I like to compare coin performance over time. I always use Bitcoin (BTC) as a baseline for these comparisons, because Bitcoin dominates the market by both market cap and volume. Seeing how a coin's price movement is correlated to Bitcoin's helps give an indication of its strengths.
I turn to coinlib for a helpful graphic comparison tool.
Let's compare Bitcoin to Steem since April 2018, when the coin market began to regroup after Q1 declines.
Although roughly correlated, Steem has outperformed Bitcoin over the last seven weeks.
This link will give you the above chart from April 1, 2018 to today's date. I took the screenshot on May 21.
Comparing Coins/Tokens within a Sector
Taking Steem's social media sector, let's use coinlib to compare its performance to other social media coins/tokens. For this example, I've chosen ReddCoin, QunQun and ALISmedia.
From this chart, it's easy to see that ALIS is a market laggard. Before I invested in the Japanese social media platform, I would make a more thorough investigation as to why this is the case.
This chart also highlights a drawback of the graphing application. Users can't change the colors in the graph. The default is "Asset 1" is blue, 2 is green, 3 is purple and 4 is red.
I entered these assets according to market cap, so ReddCoin appears green--a little counterintuitive.
But the service is free, and supports a large range of coins and tokens. The page also contains other helpful comparisons, like correlation, market cap and all-time-high info.
What site do you use to graph performance? Please let me know in the comments.
Note: This is not a referral link. I find the site helpful and thought I would share it.