Lantern vs Crayon — Which Competitive Intelligence Tool is Right for You?

Choosing the right competitive intelligence platform determines whether your team actually uses competitive data or lets it gather dust in a dashboard no one checks. Here is an honest, feature-by-feature comparison of Lantern and Crayon to help you decide.

Last updated: February 2026

The Competitive Intelligence Market in 2026

Competitive intelligence is no longer a luxury reserved for Fortune 500 strategy departments. In 2026, every B2B SaaS company operates in a market where competitors ship new features weekly, adjust pricing quarterly, and raise funding rounds that reshape the landscape overnight. The companies that win are the ones that stay informed, and the tools they use for that intelligence matter more than ever.

The CI market has split into two camps. On one side, you have enterprise platforms like Crayon and Klue that were built for large organizations with dedicated competitive intelligence teams, robust budgets, and complex dashboard requirements. On the other side, a new generation of tools like Lantern has emerged, purpose-built for startup founders, lean teams, and the fast-moving realities of modern SaaS.

If you are evaluating a Crayon alternative, this comparison covers everything: pricing, features, delivery methods, ideal use cases, data sources, and the philosophical differences between both platforms. We will be direct about where each tool shines and where it falls short.

Lantern vs Crayon: Feature Comparison

Pricing: Flat Rate vs Per-User Scaling

The most immediate difference between Lantern and Crayon is the pricing model. Lantern charges a flat monthly rate: $199/month for Pro (2 users, 10 competitors) or $399/month for Team (10 users, 50 competitors). There are no per-user fees. Your cost is predictable whether your team has two people or ten.

Crayon uses per-user pricing, typically ranging from $39 to $99 per user per month depending on the plan and features. This means a five-person team could pay $195 to $495 per month, and a ten-person team could run $390 to $990 per month. For larger enterprise deployments, Crayon's costs can reach thousands per month.

For startup founders watching every dollar, the difference is significant. Lantern's flat-rate model means you can share competitive intelligence across your entire founding team without worrying about incremental seat costs. You know exactly what you will pay each month, and the price does not change as your team grows within the plan limits.

Delivery: Slack-First vs Dashboard-First

This is the fundamental philosophical difference between Lantern and Crayon, and it affects everything about how your team actually uses competitive intelligence.

Lantern is Slack-first. Every morning between 6 and 8 AM your local time, Lantern delivers a structured competitive intelligence brief directly to your Slack channel. The brief includes signal types (pricing changes, new features, hiring signals, funding announcements), impact scores, evidence quotes with source links, strategic context, and recommended actions. You read it in Slack, where you already spend your day. No additional tab to open, no dashboard to remember to check.

Crayon is dashboard-first. The core experience is a web application where you log in to review competitor intelligence, set up alerts, manage battlecards, and browse collected data. Crayon does offer email and Slack notifications, but the primary workflow assumes you are spending time in the Crayon dashboard reviewing and curating information.

Why does this matter? Data from competitive intelligence platforms consistently shows that push-based delivery (alerts sent to you) drives significantly higher engagement than pull-based delivery (dashboards you must remember to visit). Lantern's Slack-first approach achieves 8x higher daily engagement compared to dashboard-only workflows. If intelligence is not seen, it is worthless. Lantern's delivery model ensures competitive data is part of your team's daily routine, not an afterthought.

AI Analysis: Strategic Reasoning vs Basic Summaries

Both Lantern and Crayon use artificial intelligence, but they use it differently.

Lantern uses Anthropic's Claude AI for strategic analysis. This is not just summarization. For each competitive signal, Lantern's AI generates a "Why It Matters" strategic context section and a "Your Move" actionable recommendation. The AI considers the signal type, its potential impact on your business, and what a founder or product leader should do in response. Every AI-generated insight is grounded in verified data with source attribution, meaning you can click through to the original source and verify anything Lantern tells you.

Crayon provides automated summaries of collected competitive data. The platform surfaces changes and updates across competitor properties, but the analysis layer is more focused on aggregation and categorization than strategic reasoning. Crayon expects users (typically product marketing managers) to perform the strategic interpretation themselves.

For founders and small teams who do not have a dedicated competitive intelligence analyst, Lantern's AI-powered strategic analysis is a significant advantage. It bridges the gap between raw data and actionable decisions. For large organizations with dedicated PMM teams who prefer to do their own analysis, Crayon's approach of presenting organized data may be preferred.

Data Sources: Comprehensive vs Specialized

Both platforms monitor the core competitive intelligence data sources: competitor websites (pricing pages, feature pages, positioning language), news and press releases, social media accounts, and customer review platforms like G2 and Capterra.

Where Lantern adds additional depth is in research and open-source intelligence. On the Team tier, Lantern monitors arXiv research papers, GitHub repositories, and technical blog posts. For AI and deep-tech companies, this is critical intelligence. Knowing that a competitor's research team published a paper on a new approach, or that they open-sourced a key library, can be as strategically important as a pricing change.

