The best website change monitoring software makes it simple and easy to alert you to any unauthorized changes to your website, such as a hacking attack.
1. Best overall
2. Best for advanced users
3. Best for retailers
4. Best for small sites
5. Best for features
6. FAQs
7. How we test
Monitoring websites has all kinds of benefits. Consumers can watch ecommerce sites, spotting bargains when prices change. Business can do the same to monitor competitors and adjust their own pricing, as well as tracking brand mentions or consumer comments on social media.
There can be real security benefits in monitoring your own website for changes, such as giving you an early warning if the site is infected by malware, hacked or defaced.
And then there are endless legal and compliance responsibilities. What if someone makes a tiny change to your website, and the cookie banner disappears, and you're not GDPR-compliant any more? Or a key partner changes their terms and conditions, and you don't realise? Spotting issues like this early can save you from a whole heap of trouble later.
But, no matter what you’re looking for, we have you covered – we’ve highlighted the best online monitoring services right here. So read on to find the website change monitoring software that best suits your needs.
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The best website change monitoring software of 2024 in full:
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Best overall
One of our pet peeves with these sort of monitoring solutions is that a lot of them look like they were designed 10 years ago. What we love about Wachete is that it is able to pack in all the functionality from its competition and implement it in a user-friendly package.
Wachete can be used for all manner of purposes, from tracking the prices of rival stores, to receiving notifications about job openings. And what really sets Wachete apart is that in addition to daily or weekly email reports, it also offers mobile apps and browser extensions so that you can keep track of events while on the go.
While this is definitely useful for professionals who can’t afford to be tied to a desk all day, it’s especially important for consumers who just want to buy a concert ticket before they sell out.
Watchete is free for monitoring up to 5 static pages and checking once every 24 hours, with paid-for plans offering various options according to how many pages you want to monitor and how quickly to recheck these.
Read our full Wachete review.
Best for advanced users
Sometimes you just need raw power to get the job done – sometimes you need Distill.io. Distill.io is one of the most flexible content monitoring services available right now because it allows users to do anything they need to do – even run monitors locally.
Now, while the functionality that Distill offers isn’t dramatically different from the competition, the difference that it does offer is pretty major. By allowing any user to employ a browser extension to monitor web content for free, without placing any kind of limit on it, this may just be the most affordable and sensible way to watch the web. In fact, if we were going to recommend a service to a consumer who just wants to watch a few online retailers – we’d recommend Distill.
Distill.io offers a relatively generous free service with support for up to 25 monitors, and a minimum interval of six hours. Paid plans offer higher volumes and more frequent checks, with prices ranging from $15 to $80 a month for 500+ monitors and a minimum frequency of only 2 minutes.
Read our full Distill.io review.
Best for retailers
If you run a retail business, or if you’re a consumer looking to, well, support a retail business, it may be useful to check out ChangeTower. Now, while the free version will only check websites once every 12 hours – which isn’t very useful in the fast-paced world we’re living in – once you start paying for the service you’ll be able to keep up-to-date with any changes to whatever online content you’re watching.
This is particularly useful to retail businesses, as it allows them to monitor competitors and adjust pricing on-the-fly in order to stay competitive. Plus, ChangeTower supplies reports that show, in detail, any changes. And, if you don’t need alerts for every single update, you can set custom alert criteria, so that you're only informed about the details that most matter to you.
Read our full ChangeTower review.
Best for small sites
Visualping is another competent website change monitoring platform, that like others listed above provides both a free tier as well as various paid-for options for wider ranging monitoring.
The free tier, however, is very limited, and users are restricted to monitoring just a couple of pages, though changes are monitored daily rather than monthly like some rival service providers.
As with other providers, though, paid-for plans allow for more pages to be monitored, with pricing based on the volume of pages to monitor each month.
Overall, while the page volume is quite small and probably not great for monitoring full ecommerce lists on rival websites, it does offer daily alerts which means if you need to monitor a small number of pages relatively inexpensively, then Visualping could be an option worth looking at.
Read our full Visualping review.
Best for features
Versionista is a seriously sophisticated content monitoring service with the power to detect changes that others miss. We're not just talking simple static HTML: this tool can scan dynamic pages, check PDFs, crawl entire sites and more.
For all its power, we found Versionista really easy to use. Add the top-level page of a site, the service automatically finds other links, and you can turn on monitoring for them all with a click.
We found Versionista's change reporting to be the real highlight, though. Optional filters tell the servers to ignore irrelevant updates; you can get instant alerts when something changes, summary emails every day, and color-coded comparisons to show every addition and deletion.
There are a few different plans you can subscribe to, and like many other providers there's a free tier with limited monitoring that will probably serve best as a taster to get used to the service, and allows you to monitor a handful of pages a month.
Read our full Versionista review.
FAQs
Which website change monitoring software is best for you?
When deciding which website change monitoring software to use, first consider what your actual needs are, as the cheapest options may only provide basic features, so if you need to use advanced tools you may find a more expensive platform is better suited to you. Additionally, higher-end software can usually cater for every need, so do ensure you have a good idea of which features you think you may require from your website change monitoring software.
How we test
To test for the best website change monitoring software we first set up an account with the relevant platform, then we tested the service to see how the software could be used for different purposes and in different situations. The aim was to push each website change monitoring software platform to see how useful its basic tools were and also how easy it was to get to grips with any more advanced tools.
Read more on how we test, rate, and review products on TechRadar.
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