Top Tools to Monitor Website Changes | Visualping Alternatives 2024

By Emily Fenton

Updated October 2, 2023

Top Tools to Monitor Website Changes | Visualping Alternatives 2024

With over 2 million users, Visualping.io has attracted attention from NBC, The Wall Street Journal and Politico, among others.

But we’re not the only tool to monitor website changes and alert you of page updates.

Interested in surveying your options? Here are several of the best website change detection and monitoring tools of 2024.

As Lauren Becalli once said, standing still is the fastest way of moving backwards in a rapidly changing world.

In the midst of the digital age, website data is ever-changing. To help you keep track of online updates, website change detection and monitoring tools keep track of web pages by alerting you the moment they detect changes.

Case in point: The Wall Street Journal recommended Visualping as a tool to monitor COVID-19 vaccines in your area to sign up for slots as soon as they become available.

According to the Telegraph, thousands of shoppers use Visualping to secure online supermarket delivery slots.

Politico mused over how Visualping has helped people track sold out products, concert tickets, restaurant reservations and “tweets from former President Donald Trump.”

Visualping has over 1.5 million users. 85% of Fortune 500 companies use Visualping to monitor website changes.

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But, in case you’re curious and want to survey your options, there are several notable alternatives worth checking out. We’ve outlined their features here, for your perusal. Read on to learn more.

1. Distill.io

Like many online tools that monitor website changes, Distill.io provides a custom tracking frequency and alerts you, via email, of page changes. You can monitor pages locally, which means running your monitors on a local machine, or on the Cloud -- the monitor = run on all their servers, so you get more alerts (depending on your plan).

With the free subscription, the minimum tracking frequency is every 6 hours.

Features

With Distill.io, you’re monitoring pages with the Visual Selector. When you set up your monitor, you select the items on the page you wish to track -- either partial or complete content from web pages. You can refine your selections with XPATH, CSS and regular expressions.

Users can filter their alerts with the Conditions feature. You can check if text you’re monitoring has a number within a range you’re looking for, matches an expression or includes certain text. By compounding filtering conditions, users can receive alerts without false

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Comparable to Visualping’s user dashboard, Distill.io users can view and manage their monitors in one place -- their Watchlist. Here, you can view and edit each of your monitors.

Like Visualping’s Perform Actions feature, which lets you instruct the bot to navigate the page to access blocked information, you can automate actions to access password-protected pages -- for example, filling in a form and clicking a button.

You can also track changes in PDF documents, apply custom proxies and import and export data as JSON or CSV files.

Pricing

For free, Distill.io lets you track 5 different pages in the cloud and 20 local monitors, with a 6-hour check interval. You have a total of 1,000 checks/month.

Distill.io’s subscription plans start at $15/month for individual users. In the cloud, you can check pages for pages every 10 minutes.

For more advanced features, the Flexi plan starts at $80/month with a 2-minute tracking interval and flexible limitations.

2. ChangeTower

ChangeTower is another cloud-based tool that monitors website changes and alerts you, via email, of web page changes.

On the free plan, users can monitor pages every 12 hours.

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Features

ChangeTower monitors pages through either a visual screenshot, text-based content snapshot and source code.

These monitoring modes are directly comparable to Visualping’s visual-compare, text-compare and web-compare.

Text-based tracking lets you monitor certain keywords and phrases. You can monitor code updates through tracking the HTML. Visual screenshots lets you monitor changes to the page’s images.

ChangeTower allows for multi-condition monitoring to create custom page alert conditions. Like Visualping’s trigger feature, which lets you define the sensitivity of the change alerts by a percentage of the change, ChangeTower also lets you define your monitor’s sensitivity by predefining the percentage of the change.

You can monitor a site’s availability by receiving alerts when your page is down. Through multi-user alerts, notify just you or your team of page changes with real-time email notifications.

Pricing

ChangeTower’s free plan includes 3 addresses you can monitor for free, with a total of 6 daily checks and limited features. You can store records of content changes for up to one month.

The next upgrade is $14/month, for 100 daily checks and 3 months’ worth of daily data archival. Enterprise plans start at $299/month, which checks as often as 3 minutes. Content changes can be stored for up to 12 years.

3. Wachete

Wachete is a pioneering website change monitoring tool that’s mainly for desktop applications. Like most of these tools, you can monitor parts of a page or the entire page -- including subpages. Alerts can occur through email, push notifications or your mobile app.

Features

Wachete lets you monitor password-protected pages. You just need to submit the required values and clicks for the bot to access the page.

Textual changes can be tracked in various formats, such as PDF, MS Word, DOCX, XLSX files or JSON. You can share monitored data through a task link, or download it into an Excel spreadsheet.

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Wachete can monitor dynamic and Javascript pages.

You can also archive your monitored data history for up to 12 months, and view numerical monitored data in the form of graphs.

Comparable to Visualping’s website widget, Wachete offers a public tracker button you can install on your website, so users have the option to easily monitor changes to your page.

Pricing

Wachete has a single pricing plan, starting at $9.99/month. You can monitor up to 100 pages, with checks up to every 10 minutes. You can store up to 12 months of data history.

4. Pagecrawl

Features

Like Visualping and Wachete, PageCrawl.io allows you to track multiple elements on a page. Tracked pages are sharable with friends and team members. You can view monitored results as charts, send notifications to email or Slack and export data.

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With the Google Sheets integration, you can check your monitors in Sheets. With the Zapier integration option, you can automate your workflow and connect with other apps.

Pricing

PageCrawl.io’s free plan is generous. You can track up to 16 different pages with one daily check. That’s 480 free checks/month.

PageCrawl.io’s plans start at $8/month. You can track 100 pages, with checking intervals as frequent as every 15 minutes.

Enterprise plans start at $30/month. You can track 500 pages, with a check frequency of every 5 minutes. This is one of the cheapest premium plans amongst competitors.

5. Versionista

Features

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Like Visualping, Versionista is a website monitoring tool that lets you monitor web pages of static and dynamic websites. You can also monitor documents like PDFs.

A unique feature is that it lets you set filters to dodge irrelevant content changes. You can also manage monitors that let you track SEO changes, similar to Visualping and ChangeTower.

You can customize the frequency, JavaScript support and proxy address. Versionista supports team collaboration, allowing admins to manage users and collaboration between users to support team projects.

The user dashboard shows site-wide URLs for every page you’re monitoring, allowing you to efficiently add monitors to other pages of a website you’re already monitoring.

Pricing

Versionista’s free plan allows individuals and businesses to check 5 URLs, with a total of 465 checks/month.

Versionista’s plans start at $19/month. You can monitor 20 pages, with a total of 1,860 checks per month.

With the plans that start at $ 139/month, you can add team members and use customizable reports.

In a world with constantly shifting online data, website change monitoring tools help you keep track of important updates by alerting you of changes.

Visualping is the top tool to monitor website changes. But, if you’re interested in browsing alternatives, there are several tools, like Distill.io, ChangeTower, Wachete, PageCrawl.io and Versionista, that can get the job done smoothly and with advanced, robust features.

Want to monitor web pages for changes?

Sign up with Visualping to get notified of alerts from anywhere online, so you can save time, while staying in the know.

Emily Fenton

Emily is the Product Marketing Manager at Visualping. She has a degree in English Literature and a Masters in Management. When she’s not researching and writing about all things Visualping, she loves exploring new restaurants, playing guitar and petting her cats