It is a competitor, and good project.. I think it may be fair to say Substratum has a more simple concept, has a trump card with decentralized DNS if they can pull it off, and has a more mature dev community (blockchain in general) to catch up very quickly (MaidSafe more like pioneers).. they have focused on easy adoption so they hit some really sweet spots with unlimited upside to boot.. i’m biased because i am overly invested in SUB and SNGLS because of that adoption ease.. but i love both projects..