Most teams do not have a competitor problem. They have a time problem.

You know competitor monitoring matters. You want to know who is shipping faster, who has gone quiet, what themes keep appearing, and whether another product is quietly pulling ahead. But the real work of staying informed is messy and manual. You open changelogs in too many tabs. You skim RSS feeds. You check status pages. You paste links into Slack. You promise yourself you will do a proper competitor review next week.

Then next week gets busy too.

That is exactly why we built Sonar.

Sonar is ChangeCrab’s new competitive intelligence software for product teams. It watches public changelogs, feeds, and status pages, then turns that activity into something genuinely useful: heartbeat charts, tracked competitor profiles, signals, and concise AI-generated intelligence briefs.

Instead of scattered monitoring and half-finished competitor spreadsheets, you get a live view of how the market is moving.

Why We Built Sonar

Most teams are surrounded by market signals, but very few have a practical system for turning those signals into decisions.

A competitor launches three updates in a month. Another quietly improves onboarding. A third has a rough patch of outages while also accelerating releases. None of those things on their own gives you the full picture. Together, though, they reveal a lot about product direction, operational maturity, and shipping pace.

The problem is that most teams do not have the time to manually connect those dots.

Sonar was built to help answer questions like:

• Who is shipping faster than us right now?
• Which competitors have slowed down?
• What themes keep appearing across the market?
• Which products deserve a closer look this week?
• What can we learn from public product updates without running a full research project?

This is not about vanity monitoring. It is about giving product, marketing, support, and leadership teams a lightweight way to stay sharp.

What Sonar Does

At its core, Sonar turns public product activity into structured competitor intelligence.

You can add competitors by name or URL, let Sonar discover their public sources, and then monitor what changes over time.

Shipping Heartbeat

The Shipping Heartbeat gives you an instant read on release velocity.

It compares your pace with tracked competitors over time, so instead of relying on intuition, you can see whether you are ahead of the pack, matching it, or falling behind.

This makes it easy to spot:

• a competitor accelerating into a bigger launch cycle
• a previously active team going quiet
• whether your own release cadence is strengthening or slipping
• how the wider market is moving over the last few months

For busy teams, this is one of the fastest ways to understand market momentum.

Competitor Profiles That Stay Useful

Each tracked company gets a live workspace inside Sonar.

You can quickly see when they last updated, how active they are, which sources are being monitored, and how their release pace compares with yours. Instead of maintaining a static competitor spreadsheet that becomes stale almost immediately, you get an up-to-date view that evolves with their public activity.

That means less admin and better context.

AI Intelligence Briefs

Competitive monitoring is only valuable if it leads to clarity.

That is why Sonar includes AI-generated intelligence briefs based on observed public updates. These briefs turn raw changelog activity into readable summaries your team can use in planning sessions, weekly reviews, launch prep, or leadership updates.

Instead of reading every changelog entry one by one, you can get a fast summary of where a competitor appears to be investing.

That is especially useful when your team needs to answer questions like:

• What has this competitor focused on recently?
• Are they investing in reliability, growth, onboarding, workflow depth, or something else?
• What should we pay attention to before this roadmap discussion?

The goal is not to replace human judgment. It is to give your team a much stronger starting point.

Status Page Monitoring Alongside Product Updates

Shipping is only one part of the story - reliability matters too. Sonar takes into account the outages of your competitors and your own so you can both capitalise on these events, and see how they affected trends.

Sometimes the most important signal is not just that a company is shipping more. It is that they are shipping more while also dealing with instability, or that they have gone quiet after a run of incidents.

Those patterns matter.

Who Sonar Is For

Sonar was built for real product teams, not just analysts.

It is useful for:

• Product teams that want clearer roadmap and market context
• Marketing teams that need better positioning awareness
• Founders and leadership who want concise competitor briefings
• Support and success teams that need context ahead of customer conversations

In short, Sonar is not just another competitor monitoring tool. It is a practical workspace for teams that want to understand what the market is doing without wasting hours every week.

What Makes Sonar Different

There are plenty of ways to monitor competitors in theory.

In practice, most of them fall into one of two categories:

• generic alerts that create noise
• heavyweight research workflows that are too slow to maintain

Sonar sits in the middle.

It is lightweight enough to stay live, but structured enough to be genuinely useful. It does not just dump links into your inbox. It gives you a workspace built around pace, patterns, and signal.

That is the difference.

How to Use Sonar

If you want to get started quickly, we have already put together a full step-by-step guide covering setup, workflow, heartbeat charts, and intelligence briefs.

Read it here: How to Use Sonar

Who Can Access Sonar

Sonar is now available on paid plans and active trials.

Free users can explore a preview to see how Sonar works and what the output looks like before unlocking the full workspace. The live tracking, filters, reports, and intelligence features are available once Sonar is enabled on the account.

Launching Sonar

This is an important launch for us.

ChangeCrab started with a simple belief: product communication should be clearer, faster, and less painful. Sonar extends that same thinking into competitive intelligence. It helps teams not only publish their own updates, but also understand the wider shipping landscape around them.

We think that matters more than ever.

The teams that win are not always the ones with the biggest roadmap. They are often the ones with the clearest view of what is happening around them and the discipline to respond well.

That is what Sonar is for.

Try Sonar Today

If you are already on a paid plan or active trial, Sonar is ready for you now.

Add a few competitors, let discovery do the heavy lifting, and start with the Shipping Heartbeat. Then explore tracked profiles, review the signals, and generate an intelligence brief for the companies you care about most.

If you are on a free account, open the preview and see what you have been missing.

Sonar gives you a better way to monitor competitors, understand product momentum, and stay informed without the busywork.