Frequently Asked Questions

A competitive intelligence brief is a structured summary of recent competitor activity, analyzed and prioritized for strategic relevance. Lantern's daily briefs are delivered to Slack every morning between 6–8 AM your local time.

Each brief contains multiple competitive signals, and each signal includes five components: the signal type (one of 10 categories: pricing, features, hiring, positioning, announcement, research, leadership, partnership, market dynamics, or culture), an impact score from 0 to 100 indicating strategic significance, an evidence quote with a source link so you can verify the data, a "Why It Matters" section providing strategic context specific to your business, and a "Your Move" section recommending concrete actions to consider.

On the Team tier, Lantern offers role-based briefs tailored to different stakeholders: the Founder Brief covers all high-impact signals, the GTM Brief focuses on pricing, positioning, and sentiment, the Product Brief emphasizes features, research, and customer complaints, and the Board Brief highlights funding, major launches, and macro narratives.

Lantern uses a multi-layered monitoring system to track competitors across the internet. The platform continuously crawls competitor websites using the Firecrawl API to detect changes in pricing pages, feature lists, positioning language, blog posts, and documentation. Lantern monitors social media channels including Twitter/X, LinkedIn, Reddit, and Hacker News for mentions, discussions, and sentiment about your competitors.

Job board tracking covers careers pages, Lever, Greenhouse, and LinkedIn to identify strategic hires and organizational signals. Customer review platforms like G2, Capterra, TrustRadius, and Trustpilot are monitored for sentiment trends and competitive switching signals. News aggregation covers press releases, funding announcements, and product launches.

On the Team tier, Lantern also tracks arXiv research papers and GitHub repositories for technical intelligence. All collected data is processed through Lantern's AI layer, which uses Anthropic's Claude to categorize signals, assign impact scores, and generate strategic analysis with source attribution.

Lantern tracks competitors across six major categories of data sources. Owned and product surfaces include competitor websites, landing pages, pricing pages, feature pages, product changelogs, documentation, and blogs. Talent and hiring sources include careers pages, job platforms like Lever and Greenhouse, and LinkedIn job postings.

Social and community sources cover Twitter/X (official and founder accounts), LinkedIn company posts, Reddit (including r/SaaS, r/startups, r/MachineLearning), and Hacker News discussions. Customer voice sources include G2, Capterra, TrustRadius, and Trustpilot reviews, with attention to "what did you switch from" signals and sentiment trends.

News and funding sources track press releases, launch announcements, funding rounds, and acquisitions. Research and OSS sources (available on the Team tier) include arXiv papers, technical blogs, GitHub repos, release notes, and researcher movements. This comprehensive coverage ensures you never miss a significant competitor move across any public channel.

Yes, pricing monitoring is one of Lantern's core signal types. Lantern continuously monitors competitor pricing pages, feature comparison pages, and plan description pages to detect changes in pricing structure, tier configurations, feature bundling, and promotional offers.

When a competitor changes their pricing, Lantern categorizes it as a "pricing" signal, assigns an impact score based on the significance of the change, provides the specific evidence of what changed (with a source link to the pricing page), explains why it matters for your competitive positioning, and recommends actions you should consider in response.

Pricing intelligence is particularly valuable for SaaS companies because pricing changes often signal broader strategic shifts — a competitor raising prices may be moving upmarket, while a competitor introducing a free tier may be pursuing a land-and-expand strategy. Lantern's AI analysis helps you interpret pricing moves in their strategic context rather than just noting that a number changed.

Lantern is Slack-first because push-based delivery drives dramatically higher engagement than pull-based dashboards. Data from competitive intelligence platforms consistently shows that daily push notifications achieve 8x higher engagement than dashboard-only workflows. The reason is simple: dashboards require you to remember to visit them, find time to browse, and make it a habit. Slack briefs arrive in a channel you already check every morning.

Competitive intelligence that is not seen is worthless, and Slack-first delivery ensures your team actually reads and acts on competitive data. Lantern does offer a dashboard on the Team tier for historical lookup, trend analysis, and settings management. But the dashboard is a secondary interface. The primary habit loop is the daily Slack brief that arrives between 6–8 AM your local time.

This Slack-first approach also enables quick team discussions — when a significant competitive signal appears in your Slack channel, your team can immediately discuss and decide on a response right where the intelligence landed.

Lantern achieves 95%+ data accuracy through a multi-source verification process. Every competitive signal is cross-referenced against multiple data sources before it appears in your brief. If Lantern's confidence in a signal falls below its accuracy threshold, the signal is not included — the platform would rather show you less information than show you incorrect information.

Every insight in a Lantern brief includes source attribution with clickable links, so you can verify any piece of intelligence yourself by going directly to the original source. This source transparency is a core design principle, not an afterthought.

The AI analysis layer, powered by Anthropic's Claude, is strictly grounded in verified data. Unlike general-purpose AI chatbots that may hallucinate or speculate, Lantern's AI only generates strategic analysis based on confirmed signals with identified sources. Impact scores (0–100) help you prioritize which signals deserve immediate attention versus background awareness.

Role-based competitive intelligence briefs are customized versions of Lantern's daily intelligence reports, tailored to the specific needs and priorities of different roles within your organization. Available on the Team plan ($399/month), Lantern offers five distinct brief profiles.

The Founder Brief includes all high-impact competitive signals across every category, delivered daily via Slack and weekly via email — it is the comprehensive view for strategic decision-makers. The GTM Brief focuses on pricing changes, go-to-market strategies, positioning shifts, and customer sentiment, delivered daily via Slack for sales and marketing leaders. The Product Brief emphasizes new features, technical research, customer complaints, and product direction signals, delivered weekly via email for product leaders. The Board Brief highlights major events like funding rounds, significant product launches, and macro market narratives, delivered weekly via email for board members and advisors. The Research Brief (Team tier and above) covers research advances, open-source changes, and key talent movements for technical leadership.

