Inspect them and look at their battle armor level/rank, magatama, refines, rune stones, purifies, summon runes, etc. I think you are able to view almost everything besides cultivation, 8 gates, tactics level, ninja tools, mood, group skills, group summon, and exact character advancement. Group summon won't matter if you're in the same group and you already said your group skills are higher (although that's taking their word for it).
You should be able to compare your stats to theirs on each of these to get a general idea of where their power is coming from. If you don't see a difference in anything visible, it's likely one of the few things you can't see (like maybe they bought a bunch of tactics pages and leveled it up a lot).