Students often treat SWOT, PESTLE and Porter's Five Forces as interchangeable. They are not. Each looks at a different layer of the world, and using the wrong one produces shallow analysis.
PESTLE: the wide environment
PESTLE scans the macro-environment — Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Legal and Environmental forces. It is the widest lens, useful at the start of analysis to spot trends no single company controls.
Porter's Five Forces: the industry
Five Forces zooms in one level, to the structure of a specific industry and how profit is shared within it. Where PESTLE asks “what is happening in the world?”, Five Forces asks “is this industry profitable, and why?”
SWOT: the company
SWOT is the narrowest and most personal — your own Strengths and Weaknesses, and the Opportunities and Threats you face. Its power is as a synthesis tool: the best SWOTs are filled in after a PESTLE and Five Forces analysis, so the opportunities and threats are grounded in real evidence rather than guesses.
The sequence that works
Run them outside-in: PESTLE → Five Forces → SWOT. Scan the environment, understand the industry, then turn that into a clear picture of where your organisation stands and what it should do. Explore all three in the Strategy models library.