Competitor email tracking tools compared: what 8 tools collect and cost

Competitor email tracking tools differ in what they collect: galleries such as Really Good Emails and Email Love hold selected designs, archives such as Milled, MailCharts and BadRep hold emails from the brands they cover, Panoramata adds texts, ads and landing pages, and trackers such as Owletter and SendView follow the rivals you name. Choose by the job, and for 1 to 3 rivals a spare inbox for each and a sheet are enough.

Retention agencies, brand CRM leads and founders track rivals’ emails and texts to time their own offers, plan Black Friday and show clients what the market sends. 8 dedicated tools do the job, and they differ most in what they collect.

A gallery holds designs its editors chose. An archive holds what its own addresses received from the brands it covers. A tracker holds what reaches addresses pointed at the rivals you name. Listed prices run from free to $399 a month, and 1 tool lists no price.

Triggered flows earn a large share of email revenue. In Klaviyo’s 2026 benchmarks, automated flows were 5.3% of email sends and earned nearly 41% of email revenue, so a rival’s welcome and basket emails carry much of its email strategy.

What competitor email tracking is

Competitor email tracking is recording the emails, and often the texts, that rival brands send their subscribers, with the date, the offer and the place of each message in its sequence. Teams use that record for 5 jobs:

• Offer timing: when a rival discounts, how deep, and how the offer grows for subscribers who haven’t bought.
• Calendars and frequency: the days and hours rivals send, and how often in a sale week.
• Flows: the welcome series, basket and browse reminders and win back emails, with the delay before each step.
• Black Friday planning: when rivals start their teasers and early access emails, and what they repeat each year.
• Client reporting: a comparison an agency’s client can check. MailCharts’ agencies page quotes an account manager whose clients would “constantly be asking us to produce a competitive analysis based on email”.

How to compare the tools

7 criteria separate the tools:

• What it collects: a curated gallery, a campaign archive, triggered flows (welcome, basket, win back), texts or landing pages. A tool receives a flow only if its address takes the action that starts it.
• Coverage and countries: how many brands it covers, and in which markets.
• History: how far back the record goes. An address opened today holds nothing sent before it signed up.
• Speed: whether new emails appear as they arrive, daily or in a weekly roll up.
• Search, alerts and exports: filters by brand, offer or holiday, alerts on keywords or new offers, and exports to CSV, HTML or an API.
• Brand choice: whether it covers only brands it already follows, or any brand you name.
• Price: as listed on its own page on 23 October 2026.

Curated email galleries

Really Good Emails

Really Good Emails, part of Beefree, is a free gallery of email designs that its site says has been curated by humans since 2014.

• Collects: 20,000+ selected emails, as its pricing page counts them, filed by type (welcome, abandoned cart, Black Friday) and by industry.
• Best at: finding a well designed example of 1 kind of email fast.
• Where it stops: it holds a selection, and its pages describe no brand tracking, texts or alerts.
• Price as listed: the gallery is free. The paid plans are for its email builder, RGE Studio, from $30 a month.
• Best for: designers and copywriters.

Email Love

Email Love says it collects, analyses and breaks down the best emails from 8,600+ brands.

• Collects: selected emails with a written breakdown, plus journeys and trend reports. You can ask the team by email to add an email or a brand.
• Best at: examples that explain how each email works.
• Where it stops: it holds emails chosen as the best, and its pages describe no alerts, texts or tracking of a set list of rivals.
• Price as listed: free with an account, which its pricing page says includes its MCP and REST API. Its paid plans are for its Figma plugin, from $19 per user a month.
• Best for: brand teams and freelancers who want examples explained.

Searchable email archives

An archive subscribes its own addresses to many brands and keeps what arrives, so for the brands it covers it holds mail from before you started looking.

Milled

Milled calls itself a search engine for email newsletters and ecommerce sales, and its homepage says it receives 20,513 emails a day.

