@clmorgan Comparision and alternative blogpost or pages on your website are your money pages. They are a "Must have" component in your roadmap of marketing.
These pages drive traffic in which the visitor intent is either to choose a service like yours [ In comparison case ] or they are looking for something better than your competitors [ In alternative case ]
Also, talking about the example that you gave, you are going to write a number of content that would be list based [ Google prefers ranking list based content since it loves giving its users to make choices instead of forcing a monopoly ]. In that case, you can't give a backlink to your competitor. So, for that, you can do internal linking to your competitor's comparison page that you have published on your website. This makes you good in eyes of the algoritham as you give choice, plus, drive traffic to your money page [ Comparision or alternative ] where users can convert as customers.
In short, you are completing your user journey to choose a service like yours.
Dude, focus on high volume alternative/comparision keywords. Why would you invest time in creating content that has no reader or decision-maker? Just make sure you are a very close alternative to them.