What is Porter's Five Forces?

Porter’s Five Forces is Michael Porter’s framework for judging how attractive an industry is by examining five pressures: rivalry among existing competitors, the threat of new entrants, the threat of substitutes, the bargaining power of buyers, and the bargaining power of suppliers. Strong forces squeeze profitability; weak ones leave room to capture value.

For operators, the framework is a checklist for where competition actually comes from — not just the named rivals on your battlecards, but the spreadsheet a buyer could use instead, or the platform vendor that could bundle your feature. It pairs naturally with competitor monitoring, which tracks how those forces shift in practice.