Website change monitoring tools, tested hands-on
Website change monitoring means software that checks a web page on a schedule and tells you when something on it changes: a price, a policy, a job post, a product page or a competitor's homepage. There are many tools that do this, and they differ a lot in price, check speed, noise and how they show you what changed.
WatchJury pays for one month of each tool and tests it on the same set of pages. Testing has not started yet. Until it finishes, this site lists only facts we checked on each vendor's official site. No scores, no rankings and no verdicts until we have real results and screenshots to show.
Website change monitoring tools compared
This table lists what each vendor publishes. It is not a ranking. Tools are in no particular order. "Fastest check" is the shortest interval the vendor lists on any self-serve plan unless noted.
| Tool | Lowest paid price | Free plan | Fastest check listed | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Visualping | $14/mo (or $10/mo billed yearly) | Yes: 5 pages, 150 checks a month | Every 2 minutes (Personal 10K and Business plans) | Vendor page |
| Distill.io | $15/mo | Yes: 25 monitors (5 in cloud), 1,000 cloud checks a month | Cloud: every 2 minutes (Flexi). Local monitors: from 5 seconds | Vendor page |
| ChangeTower | $12/mo | Yes: 3 pages, checked daily | Hourly (Essential and Business). Custom on Enterprise | Vendor page |
| Wachete | $5.40/mo | Yes: 5 static pages and 1 dynamic page, checked every 24 hours | Every 5 minutes (Premium and Ultimate) | Vendor page |
| PageCrawl.io | $13.33/mo billed yearly ($160/yr) | Yes: 6 pages, 220 checks a month | Every 2 minutes (Ultimate). 1 minute on a custom plan | Vendor page |
| changedetection.io | $8.99/mo (hosted) | Self-hosted open source version is free (Apache 2.0) | From about 5 minutes per browser runner (hosted) | Vendor page |
| Hexowatch | $10.50/mo billed yearly ($126/yr), OR:ON Personal | Yes: OR:ON Free plan, no credit card | Every 5 minutes (OR:ON Plus) | Vendor page |
| OnWebChange | 0.89 EUR/mo | Yes: 3 page trackers | Not stated on the pricing page | Vendor page |
| WebsiteChange | $49/mo (or $24/mo billed yearly) | No free plan (free one-page demo only) | Every 2 minutes (Enterprise) | Vendor page |
| Sken.io | 3 EUR/mo | No free plan. 14-day trial with 140 checks, no card | Every 1 minute (all plans) | Vendor page |
| Changeflow | $99/mo billed yearly ($1,188/yr) | Yes: 3 sources | Hourly on self-serve plans. 10 minutes on Enterprise | Vendor page |
| Monity.ai | Business from $50/mo billed yearly ($70/mo monthly) | Yes: 100 checks a month, 3 tasks | 15 minutes (Business). 1 minute on Enterprise | Vendor page |
| Fluxguard | $110/mo | Yes: 3 sites a month (vendor estimate) | Every 5 minutes (Premium) | Vendor page |
| Browse AI | $19/mo billed yearly ($228/yr) | Yes: 50 credits a month | Every 5 minutes per the plan summary (its comparison table says every minute) | Vendor page |
| Firecrawl | $19/mo (or $16/mo billed yearly) | Yes: 1,000 credits a month | Every 5 minutes (scheduled monitoring) | Vendor page |
What to look for in a website change monitor
- Check frequency. How often the tool looks at a page, and how many checks your plan allows each month.
- Visual or text comparison. Some tools compare screenshots, some compare text or HTML, some do both.
- Noise control. Ways to ignore dates, ads, counters and other parts of a page that change all the time.
- Where alerts go. Email, Slack, Microsoft Teams, webhooks, SMS or an API.
- Hard pages. Pages behind a login, pages that need a click first, PDFs, and sites that block bots.
- Price for your volume. Plans are priced by pages, checks or credits, so the cheapest plan is not always the cheapest for your use.
Reviews
Each review page lists verified facts now. Hands-on results and screenshots will be added once the paid test month ends.
- VisualpingA hosted web page change detection service with visual and text comparison, AI change summaries, a Chrome extension, a REST API and an MCP server.
- Distill.ioA change monitor that runs checks in the cloud or locally in a browser extension or desktop app, with macros to act on pages before checking.
- ChangeTowerA hosted website change monitoring service with AI monitoring in plain language, keyword tracking and selective monitoring of page sections.
- WacheteA hosted page monitor with mobile apps and browser extensions that alerts by email, phone or chat when a page or part of a page changes.
- PageCrawl.ioAn EU-based, cloud-hosted page monitor with AI summaries, document monitoring and a long list of alert integrations.
- changedetection.ioAn open source change detection project you can host yourself, with a paid hosted version run by the project's official provider.
- HexowatchA long-running monitoring service from Hexact, Inc. with many monitoring types. Its pricing page now shows plans for OR:ON, the company's newer AI website monitoring product.
- OnWebChangeA web page tracker running since 2009, with low-cost plans priced in euros, PDF and file tracking, and RSS output of tracker changes.
- WebsiteChangeA hosted monitor for public pages that filters noise and writes a short AI summary with an importance score for each change.
- Sken.ioA visual website change monitor priced by checks per month, with a Chrome extension and an API.
- ChangeflowAn AI monitoring service aimed at compliance and regulatory teams. You describe what matters and it sends briefings when a source changes.
- Monity.aiA UK-based AI website change monitor with plain-English alert rules, browser actions, mobile apps and uptime checks.
- FluxguardA web change detection service (the site footer names LegitScript as owner of the copyright) that uses a Chrome crawler for visual, HTML and text comparison, with AI filtering on higher plans.
- Browse AIA no-code web scraping platform. Its robots can also monitor a page on a schedule and alert when the extracted data changes. We review the monitoring feature.
- FirecrawlA web scraping API for developers. Its change tracking format compares a page with your last scrape, and its monitoring feature runs those checks on a schedule. We review change tracking and monitoring.