Best 5 Free Website Change Monitoring Software 2023

Website change monitoring tools are handy in many different scenerios.

Maybe you want to watch for price drops or restock alerts for your favourite products. Or, maybe you’re spying on competitors’ homepages for intell.

To monitor website changes on the ever-shifting internet, check out our list of the best website change monitoring software in 2023.

The average tech-minded internet user knows website change monitoring tools can come in handy in many contexts. But you don’t have to be a software engineer to quickly pick up these tools and leverage them to stay on top of changes that impact your business, or in your day-to-day life.

One popular life hack is automatically monitoring eCommerce websites for sales and bargain offers on your favourite products or limited-edition merch. Get an in stock alert once your item is back in stock, via email, so you can act fast and make your purchase.

Businesses commonly use website change monitoring tools to gather market research, making them free competitive intelligence tools. Marketing and sales teams can get notified once competitors launch a new product release, or conduct automated competitor price tracking.

Regardless of the purpose, if you’re looking to monitor website changes, this software is ridiculously easy to setup, and can be used to help you keep track of the exact information you want to monitor online.

That’s why we’ve highlighted the best, most user-friendly website change monitoring tools, with the best features, for you to check out here. Read on to learn more.

Best Free Website Change Monitoring Tools 2023

1. Visualping.io

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

NBC, The Washington Post and Forbes, among others, recommend using Visualping to watch web page changes. The Wall Street Journal reported Visualping came in handy for monitoring pharmacy, clinic, government and other vaccine-related pages to snag the COVID-19 vaccine during the pandemic.

Ease of use

Visualping makes website change monitoring easy.

It has the smoothest, most user-friendly interface of the change monitoring software online. Folks less familiar with online tech tools will have a substantially easier time with Visualping’s minimalist website and interface than most other monitoring tools.

Here’s why.

How to Easily Monitor Website Changes with Visualping

To monitor website changes with Visualping, you don’t have to navigate through the website, click a slew of buttons to register, and then several more to actually set up your monitored page.

Instead, just go to Visualping’s homepage, and simply paste the URL of the page you want to monitor into the search bar. Click “Go”, wait a couple seconds for the page to load in the viewport, and you’re well on your way there.

Next, select the area of the web page you want automatically checked for changes, specify how frequently you want the page checked, whether you want to monitor visual changes or textual, and then enter email address you want the change alerts to be sent to.

Click “Start Monitoring”, and that’s as tricky as it gets. You just have to confirm the email sent to your inbox to validate the email address and make an account.

Pricing

Visualping has many flexible subscription options to choose from – ranging from completely free, to our premium Business user accounts. There’s a plan for every kind of user.

On the free plan, you can monitor up to 5 different web pages/day, and have each page checked daily. You can monitor web pages for visual or textual changes, and select which area of the page you want checked for changes.

The pricing model depends on how quickly you want your web page checked for changes, and how many web pages you want the option to monitor. Visualping for Business plans include real-time monitoring, bulk monitoring and collaboration features, in which you can coordinate with your team on web page changes in your shared workspace.

Advanced features

Don’t underestimate Visualping’s minimalist design and affordability – it’s anything but a plain tool. It offers more advanced options than most website change monitoring tools available.

Keyword alerts

Including for those on the free plan, Visualping offers a neat keyword alerts option. When you’ve selected to monitor textual changes, you can get notified everytime a keyword, phrase or numbers get added or removed from any web page.

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

Perform actions

Including for those on the free plan, With perform actions, users can access the exact information they need on the web page, before Visualping checks it for changes – such as navigating through a login portal, clicking a dropdown menu, selecting a button, etc.

It’s a popular feature with monitoring password-protected pages.

Interested in learning more about how Visualping can help you or your team stay on top of important website changes? Contact us, we’d be happy to help.

2. Fluxguard

Ease of use

Fluxguard is a cloud-based website 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.