Best 5 Free Website Change Monitoring Software 2024

Website change monitoring tools come in handy for businesses and individuals alike.

Maybe you’re watching competitors’ websites, or tracking partner’s prices for compliance. Maybe it’s simply Nike’s next sneaker drop.

Monitor website changes with our list of the best website change monitoring software in 2024.

Businesses and individuals alike need to gather information from the web to keep their knowledge and awareness on something up-to-date. Data powers business decisions – such as tracking competitors' prices for intel, or conducting compliance monitoring on partners’ websites, product listings or ads.

Maybe you want to keep an eye on various websites for competitive intelligence, or you’re an eCommerce site and looking for in stock alerts to make smart purchasing decisions.

Because we’re past the point of manually rechecking web sources and recording changes in a spreadsheet, website change monitoring tools are the best solution for this. They automatically monitor any web pages, and notify you when there’s a change.

You don’t have to be a software engineer to pick up these tools. Some are easier to use than others, and they typically offer free plans and flexible pricing options, depending on your web monitoring needs – like how many web sources you want to track, and how often.

Some even offer enterprise options, allowing for entire teams to coordinate on updates, and in their preferred communication platforms, like Slack and Microsoft Teams.

But not all website change monitoring tools are created equal. We’ve highlighted the best, most user-friendly software options, that are also packed with powerful features, below. Read on to learn more.

Best Free Website Change Monitoring Tools 2024

1. Visualping.io

With over 2 million users – including 85% of Fortune 500 companies – Visualping is the top website change monitoring software.

You don’t have to take our word for it. Visualping is ranked as the best website change monitoring tool by G2, and the #1 tool to monitor website changes by Hongkiat. MakeUseOf also says it’s the #1 website change detection tool.

Lifehacker, NBC, The Washington Post and Forbes, among others, have also recommended Visualping to monitor website changes.

Ease-of-Use

Monitor Website Changes – the Easy Way

Among its competitors, Visualping is known as having the smoothest, most user-friendly interface.

To set up, you go to Visualping’s homepage and copy and paste the URL you want to track into the search field. Pick the area of the page you care about, whether you want to track visual or textual changes, the frequency you want the page tracked, and the email address you want the alerts sent to.

Confirm the email Visualping will send you, and boom – you’ve made an account, and also you’re first monitor, just like that.

But don’t mistake Visualping’s clean design and affordability for a simple, low-grade tool. Visualping offers many advanced features that make it easier for you to get notified on the exact web updates you’re looking for.

Advanced features

Visualping offers more advanced feature options than most website change monitoring tools available – especially on its free plan.

Keyword alerts

Included on the free plan, Visualping offers keyword alerts. You can get notified every time a keyword, phrase or number gets added or removed from a web page.

That way, you only get alerted of the exact change you’re looking for, and you don’t have to sift through alerts to check for relevancy.

False Alert Reduction

Also on the free plan, when setting up your page, you can specify the change threshold in which you’ll get notified of changes – whether you want alerts for any change, or only when they’re tiny, medium, major or gigantic.

There’s also a cookie pop-up and ad blocker option. If selected, Visualping will automatically block all ads and cookies for you, so you don’t get irrelevant alerts.

When setting up a page, you can select a specific part of the page to track, so you only get notified of change alerts relevant to you.

Monitor password-protected pages

Free plan users also have access to the Perform actions feature. This feature allows you to access the exact information you need on a page – even if it’s behind a login portal, or if you need to click from a dropdown menu first, or click a certain button first, etc.

With Perform actions, when setting up your page, you can instruct Visualping on how to navigate the page, prior to checking it for changes. That way, you can access the exact web content you care about – say, even if it’s initially blocked behind a login portal, or you need to fill in a form first.

This feature is especially popular with monitoring password-protected pages.

Enterprise options

For monitoring and managing updates at scale

Visualping’s Business plans offer several advanced features for monitoring and managing web page changes with your team, and at scale:

• Get AI-generated summaries of the change in your alerts
• Monitor any number of pages with bulk monitoring
• Get real-time notifications
• Send alerts to email, Slack, Teams, Google Sheets or API
• Invite users to collaborate in your account’s workspaces
• Generate historical reports across all your monitored pages
• Categorize and label your monitored pages,

And much more.

If you want to learn more about how Visualping can help you or your team stay on top of website changes, you can contact Visualping here.

Pricing

Solid Free Plan

The free and freemium pricing plans are impressive. For free, you can monitor up to 5 different web pages/day, and have each page checked daily. You also get access to several advanced features, including keyword alerts, false alert reduction, and access to password-protected pages with the Perform actions features.

Flexible subscription options for monitoring at scale

Visualping for Business plans include bulk monitoring and collaboration features, in which you can integrate change alerts into your own API or popular messaging apps.

With several flexible options to choose from, the pricing depends on how many pages you want checked, how frequently, and whether change summaries, integrations and collaborative monitoring interest you.

2. Fluxguard

Ease of use

Fluxguard is a cloud-based website change monitoring tool. While it’s fairly straightforward to set up, there are several steps to get started.

To set up your first monitor, you have to register and validate your account first. This is actually the case for most website change detection tools – Visualping is just the weird one with its quick and easy set up.

