What this covers: Adding your first competitor, setting up notifications, adding website monitoring, and reading the data Rivale surfaces for you. Takes about 3 minutes.
Step 0: Sign up for the closed beta
Go to https://app.rivale.io/, click the “Sign Up” tab and sign up with the same email address you received the invite at.
Step 1: Add your first competitor
Go to Competitors in the sidebar. Enter a WordPress.org plugin slug (like classic-editor) or paste the full plugin URL. Click Add Competitor.
You can track up to 10 competitors. Start with 2-3 plugins you compete with directly.
Initial data (stats, reviews, version history) appears within minutes. If data looks thin on first load, refresh the page. Trends and change detection build up over the following days as Rivale collects more snapshots.
You can also trigger a manual sync anytime from the Competitors page using the Sync All button.
Step 2: Set up notifications
You don’t need to check Rivale every day. Set up notifications and let it come to you.
Go to Notification Settings in the sidebar. Enable email notifications, enter your email address, and choose a frequency:
- Daily Digest — one email per day covering everything that happened
- Weekly Summary — one email per week on your chosen day, covering activity and trends across all your competitors
If you’re unsure, start with the Weekly Summary.
On top of email, you can also connect Slack to get notifications there.
On the Vantage plan, Slack supports real-time alerts so you hear about changes the same day.
Step 3: Add website monitoring
Rivale tracks more than WordPress.org. For each competitor, you can monitor three marketing pages: their homepage, pricing page, and features page.
Open any competitor’s Analyze page and scroll to Marketing site changes. Enter the URLs you want to watch and click Save URLs. Rivale takes a baseline snapshot right away, then checks daily. When something changes, it classifies what happened: pricing change, new feature announced, positioning shift, and more.
Step 4: Explore the plugin analysis
Click any competitor name to open its Analyze page.
The Overview tab is your main view. It includes:
- Activity feed showing everything Rivale detected (releases, review changes, README edits, website changes)
- A snapshot brief summarizing what’s notable about this competitor
- README and changelog diffs showing exactly what changed between versions
- Low-star reviews tagged by complaint type
- Marketing site changes (once you’ve added URLs in Step 3)
The Forum Health tab shows support thread resolution rates and unanswered threads.
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Good to know
- Your trial includes full access.
- Rivale syncs automatically every few hours. You can also trigger manual syncs daily from the Competitors page.