A competitive teardown goes stale the moment you close the tabs. You remember the gist, but the specific paywall copy, the exact field order on signup, the weird empty state on the dashboard, those details evaporate by the time you write the Slack message. What your team actually needs is the screens, in order, with your reasoning attached to each one.
Here is a workflow that takes about 30 to 45 minutes per competitor and ends with one link the rest of the team can open. No install, no extension, no signup required to publish it.
Step 1: Pick the flow before you open the competitor
Decide what you are tearing down before you start clicking. "Their whole product" is not a teardown, it is a wander. Pick one of: the marketing site and pricing, the signup and first-run experience, a specific feature flow (search, checkout, invite-a-teammate), or the empty and error states. Write the goal in one sentence so future you remembers why these screenshots exist.
Outcome: a single sentence like "Compare Acme's onboarding from landing page to first value moment against ours."
Step 2: Open a fresh review tab
Go to start a new review in one browser tab. You do not need to sign in to publish. If you want the review to stick around past 30 days, sign in with Google or a magic link first; otherwise just keep going and claim it later.
Open the competitor in a separate window. Two windows side by side is the setup, because you will be flipping between "do the thing" and "capture the thing."
Outcome: an empty review on the left, the competitor on the right.
Step 3: Walk the flow in order and capture each meaningful screen
Move through the competitor like a new user would. At each screen worth a comment, click Capture screen, share the competitor's window, and either keep the full frame or drag a rectangle to crop to the part that matters. Pricing page: crop to the plan table. Signup: capture the full form so field order and required asterisks survive. Dashboard: full frame, then drop a numbered pin on the specific element you want to talk about.
Be greedy. Capture the screens you are not sure about. It is faster to delete a screenshot later than to redo the flow.
Outcome: 8 to 20 screenshot items in order, each pointing at something specific.
Step 4: Talk through each item while it is fresh
For each screenshot, add a comment. In Chrome or Edge, dictate it: the speech-to-text uses the browser's built-in recognition, so you can talk at the screen while your hands are still on the trackpad. In Firefox, type instead.
The comment should answer two questions: what is this screen doing, and what is the takeaway for us. "Their pricing has three tiers and the middle one is pre-selected with a 'Most popular' badge. Our pricing page lets the visitor land on the cheapest plan first; worth testing the default." That is useful. "Nice pricing page" is not.
Outcome: every screenshot has a comment with an observation and a so-what.
Step 5: Add free-floating notes for things you cannot screenshot
Some observations have no screen. The marketing email that arrived 12 minutes after signup. The fact that they never asked for a credit card. The total click count to reach first value. Add these as free-floating comments with no screenshot. They sit in the same review alongside the visual items so the full picture lives in one place. This is similar to how a structured product review mixes evidence with judgment.
Outcome: the non-visual context is captured in the same review.
Step 6: Publish and share the link
Click Publish. You get a short URL of the form /r/<slug>. Anyone with the link can open the review and read it; they can also leave a comment on any item, which is where the actual team discussion happens. The product manager can reply on the pricing item with "we should A/B this," and the designer can reply on the empty-state item with "already in next sprint." Mark each comment resolved when it has been handled.
Drop the link into the channel where the work happens. That is the entire handoff. For more on framing the link for stakeholders, the competitive analysis use case page has examples of how teams structure these.
Outcome: one URL in Slack instead of a 14-attachment email.
Step 7: Export the formats the receivers need
The same review is available as a PDF and a Word document for the partner who wants something to print or paste into a strategy deck. It is also available as plain markdown at /r/<slug>/markdown, which is the format to use if you want to drop the teardown into a doc, a wiki, or an LLM for synthesis. If you are running several teardowns and want help spotting patterns, the markdown export feeds straight into that kind of research synthesis work.
Outcome: the same teardown exists in every format your team uses.
What to do next time
Keep a running list of competitors and re-run the same flow every quarter against the same review template (signup, pricing, core feature, empty states). The screenshots from last quarter become the baseline; the new review shows what they changed. That is when a teardown stops being a one-off and starts being a real signal. Open Cobalt Capture and run the first one before you lose the afternoon to something else.