With Fluxguard, you’re providing your email and a password, and then checking your email for the confirmation code. If there’s a delay of a minute or two, then you have to request the confirmation code again.

Enter the code, sign in to Fluxguard once more, and then click the “Add Site” button in the top corner to get started with your first monitor.

You copy and paste the URL into the search bar, and click “crawl”. To edit the settings and apply fancy features to it, you have to click the small settings icon next to your monitor.

It’s a couple extra clicks. But it gets the job done.

Advanced features

Fluxguard’s 100% cloud-based web monitoring allows you to sequence a series of pages to crawl, or monitor. Cookies and local storage are preserved in the Cloud.

Fluxguard can monitor password-protected pages through automating the process of interacting with the page and submitting login forms.

Users can monitor text content changes, HTML, visual changes, network activity and cookie changes.

Through Google Lighthouse audits, Fluxguard can automate website audits to assess changes in important metrics such as your website’s performance, search engine optimization (SEO) and accessibility. You can have this set up on every page of your site, or just a couple pages, within a few minutes.

Fluxguard offers detailed reports of change summaries for staff remediation, analysis or investigation, emailed to you and others in an easy-to-read report. The reports can be sent via SMS, Webhooks, Email and API.

3. Sken

Ease of use

Similar to Visualping, Sken is quick and easy to get started with. You simply copy and paste the URL of the page you wish to monitor into the search bar on the homepage.

After customizing the monitor’s settings, you provide the email for the alerts and make a password for your account. That’s it. Quick and easy.

While it’s not as smooth and slick as Visualping’s interface, you’re not having to navigate a finicky sign up process with a series of small, fussy steps.

Advanced features

With Sken’s advanced time scheduler, you can set your own schedule for when the checks will be performed. The timing of the checks and check frequency can vary each day of the week, ranging from every minute to every 60 minutes.

Sken.io users can avoid false alerts when setting up their monitor, such as irrelevant popups that hide the content you wish to monitor, by simply selecting the page element and deleting it.

You can also get chart-style reporting to more easily analyze changes to numerical values – shifts in your favourite product’s prices, for example, or the number of your competitors’ service reviews.

Sken offers a mobile app for users who prefer to receive alerts directly to their mobile. There’s also a browser extension. Your monitored data, stored in the Cloud, can be fully synchronized with the chrome extension and mobile application.

4. Pagescreen

Ease of use

Pagescreen is relatively easy to set up. Although, when you first set up your monitor, you have to “take a few seconds” to consider trying out their “capturing tool”. It’s a fancier feature that lets you monitor websites in high resolution. You ultimately have to pay for it. It’s a popup you can’t avoid.

But, once you’re setting up the monitor, it’s straightforward: you’re pasting the URL into the search bar, naming your monitor and specifying the check frequency.

Advanced scheduling options become available once you switch on Advanced Mode.

Advanced features

With Pagescreen, you can create website archives of saved page changes. Get the visual evolution for better analysis to generate numerous high-quality screenshots from mobile and desktop.

You can choose which days of the week you want the monitor to repeat itself, as well as the exact time, down to the minute, you want Pagescreen to monitor the page. There’s an option to delay the time in between the page loads, up to 60 seconds.

As with most competing website change detection tools, you can monitor the entire page or just a part of it. You can also select a preset device, such as a desktop (1440 x 960), tablet (768 x 1024) or mobile (375 x 667), or a custom size to monitor the page with.

You can also select the file format – either PNJ, for lossless compression, or JPEG.

Customize the alert change threshold to customize the sensitivity of your alerts and minimize false alerts. You’ll only be notified if the change meets a required change percentage.

You can make navigation and management easier by smartly grouping your monitors together. The grouping also ensures you don’t miss important changes due to managing several different monitors at once.

5. OnWebChange

Ease of use

While OnWebChange has a user interface that isn’t as sleek as the others, it’s relatively easy getting set up. To register with OnWebChange, you have to provide your email and password. Then you have to scroll past a prompt to upgrade your subscription to a paying option and your account summary, in order to click the “Create New Tracker” button to start monitoring a web page. From there, it’s a matter of copy and pasting the URL you want to monitor and customizing the settings.

Advanced features

OnWebChange is particularly handy for defacement protection. Users can select one or more areas to monitor within a web page, which is ideal for maintaining pages with dynamic content.

OnWebChange notifies you via email or push notifications in Android/iOS. Power Users can also use a HTTP CallBack with their own login data, to adjust website content automatically and, for example, restore a defaced page.

OnWebChange offers multi-region tracking, allowing you to visit web pages as though you were visiting them from different geographic regions around the world. The “Browser Mode” feature allows you to track any public webpage.

OnWebChange also offers advanced CSS (Page Content Selection), as well as the ability to scan both PDF and plain text files for changes.

Best Website Change Monitoring Software: That’s a Wrap

The average tech-minded geek knows website change detection and monitoring tools can come in handy in many different situations. Regardless of the purpose though, website change monitoring software is ridiculously useful.

Hopefully you found the best tools we highlighted here, in terms of their ease of use and advanced features, useful.

Interested in learning more about how Visualping can assist you or your team’s website change monitoring needs? Contact us today, we’d be happy to help.