Pitch Deck Competition Slide: What to Include with Examples

The pitch deck competition slide is the slide investors almost always click on, revisit, and spend the most time chewing on. Oftentimes, as much as your financials and problem slides.

Why? Because it answers two unspoken questions immediately:

• Do you actually understand the landscape you’re playing in?
• And do you know how to position yourself to win?

The thing is: Too many founders trip here. Some boldly claim no competition 🚩. Others paste in a cookie-cutter 2×2 matrix that’s so generic it could belong to any startup.

Neither builds confidence.

So what does really work?

Well, I’ve been helping founders design pitch decks for their investor meetings. And with over a decade of experience, I can certainly help you design a pitch deck competition slide that the investors want.

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Why have a competition slide in your pitch deck?

Here’s something that happens all the time, and I don’t understand it: Founders shying away from showcasing their competitors.

Competition doesn’t scare away investors. In fact, you saying “we have no competition” might chase them away.

Investors who plan to lend you millions need an honest understanding of your competitive landscape. They want to know if customers would pay for solutions like yours and if you have a plan to differentiate from existing players.

If anything, competition validates your market, and having a solid competition slide in your pitch deck sets up those strategic business discussions that can make or break your pitch.

Here’s why I insist on this slide in your deck:

• Demonstrates market intelligence: Reveals how well you understand market dynamics, customer segments, and positioning gaps that competitors haven’t addressed
• Forces strategic differentiation: Forces you to articulate your differentiation beyond surface-level features into meaningful competitive advantages
• Signals market timing: Helps investors understand a sweet spot between validated demand and oversaturated markets where your startup can carve out a defensible position
• Validates customer demand: Proves that there would be customers willing to pay for the problem you solve
• Reveals growth opportunities: Shows adjacent markets and customer segments your competitors haven’t captured yet

How to create a “great” pitch deck competition slide?

If only building a competitor slide were as simple as dividing information into bullets, slapping a nice design, and pasting your logo.

But more than design, it’s the context and research that will help you add strategic value to your slide.

Here’s how to do a competitor’s analysis for your pitch deck:

1. Map out your competitor

Let’s stop pretending there’s no competition to your business. That’s naive.

Begin by listing down 4-5 businesses that are directly competing with your products or services. This could include established market leaders, well-funded emerging players, and businesses that could potentially become competitors.

But don’t stop yet.

For your slide, also consider the businesses whose products or services your potential customers are using as an alternative, i.e., your indirect competitors. This is especially important if yours is a first-mover business.

I have often seen these indirect competitors catching up and evolving into direct threats. In such cases, if your indirect competitors have existing customer loyalty, they would quickly challenge your market position.

2. Perform a SWOT analysis on competitors

You need a framework to conduct thorough and insightful competitor research. SWOT is one such framework that can help you evaluate your competitors.

For all the competitors you listed above, map out their:

• Strengths: What they do exceptionally well
• Weaknesses: Where customers consistently complain
• Opportunities: Market gaps they could fill
• Threats: What could disrupt their business

Now, don’t just browse the homepage or a feature page to understand what your competitor does well. I would suggest leveraging different metrics online to understand competitors. That is,

• Check G2, Capterra, and Trustpilot reviews to identify recurring user complaints and praise patterns
• Monitor their social media engagement rates and customer response times to gauge brand loyalty
• Use SimilarWeb or Ahrefs to analyze their website traffic sources and content performance
• Study their pricing changes, promotional campaigns, and partnership announcements
• Analyze their customer case studies to understand which market segments they prioritize
• Review their product update frequency and feature releases to assess development velocity

This analysis reveals blind spots in your own strategy and highlights areas where you can excel.

For instance, when competitors are expanding rapidly into enterprise but ignoring SMBs,  it gives you an untapped market opportunity (competitive advantage).

3. Pick differentiation metrics

Now, pick the metrics that can help you position strongly in the competitive market.

And no, “We have 47 features compared to competitors who only have 30 features” isn’t a strong competitive advantage.

That’s just a vanity metric. Your competitors can build those same features in their next product update.

To ensure that you’re chasing metrics that actually drive buying decisions, talk to your prospective customers. Look out for people who’ve switched between solutions in your space and ask these very specific questions:

• What specific problem made customers switch from competitors to alternatives?

• Which factors do customers mention first when explaining their purchase decision?

• What metrics do customers use internally to measure success with solutions like yours?

