Do you have experience with competitive intelligence tools like Crayon or Klue?

Great question!

I've used one of those vendors in the past and have evaluated various others. I have found a number of reasons why these tools are extremely helpful:

1. They save so much time vs. manually searching through Google (setting up Google Alerts) or scrolling through social media. It is nearly impossible to do your day-to-day PMM work plus keep tabs on your competitors. Having an app that automatically gives you daily updates is a true time saver. I would estimate it saved the PMM team 5-8 hours each week in staying on top of competitive news updates. I would estimate 10+ hours were saved in creating the program and templates by using the tool (being conservative in my estimates). 
2. These tools give you a way to track how your teams are actually using/consuming the competitive intel you're publishing. For example, after publishing a battlecard, I could see who viewed it and how many times. This helps in tracking the progress and success of your program.
3. In addition to battlecards, you can create other resources such as dashboards and newsletters. For example, I created a competitive dashboard focused on a specific industry (financial services) and it covered all the competitors who play in that space.
4. If you or your sales team comes across intel that isn't found on the web, you can upload it into the tool. Nothing is lost and it is all stored in the same place.
5. Everything is easily editable in the app vs. updating and formatting a static document such as a PPT or Word doc.

Can this be done without a tool? Of course! It just will take more time. Creating a competitive program without a CI tool can be done, but is much easier if you have other tools such as other social listening tools and sales enablement portals whether that is a Seismic, Highspot, Showpad, etc. Even just SharePoint makes it much easier because you can upload your battlecards and cheat sheets and still track who is viewing them and how often. I actually have paired up my CI tool with SharePoint a number of times to create the comprehensive competitive program the business needed. 

To add, having the CI tool will not magically provide a competitive intel program. A lot of work still has to be put into using the tool. The tool is simply a platform that helps automate, standardize, and measure. I've been the champion for CI at many places and sadly the programs disappeared after I left each company. 

The 6 keys to a successful CI program are: 

1. Championed (and not just by 1 person, but by multiple, ideally, by multiple teams so if there is turnover, the program doesn't disintegrate)
2. Centralized (everyone needs to know where to go to find the intel)
3. Scalable (want to be able to grow it easily and not reinvent the wheel)
4. Consistent (need to be able to remain consistent and predictable, i.e, send out your weekly newsletter on the same day each week)
5. Concise (we all have the attention span of a gnat, so keep your battlecards and newsletter short, sweet, and to the point)
6. Measurable (not being able to measure the success of your program makes it much harder to justify the time spent on it) 

Hope this was helpful!

This depends on your CI program's maturity. I've only ever used the tools in my career to address scale and user experience, but haven't found them to be particularly capable of adding anything to the grunt work of detailed, industry/product specific competitive intelligence. In my career, side-by-sides with value propositions have been more important to the enablement nature of our CI program, for which we used CompeteIQ. It's still manual work on the backend to understand the features/functionality and mapping it to ICP value props - but the tool acts as an on-demand, scalable way for your audience to do the comparisons real time vs. waiting for you to create something bespoke.