• Collects: campaign emails, searchable by keyword, subject line, brand, country and holiday. The pages we read don’t mention triggered flows or texts.
• Best at: breadth, with the full archive on Pro, holiday filters, keyword alerts, saved searches and full length screenshots.
• Where it stops: you follow brands it already covers, and can suggest others through its Submit a Brand form.
• Price as listed: Basic is free. Pro is $99 a month or $999 a year, and Team, for 5 seats, $299 a month or $2,999 a year, on the Internet Archive’s copy of its pricing page from 10 February 2026.
• Best for: category research and last year’s holiday campaigns.

MailCharts

MailCharts presents itself as MailCharts from Validity, offering competitive intelligence, industry insights and inspiration for email and SMS.

• Collects: campaigns, curated texts, and ecommerce email journeys that its homepage says it signs up for and triggers. Its agencies page says it tracks 30,000+ companies.
• Best at: journeys by type of subscriber (buyers, cart abandoners, people who haven’t bought), benchmarks of frequency, discounts and send times, and CSV exports for client decks.
• Where it stops: its pages don’t describe adding a brand or setting alerts, and its pricing link leads to Litmus’s pricing page, which lists no plans and says Litmus is now part of Validity Engage.
• Price as listed: not listed. You contact the company to start.
• Best for: journey and benchmark research, bought through sales.

BadRep

BadRep is a searchable database of marketing emails. On 23 October 2026 its homepage listed 51,174 emails from 1,910 brands in 240+ categories.

• Collects: campaigns and flow emails, classified by type, offer, email platform and design, each with a screenshot and its HTML. A brand’s welcome, cart or post purchase emails show in date order.
• Best at: comparing many emails at once, with 20+ filters.
• Where it stops: its 1,910 brands span many sectors, so check that your rivals are indexed. You can request brands, and its pages describe no texts.
• Price as listed: $29 a month, cancel any time. The page says all sales are final.
• Best for: copy and offer research on a small budget.

Competitor monitoring platforms

Panoramata

Panoramata tracks competitors’ emails, texts, flows, ads, landing pages and website changes on 1 platform.

• Collects: newsletters, flows such as welcome and cart abandonment, texts, ads on 6 networks including Meta, TikTok and Google Display, landing pages and site changes, by country. Tracking of texts, flows and landing pages comes with every plan, and searches of its library of them start on Professional.
• Best at: 1 view across channels, with daily summaries, CSV and PDF exports, alerts from Professional, and an MCP connection to Claude or ChatGPT on every plan.
• Where it stops: Startup covers 20 competitors and 6 months of history, and its pages don’t say how it collects emails.
• Price as listed: Startup $99, Professional $179 and Advanced $399 a month, or $990, $1,790 and $3,990 a year. Enterprise on request.
• Best for: emails, texts and ads from many rivals in 1 tool.

Trackers for rivals you name

A tracker follows the websites or companies you name, so the list of brands is yours.

Owletter

Owletter captures the emails a website sends to its mailing list, screenshots and stores them, and alerts you on keywords you set.

• Collects: mailing list emails from the websites you monitor, with analytics on send days, seasonal frequency and spam reputation.
• Best at: a low cost archive of a fixed set of rivals, shared with the team, with roundups and keyword alerts.
• Where it stops: its pages don’t say how it receives emails, and don’t mention flows, texts or exports.
• Price as listed: Starter $29 a month for 10 websites with 12 months’ retention, Pro $49 for 25 and Unlimited $99, both with lifetime storage. Each has a 14 day free trial.
• Best for: small teams watching up to 25 named rivals.

SendView

SendView gives you tracking addresses to sign up to any company you choose, in an inbox built for analysis.

• Collects: what its addresses receive after you sign them up, including sequences you start. Its page suggests several addresses for 1 company to compare the newsletter with the abandoned cart emails, and auto open so a brand doesn’t drop the address for inactivity.
• Best at: control over brands and journeys, with sequence timelines, trend reports on send times, email platforms, DKIM and SPF, weekly digests and AI summaries.
• Where it stops: you do the sign ups unless you pay for Managed, history starts at your sign up, and its page mentions no texts or ads.
• Price as listed: Standard $69 a month for 10 companies, Pro $99 for 25, Ultimate $169 for 50, and Managed $249. Standard, Pro and Ultimate have a 10 day free trial.
• Best for: named rivals’ welcome and basket sequences, for teams and agencies.