• Where do competitors consistently fail according to customer reviews and feedback?

• Which performance indicators would make a customer choose you over existing alternatives?

When you have your metrics, validate them with actual customers and friendly investors. Share your proposed comparison points with recent buyers to see which ones immediately resonate.

Metrics that don’t immediately resonate with either group won’t strengthen your pitch.

4. Define your honest competitive edge

Most founders approach this step backwards.

They start with what they think makes them special, then try to prove it. This creates positioning that sounds impressive but doesn’t match reality.

Instead, the framework we’ve built—analyzing competitors and identifying key metrics—gives you something more valuable: evidence-based differentiation.

You now know exactly where competitors struggle, which metrics actually matter to buyers, and what gaps exist in the market.

Here’s how to turn that research into your competitive advantage:

• Work from customer pain points: If competitors get consistent complaints about slow support and you offer instant chat, that’s real differentiation backed by evidence
• Focus on sustainable advantages: Being first to market or having lower prices won’t last long. Instead, look for proprietary data or switching costs that competitors can’t easily replicate
• Test with the investor flip: Imagine an investor heard identical pitches from you and your strongest competitor—then what would make them choose you?
• Connect each advantage to customer value: Speak from an impact perspective, i.e., “24/7 support” should be “reduces customer churn by 30%”

5. Design your competitive slide

You now condense your understanding of competition and USP into a visually digestible deck.

Check these pitch deck examples to understand 3 common ways to present information on your competitor’s slide:

Quadrant matrix

In this method, you position competitors on two axes that matter most to customers—like ease of use vs. enterprise features or price vs. functionality.

This works best when you can clearly show how your solution fills a gap that others don’t address. The visual instantly communicates your unique positioning without overwhelming investors with details.

Power Grid matrix

Here, you create a table comparing your key features with competitors using checkmarks, X’s, or color coding. This format works well when you have clear functional advantages across multiple areas. However, limit the list to 4-5 features at max. 

Cluster matrix

Here, you group competitors by similarity (enterprise vs. SMB focus, high-touch vs. self-serve) and position your company in the most attractive cluster. This approach helps when the market has distinct segments and you want to show you’re targeting the right one. It’s particularly effective for demonstrating market timing and opportunity size.

As for the visual layout and slide design:

• Present not more than 5-7 competitors on your slide
• Avoid text-heavy sentences and use bullets to describe your advantage
• Choose a matrix that supports your story
• Choose colors and fonts that align with your entire deck
• Add interactive elements like embedded videos to strengthen your positioning

6. Add subtle storytelling

All your positioning efforts will go in vain if you can’t weave a subtle narrative that positions your business in a competitive light.

But with this simple framework of mine, you will always get the narrative right:

• Set the scene: Frame the current market problem in one sentence. “The market today is dominated by tools that are either too expensive for SMBs or too basic to scale.”
• Create tension: Show the gap that customers face. “Enterprise solutions have all the features, but cost $100k+ a year. Lightweight apps are cheap but can’t handle growing teams.”
• Position your solution: Show where you land differently. “We’re the only platform that combines enterprise-level features with startup-friendly pricing.”

Now, design a friendly pitch and practice it time and again to see which aspect of storytelling sticks with your audience.

And that’s how you build a competitor’s slide in your pitch deck.

Best competition slide examples (f/ real startups)

Let’s now look at competitors’ slides of some famous companies and understand what makes them kickass:

1. Buffer

Buffer is a social media scheduling platform that raised $450,000 in seed funding from 18 investors.

However, before raising this, the company faced a critical challenge convincing investors who consistently viewed the social media space as oversaturated and couldn’t understand Buffer’s unique position.

In its initial decks, Buffer made detailed feature comparisons to show how it differed from established players like TweetDeck and Seesmic.

These technical distinctions seemed valuable internally, but not for investors who saw the entire space as crowded.

After a couple of rejections and friction with the competition slide, they realized that defending their position wouldn’t work. Instead, they adopted a cluster approach to group competitors into clear categories:

• Social Media Dashboards (Hootsuite, TweetDeck, Seesmic)
• Scheduling Apps (Twuffer, SocialOomph, TwAtter)
• Sharing Platforms (Buffer, Yoono, AddThis)

This visual organization immediately shows investors that Buffer operates in a specific niche within the broader social media landscape.

What does their competitive slide do right?