Lantern also monitors Hacker News discussions, Reddit threads (including subreddits like r/SaaS, r/startups, and r/MachineLearning), and talent signals from job postings. The job board tracking reveals strategic hires, geographic expansion plans, and organizational priorities that competitors rarely announce publicly.

Crayon has a broad web monitoring infrastructure and excels at tracking website changes at a granular level. If you need to know that a competitor changed a single word on their pricing page, Crayon's web monitoring capabilities are thorough. However, Crayon does not offer the research and OSS tracking that Lantern provides for technical teams.

Why Founders Choose Lantern Over Crayon

The founders and startup teams that choose Lantern over Crayon consistently cite these reasons:

1. It fits how startups actually work

Startup teams live in Slack. They do not have time to log into another dashboard, navigate to a competitive intelligence tab, and browse through collected data. Lantern meets founders where they already are, delivering actionable intelligence in the tool they check first every morning. The daily brief becomes a habit, not a chore.

2. Predictable, founder-friendly pricing

At $199/month for Pro, Lantern costs less than a single enterprise seat on many competitive intelligence platforms. There is no annual contract required. No negotiations with a sales team. No per-user pricing that punishes you for sharing intelligence with your co-founder. You sign up, add your competitors, connect Slack, and the briefs start flowing the next morning.

3. Strategic analysis included, not just data

Founders do not need more data. They need to understand what the data means and what to do about it. Lantern's AI-powered "Why It Matters" and "Your Move" sections transform raw competitive signals into strategic recommendations. This saves hours of synthesis time that founders would otherwise spend connecting dots across multiple sources.

4. Setup takes minutes, not weeks

Crayon's enterprise onboarding process typically involves multiple calls with a customer success team, custom configuration, and a ramp-up period before you see value. Lantern's setup is self-serve: add your competitors, connect your Slack workspace, and receive your first brief the next morning. For teams that need competitive intelligence yesterday, speed matters.

5. No AI hallucinations

Every piece of intelligence in a Lantern brief includes a source link. If Lantern's confidence in a signal is low, it does not show it. The platform maintains 95%+ accuracy through multi-source verification. This is critical for founders making strategic decisions. You need to trust your intelligence, and trust requires verifiable sources.

When Crayon Might Be the Better Choice

Honest comparisons acknowledge when the alternative is actually the right fit. Here are scenarios where Crayon may serve you better than Lantern:

Large enterprise teams with dedicated PMM resources

If you have a 50+ person product marketing team that needs individual dashboards, custom battlecard workflows, and deep CRM integrations across your entire sales organization, Crayon's enterprise infrastructure is purpose-built for that scale. Lantern is optimized for teams of 2 to 10 people, and while the Enterprise tier offers unlimited users, the core product philosophy favors lean, fast-moving teams.

Organizations that need granular web change tracking

Crayon has invested heavily in pixel-level website change detection. If your primary use case is tracking every visual and textual change on a competitor's website (beyond pricing, features, and positioning), Crayon's web monitoring is more granular. Lantern focuses on strategically significant changes rather than comprehensive change logs.

Teams that prefer dashboard-based workflows

Some organizations have established competitive intelligence workflows built around dashboards, reporting, and manual curation. If your team prefers to browse and curate intelligence rather than receive automated briefs, Crayon's dashboard experience is mature and well-designed for that workflow.

Companies with complex salesforce integration needs

Crayon's sales battlecard functionality and deep CRM integrations are designed for large sales organizations. If your primary goal is arming a sales team of 100+ reps with real-time competitive battlecards during calls, Crayon has more established infrastructure for that specific use case.

The Origin Story: Why Lantern Exists

Lantern was built by Amogh Reddy, who experienced the competitive intelligence problem firsthand. While running dply.ai, Amogh's team had two weeks of runway left. An early version of Lantern flagged a competitor move that no one else had caught. The team pivoted based on that intelligence and closed an enterprise deal three weeks later.

That experience crystallized a belief: competitive intelligence should not require a six-figure platform and a dedicated analyst. Every founder deserves access to the same quality of competitive data that large enterprises take for granted. Lantern was built to deliver that intelligence in the simplest, most actionable format possible: a daily brief in Slack.

Previously, Amogh helped launch Superposition Capital, a venture fund that raised $5M in Fund I. Seeing dozens of portfolio companies struggle with the same competitive blind spots reinforced the need for a tool built specifically for the startup context, where time is scarce, budgets are tight, and every strategic decision matters.

Making the Right Choice for Your Team

The decision between Lantern and Crayon ultimately comes down to your team's size, workflow, and budget.

Choose Lantern if: You are a founder or startup team (2–100 people) who wants competitive intelligence delivered to Slack every morning, with AI-powered strategic analysis, at a predictable flat rate starting at $199/month. You value speed, simplicity, and actionability over comprehensive dashboards.

Choose Crayon if: You are a large enterprise with a dedicated product marketing team, need granular website change tracking, want complex CRM and battlecard integrations, and have the budget and onboarding capacity for an enterprise platform.

Both tools solve the same fundamental problem: helping teams understand what competitors are doing. The difference is in how they deliver that intelligence and who they are built for.