Monitor competitor websites daily with Firecrawl, Gemini, and Zalo Bot alerts

Who is this for?

Vietnamese businesses, marketers, and product managers who need daily competitive intelligence about competitor websites without manually checking them every day.

How it works

This template combines two custom community nodes (Firecrawl + Zalo Bot) to automate competitor monitoring with AI-powered Vietnamese summaries.

1. Schedule Trigger runs daily at 9 AM
2. Set Configuration holds competitor URL, brand name, and Zalo Chat ID
3. Firecrawl Scrape fetches the competitor page (handles JS, anti-bot, content cleaning)
4. OpenAI Summarize generates a concise Vietnamese summary of key updates
5. Format Alert prepares the notification text with timestamp and source
6. Zalo Bot Send delivers the alert via Zalo Bot Platform

Why this combination is unique

• Firecrawl handles modern JavaScript-heavy websites that traditional scrapers fail on
• Zalo Bot is the dominant messaging platform in Vietnam (75M+ users)
• Vietnamese AI summarization removes the language barrier for local teams
• No other template combines web scraping with Zalo Bot alerts

Set up steps

1. Install community nodes n8n-nodes-firecrawl-v2 and n8n-nodes-zalo-platform
2. Get Firecrawl API key from firecrawl.dev (or use self-hosted)
3. Create a Zalo Bot via Zalo Bot Manager in the Zalo app to get your Bot Token
4. Add OpenAI credentials (or swap with Claude/Gemini)
5. Update Set Configuration with competitor URL and Zalo Chat ID
6. Activate and let it run daily

Requirements

• Self-hosted n8n (community nodes cannot be installed on n8n Cloud)
• Firecrawl API key (Cloud or self-hosted)
• Zalo Bot Token from Zalo Bot Manager
• OpenAI API key

How to customize

• Loop over multiple competitors
• Replace OpenAI with Claude, Gemini, or local LLM
• Save history to Google Sheets to track changes
• Add diff detection to alert only on actual changes
• Send to multiple Zalo recipients or groups