The slide’s strength lies in strategic positioning.

Rather than claiming to be completely different, Buffer places itself in the “Sharing Platforms” category alongside established players. This validates the market need while showing their specific focus.

Investors could instantly grasp that scheduling tweets (crowded space) differs from optimizing social media sharing (their opportunity).

2. Front

Front is a customer communication platform that has raised significant funding through multiple rounds, including a $65 million Series D.

This pitch deck example is proof of how transparency about strong competitors can actually strengthen your position.

Although I am not a fan of the Quadrant matrix, this one presents positioning across two critical metrics in their industry: Business readiness and messaging experience.

The approach works because it acknowledges reality.

Instead of downplaying giants like Zendesk and Salesforce, the slide shows how customers want enterprise-level functionality combined with consumer-grade user experience, but how current solutions force trade-offs.

What does their competitive slide do right?

Front’s slide demonstrates market sophistication by showing the specific gap their solution fills. The visual positioning of tools clearly shows how existing solutions create an ‘either-or’ decision for customers. But with Front, they don’t have to make this painful choice.

3. Revolut

Revolut is a fintech platform that raised £1.5M seed round led by Balderton Capital in July 2015.

The tool challenges traditional banking models by addressing common pain points such as high fees, opaque exchange rates, and limited financial control.

Their competitor’s slide focuses on the pain points customers face and highlights the value points they deliver. While their slide may look a bit clunky, it establishes a clear competitive advantage.

The genius lies in the use case section, where they compare each scenario with specific checkmarks showing which competitors solve these problems.

What does their competitive slide do right?

Their slide centers everything around actual customer frustrations rather than feature comparisons. The pain point-specific use cases make it impossible to argue against Revolut’s comprehensive solution.

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Mistakes to avoid in your competition slide

Here are some mistakes you might (unintentionally) make that are equivalent to “we don’t have any competitors”

1. Undermining competition

The biggest trap startups fall into is showing only weak competitors or outdated solutions.

This manipulation backfires spectacularly because investors see through cherry-picked competition lists. They know the real players in your space, and by ignoring them, you’re revealing dangerous blind spots.

Worse, undermining actual threats means you’re likely building solutions that don’t address actual competitive threats.

While pitching investors, talk about real competitors (even the ones that make them think “how will you beat them?”

2. Using meaningless axes

Quadrant matrices fail when the axes don’t matter to customers or investors. Plotting competitors on “features vs. simplicity” sounds strategic, but provides zero actionable insight. They are basically what we call vanity metrics.

Instead, pick axes that directly connect to buying decisions. Revenue growth, customer satisfaction scores, implementation time, or support response rates tell investors how customers actually evaluate solutions in your market.

3. Making yourself the obvious winner

Funny right? 

Well, this is how many companies tend to present their startup in a competitor’s slide.

If you’re winning across all the metrics, you need to change your basis of comparison. No solution excels at everything. And by claiming universal superiority, you’re destroying credibility with sophisticated investors.

Instead, show where competitors are making strides and then explain why your trade-offs create advantages for your target customers.

4. Including too many visuals

Cramming 15+ logos onto your slide creates visual chaos and dilutes your message. Investors can’t process that much information quickly, and you lose the opportunity to explain your strategic positioning clearly.

But if you need to present a bunch of competitors, do so with a cluster mix. In the image below, although the slide may look crowded, the matrix makes it easier for investors to understand Holloway’s positioning.

5. Making features your competitive advantage

Feature battles become expensive treadmills. You spend all your resources building new capabilities while competitors copy your best ideas and distribute them through existing customer relationships.

Worse is when your only competitive advantage is based on providing a new feature. This strategy fails because big players with big budgets will replicate popular features and scale them faster through existing distribution channels.

Prepare a compelling pitch deck using Upmetrics

With that, approach the competition slide with an intent to answer most of these 5 questions:

• Who are your real competitors? 

• What market gap do you fill? 

• Why would customers switch to you? 

• How do you sustain a competitive advantage? 

• What’s your path to market leadership?

The information and research on your competitor’s slide will (indeed) influence investment from investors. But you don’t need to spend weeks trying to figure out ‘what’ and ‘how’ to present on this slide.

With our AI pitch deck generator, you can strategically position yourself favorably without downplaying your competitors. Answer a couple of business-related questions, and see your fully structured (+designed) pitch deck coming to life.