| Competitor hashtag performance | ✅ Yes (average engagement per tag, plus optimal tag count) | ⚠️ Listening add-on | ⚠️ Instagram only, top 3 tags | ❌ No |
| How often a rival’s admins reply to comments on their posts | ✅ Yes (posts and admin replies, daily) | ❌ No | ❌ No | ❌ No |
| Side-by-side benchmarking of multiple profiles | ✅ Yes | ✅ Yes | ✅ Yes | ✅ Yes |
| Competitor data in scheduled white-label PDF reports | ✅ Yes (weekly, monthly, quarterly) | ⚠️ Limited | ⚠️ Scheduled PDFs on the Advanced plan | ⚠️ PDF export, scheduling on higher tiers |
| Plan needed for competitor analysis | ✅ Every paid plan, from $79/mo | ⚠️ All plans (5 competitors, basic metrics) | ⚠️ Professional plan, $299/user/mo | ⚠️ 1 competitor until Advanced, $149/user/mo |
| AI spam and hate removal on your own profiles | ✅ AI-based auto-removal | ⚠️ Limited (rules / add-on) | ❌ No auto-removal | ⚠️ Limited |
| EU-based, GDPR-first hosting | ✅ Yes | ❌ Canada-based | ❌ US-based | ✅ EU-based |
| Starting price | ✅ From $79/mo (2 users, 5 profiles) | $99/user/mo | $199/user/mo | $79/user/mo |
Frequently asked questions
How do I monitor a competitor Instagram account?
Add it as a followed profile. Instagram competitor monitoring in NapoleonCat runs on public data, so you don’t need access to the account and nobody is notified. From that point you can monitor competitors on Instagram the same way you monitor your own: followers, engagement rate, posts per day, formats, hashtags and top posts, over any date range.
Can I analyze competitors on Instagram without following them?
Yes. You never have to follow the account from your own profile. NapoleonCat reads what Instagram makes public, which is why you can analyze other Instagram accounts, including accounts that would never grant you access, and keep the history once you start tracking.
Can I see my competitors’ engagement rate on Instagram?
Yes. Engagement rate is charted over time for every followed profile, and it’s calculated the same way for every profile in a benchmarking set, so you can put multiple accounts side by side and know your competitors’ engagement rate on Instagram is directly comparable to yours, rather than two numbers from two different tools.
Is there a free Instagram competitor analysis tool?
The free options are Instagram’s own, and they only cover the accounts you own. NapoleonCat is free for 14 days with no credit card, which is enough time to follow a handful of competitors and see a full posting cycle before you decide anything.
What is the best tool for Instagram competitor analysis?
That depends on what you plan to do with the data. If you only want a follower chart, almost anything will do. If you want to know what to post, when to post, what time of day and how often, based on what already works for a rival, look for a tool that breaks their posts down by format, by weekday and by hour, and that puts those numbers in the same place you handle comments and DMs.
What can’t I see about a competitor’s Instagram profile?
Reach, impressions, saves, video views, Story metrics and audience demographics are not available for a profile you don’t own, because Meta doesn’t share them through the API. What you get instead is built from public data: posts, formats, hashtags, engagement by day and by hour, top posts and follower numbers. The best times to post are derived from how their posts actually performed, not from when their followers happen to be online.
See what’s working on your competitors’ Instagram accounts
Free 14-day trial: full access, zero commitment.
No credit card required