The 8 tools compared

We make Obsession, which does some of this, so every line about another tool is taken from that tool’s own pages, checked on 23 October 2026.

Track competitor emails by hand

The method needs a new address for each rival, a spare phone for texts, a Gmail filter and a sheet. It records the flows you start yourself, and it holds nothing sent before your sign up.

1. Open 1 address for each rival

A new Gmail address for each rival keeps each welcome series apart and shows the tab Gmail chose. Past a handful of rivals, Google Workspace saves time: you can add up to 30 aliases for each user at no extra cost, all arriving in 1 inbox, and the deliveredto: operator in Gmail’s search help lists the mail sent to each alias.

2. Sign up the way a customer does

Sign up through each rival’s pop up on a phone, note the time and the offer on screen, and confirm the first email if it asks. For basket emails, sign up a second address, add a product to the basket in the same browser and leave. For texts, opt in with a number that has never joined the rival’s list. Use only the public sign up any customer can use.

3. Label each email and log it

In Gmail, open the search options, enter the rival’s sender address or the alias, choose Create filter and send the mail to a label, as Gmail’s filter help describes. Log each email in a sheet: rival, time received, subject, offer and code, campaign or flow step, Gmail tab, and a link. A search for category:promotions lists the mail Gmail placed in that tab.

4. Keep each address active

Open and click an email from each rival every few weeks, because brands remove subscribers who never engage. Klaviyo’s help centre recommends a sunset segment of profiles created at least 180 days ago that received at least 5 emails in the last 72 weeks and never opened or clicked, and suppressing those who stay unengaged.

5. Save the original of anything you report

For an email you will show a client or a manager, choose More, then Show original, which Gmail’s header help says opens the full header in a new window. Keep the header with the screenshot, since it carries the arrival time and the sender checks.

6. Count the hours

Use your own minutes: rivals × minutes a week on each rival × 4 ÷ 60 = hours a month. Add time for each new rival’s first week, when its welcome series arrives.

An AI assistant connected to the spare inbox can summarise and compare what arrived. What ChatGPT, Claude and 3 other assistants can do here covers their schedules, caps and limits, including that none can read mail from before the sign up.

For 1 to 3 rivals, this method needs no paid tool. At 20 rivals it needs 20 addresses, a phone number for each and about 20 hours a month at 15 minutes a rival, and it still can’t recover older mail. Obsession’s email and SMS tracking is built for that case: it subscribes an AI agent to each rival’s emails and texts and logs every message, offer and code on 1 timeline, with proof.

Which tool fits which job

• Design and copy ideas: Really Good Emails or Email Love, both free.
• What a category sent around a holiday: Milled, with its holiday filters, or Panoramata.
• A rival’s welcome and basket emails: SendView or the method by hand, where you start each flow, or BadRep, MailCharts and Panoramata for rivals they already cover.
• Emails, texts and ads from many rivals: Panoramata, with up to 20 on Startup and no limit from Professional.
• Up to 25 named rivals on a small budget: Owletter.
• Client reports at an agency: SendView’s white labelled agency accounts, Panoramata’s white label benchmark reports, sold as an add on, or MailCharts’ exports. The Black Friday rival report template gives a 1 page format, and the email marketing audit sets the rival comparison beside the client’s own emails.
• 1 to 3 rivals: the method by hand, with an assistant reading the inbox.

Limits and next steps

• Every line comes from the vendors’ pages. We did not run the tools, and every brand and email count is the vendor’s own.
• An archive holds what its own addresses received. A buyer, a long time subscriber or a subscriber in another country may receive different emails.
• A new address starts empty. Mail sent before the sign up exists only in an archive that already covered the brand.
• A Gmail tab is 1 inbox’s view. Gmail can sort the same email differently for an engaged customer.
• Plans and prices change. Check each pricing page on the day you buy.

Klaviyo’s June 2026 timing guide plans Black Friday teasers 2 to 4 weeks before the sale, in early November. Sign up to each rival by Friday 30 October, so every address is on the list before the teasers and holds 4 weeks of mail by Black Friday on Friday 27 November. What a rival’s first order costs once its welcome code is applied is in a competitor’s real price after the welcome code.

Frequently asked questions