📊 Competitor Feature-Parity Watcher

Watches your competitors' changelogs weekly, and uses an LLM to judge which updates actually matter to your product — not just a raw feed of everything they shipped.

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📖 Overview

Most "competitor tracker" tools dump every changelog entry at you, which quickly becomes noise you stop reading. This workflow is different: it compares each new update against your own product's actual feature list, scores how relevant/threatening it is (1–5), and only surfaces the ones worth your attention.

It checks two kinds of sources — competitors with an RSS/Atom feed, and competitors who only have a plain changelog webpage (handled via LLM-based extraction as a fallback). Either way, nothing gets re-reported twice: a state store remembers what's already been seen, so you only get genuinely new updates each week.

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🏗️ Architecture

Weekly Trigger
   → Loop each competitor
       → RSS feed? → Read RSS Feed
       → Webpage?  → Fetch page → LLM extracts structured updates
   → Compare against last week's saved state (Google Sheets)
   → New items? → LLM scores relevance against YOUR feature list
   → Score ≥ 3? → Save to "flagged updates" sheet
   → Save today's state, move to next competitor
→ Once all competitors are checked: build one digest, send via Telegram

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🚀 Getting Started

Prerequisites

• n8n instance — self-hosted or Cloud
• Google account — for the state-tracking spreadsheet (free)
• OpenRouter API key — free tier available, no credit card required (see below)
• Telegram bot — for receiving the weekly digest

Step 1 — Set up the Google Sheet (do this carefully — most setup issues happen here)

1. Go to sheets.google.com and create a new blank spreadsheet. Name it anything, e.g. n8n-competitor-watcher-state.

2. Create two tabs in that spreadsheet (right-click the tab bar at the bottom → rename, or use the + button to add a new one). Spelling and capitalization must match exactly:

   Tab 1: CompetitorState — Row 1 headers:

   competitor | lastCheckedDate
   

   Tab 2: FlaggedUpdates — Row 1 headers:

   competitor | title | score | reason | link | scanDate
   

3. Copy the Sheet ID from the spreadsheet's URL:

   https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/THIS_PART_IS_YOUR_SHEET_ID/edit
   

4. In n8n, this workflow has 4 separate Google Sheets nodes. Each one needs two things set, not just one:

   • Document field → paste your real Sheet ID (replaces REPLACE_GOOGLE_SHEET_ID)
   • Sheet Within Document field → click it and select the correct tab from the dropdown that appears — this field does not fill in automatically just because the Document ID is set; it's a separate click every time.

   Node name	Sheet Within Document → select
   Look Up Last Checked	CompetitorState
   Update Last-Checked State	CompetitorState
   Save Flagged Updates	FlaggedUpdates
   Get This Week's Flagged Updates	FlaggedUpdates

5. Test each node individually with Execute step (not "Execute workflow") after setting it, one at a time — this catches a misconfigured node immediately instead of surfacing four errors at once during a full run.

Step 2 — Get an OpenRouter API key

1. Sign up at openrouter.ai — no credit card required
2. Generate a key from the Keys page
3. Paste it into the Authorization header of both LLM nodes, replacing REPLACE_OPENROUTER_API_KEY
4. The workflow defaults to free-tier models with automatic fallback — check openrouter.ai/models before your first real run, since the free model lineup rotates and the specific model names in this workflow may need updating

Step 3 — Set up Telegram

Same as the other workflows in this collection — create a bot via @BotFather, get your chat ID, add both to the "Send Digest" node's credentials and REPLACE_YOUR_TELEGRAM_CHAT_ID.

Step 4 — Fill in your product context and watchlist

• "Your Product Context" node — list your product's actual current features. This is what the LLM judges relevance against, so keep it accurate and current.
• "Competitor Watchlist" node — add each competitor with their changelog URL and whether it's rss or webpage. For any public GitHub repo, https://github.com/OWNER/REPO/releases.atom always works as a reliable RSS source for testing.

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🕹️ Usage

Once configured, it runs automatically on the weekly schedule. You can also trigger it manually via "Execute workflow" to test the full path end-to-end before trusting the schedule.

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🔑 Placeholders to Replace

Placeholder	Where	What to put
productName / features	Your Product Context node	Your product's real current feature list
Competitor list	Competitor Watchlist node	Name, changelog URL, and rss/webpage per competitor
REPLACE_GOOGLE_SHEET_ID	4 Google Sheets nodes	Your spreadsheet's ID (see Step 1)
Google Sheets credential	Same 4 nodes	OAuth connection to your Google account
REPLACE_OPENROUTER_API_KEY	2 LLM nodes	Your OpenRouter API key
REPLACE_YOUR_TELEGRAM_CHAT_ID + credential	Send Digest node	Your bot token + chat ID

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🔮 Roadmap

• Slack/Discord as alternative digest destinations
• Configurable relevance threshold (currently hardcoded at score ≥ 3)
• Auto-detect RSS feed availability instead of manually tagging each competitor

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🔒 Security Notes

• The webpage-extraction path sends up to 8,000 characters of a competitor's public changelog page to an LLM — no private data involved, but be aware raw page content leaves your machine when using a hosted API
• Free-tier LLM usage may log prompts/completions depending on the model provider — check each model's data policy on OpenRouter if that matters for your use case
• This workflow only reads public changelog pages; it never authenticates as or scrapes behind any competitor's login wall

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Part of the n8n_workflows collection. See the root README for the full workflow index, and CONTRIBUTING.md for how to submit changes.