Abstract: Comprehensive competitiveness reflects the relative strength of towns within a region, and conducting scientific evaluations of urban comprehensive competitiveness is of significant importance for formulating development strategies. Based on an analysis of the guiding role of comprehensive competitiveness evaluation in the preparation of strategic urban development plans, this paper constructs a comprehensive evaluation index system across four dimensions: economic and industrial driving force, ecological and environmental carrying capacity, infrastructure support capacity, and human settlement attractiveness. Using 14 towns (counties) in the border region of three southwestern provinces in China as case studies, a comprehensive competitiveness evaluation and analysis were conducted. Key findings reveal that the indicators with the greatest impact on urban comprehensive competitiveness, ranked in descending order, are: proportion of the tertiary industry, total GDP, number of days with good air quality, land urbanization rate, density of the county road network. Regional comparisons show that towns in Guizhou Province exhibit the highest average comprehensive competitiveness, followed by those in Sichuan Province, with Yunnan Province ranking last. Finally, development recommendations are proposed in areas such as: industrial structure transformation, enhancement of human settlement quality, infrastructure improvement, ecological environmental protection and utilization, strengthened inter-town cooperation.