Each role sees only the signals most relevant to their decisions, reducing noise and increasing actionability.

Using ChatGPT or other general-purpose AI chatbots for competitive intelligence has three fundamental problems that Lantern solves.

First, hallucination: ChatGPT has a 5–27% hallucination rate depending on the topic, meaning it will confidently present fabricated information as fact. Lantern achieves 95%+ accuracy through multi-source verification and includes source links for every insight so you can verify data yourself.

Second, real-time data: ChatGPT does not have access to real-time information. It cannot tell you that a competitor changed their pricing yesterday, published a new job posting this morning, or received a negative G2 review last week. Lantern monitors competitors continuously and delivers fresh intelligence daily.

Third, workflow integration: ChatGPT requires you to manually write prompts, remember to check regularly, and interpret raw outputs. Lantern delivers structured, categorized competitive briefs directly to Slack every morning with impact scores, strategic context, and recommended actions. It also knows your specific competitive landscape — you configure which competitors to track, and Lantern monitors them automatically without repeated prompting.

Lantern, Crayon, and Klue all serve the competitive intelligence market but target different audiences. Crayon is built for enterprise product marketing teams, focusing on dashboard-based competitive tracking with per-user pricing ($39–99/user/month). Klue is built for enterprise sales teams, specializing in competitive battlecards and sales enablement with enterprise pricing. Lantern is built for startup founders and lean teams, delivering Slack-first daily briefs with AI-powered strategic analysis at flat-rate pricing ($199/month Pro, $399/month Team).

The key differences are: delivery method (Lantern is Slack-first while Crayon and Klue are dashboard-first), AI analysis (Lantern uses Claude AI for strategic reasoning while others focus on summarization or battlecard generation), pricing transparency (Lantern publishes prices with no annual contracts required), and data coverage (Lantern uniquely monitors arXiv and GitHub for technical intelligence).

For detailed comparisons, see our Lantern vs Crayon and Lantern vs Klue pages.

Lantern offers three pricing tiers. The Pro plan costs $199 per month and includes 2 users, 10 competitors, daily Slack briefs, deal signals (churn indicators, pricing changes, customer complaints), strategic signals (hiring patterns, funding rounds, product launches), source links for verification, and email support.

The Team plan costs $399 per month and includes 10 users, 50 competitors, everything in Pro plus real-time alerts, Salesforce and HubSpot integration, role-based briefs (Founder, GTM, Product, Board), full dashboard with trends, weekly board-ready digests, and priority support.

The Enterprise plan has custom pricing for unlimited competitors and users, and includes SSO, dedicated support, and custom integrations. All plans are month-to-month with no annual contract required. Visit our pricing page for the full breakdown, or book a demo to discuss which tier is right for your team.

You can track any company with Lantern. There are no restrictions on industry, geography, or company size. You simply add the competitors you want to monitor, and Lantern begins tracking them across all available data sources. This works for direct competitors, adjacent players in your market, companies you are watching for potential market entry, or any organization whose moves are strategically relevant to your business.

The number of competitors you can track depends on your plan: the Pro plan at $199/month supports up to 10 competitors, the Team plan at $399/month supports up to 50 competitors, and the Enterprise plan supports unlimited competitors. Most startups find that 10 competitors on the Pro plan covers their core competitive landscape, including direct competitors, adjacent players, and a few companies they are monitoring for market intelligence.

Yes. You can book a free 30-minute demo with Lantern's founder, Amogh Reddy. During the demo, Amogh will walk you through how Lantern works, show you example competitive intelligence briefs, discuss your specific competitive landscape, help you identify which competitors to track, and answer any questions about the platform.

There is no obligation or sales pressure — the demo is a straightforward walkthrough of the product and a conversation about whether Lantern is the right fit for your team's competitive intelligence needs. There is also a walkthrough video available on runlantern.com if you prefer to explore on your own first.

Lantern is designed for immediate setup with minimal configuration. The process takes minutes, not days or weeks. You sign up, add the competitors you want to monitor (up to 10 on Pro, 50 on Team), connect your Slack workspace, and configure your brief preferences. Lantern begins monitoring your competitors immediately, and you receive your first competitive intelligence brief the next morning in Slack.

There is no lengthy onboarding process, no implementation calls, no custom configuration sessions, and no waiting period. This is a deliberate design choice. Enterprise competitive intelligence platforms like Crayon and Klue often require weeks of onboarding with dedicated customer success teams. Lantern is self-serve because startup founders do not have time for multi-week implementations. If you need competitive intelligence, you need it now — not in three weeks after a procurement process.

The Team tier offers additional configuration for role-based briefs, CRM integration (Salesforce and HubSpot), and dashboard customization, but the core setup remains fast and self-directed.

Lantern is primarily designed for B2B SaaS and AI companies, and the platform's data sources, signal types, and AI analysis are optimized for the technology sector. The core monitoring capabilities — website tracking, social media monitoring, news aggregation, review platform tracking, and hiring signal analysis — work for any industry where competitors have an online presence.

However, some of Lantern's most distinctive features are tech-specific. The arXiv research paper monitoring and GitHub repository tracking (Team tier) are relevant only to technical companies. The AI analysis and strategic recommendations are calibrated for SaaS competitive dynamics. The role-based briefs (Founder, GTM, Product, Board) reflect technology company organizational structures.

If you are a non-tech company with competitors that have active websites and social media presences, Lantern's core monitoring will work. But you will get the most value if you are operating in the B2B SaaS or AI space where the platform's intelligence capabilities are most deeply tuned. Book a demo to discuss your specific use case.