ChangeTower web content monitoring review

Website content monitoring is essential for businesses, especially those that rely heavily on their online presence. For instance, you may want to keep an eye on your competitor’s websites, check for news and updates, and monitor compliance-related websites.

ChangeTower is a cloud-based website content monitoring platform that helps you monitor third-party sites. Founded in 2016, it's the go-to monitoring solution for many big brands such as KPMG, Disney, IBM, The Wall Street Journal, etc.

Using it is pretty easy, too. You can just enter the URL of the page that you want to track, and it will notify you about every small change that takes place henceforth. Each change notification is supported by a snapshot of the same, which you can archive in your account for up to 12 months.

Read till the end to know everything about ChangeTower, including its best features, pricing, and interface, as well as how it compares to the rest of the competition.

• Also check out our complete list of the best website monitoring software

ChangeTower: Plans and pricing

ChangeTower has three plans: two paid and one completely free. The free plan is ideal for those who are just getting started. It allows you to monitor up to 3 URLs with 6 daily checks. What's more, you can archive up to one month of data.

The first paid subscription is the Power User plan, starting at $9/month (billed monthly). Under this, you get tracking for 500 URLs, 1,500 checks per month, Zapier integration, and up to 3 months of content archive. Additionally, you get to simulate user actions, monitor websites that require a login, and enjoy full-page visual snapshots.

The best part is this is a flexible plan. This means you can change the number of monthly checks, the number of users, and the number of months your data is archived. All these things are customizable, and your plan's price will change accordingly.

Next is the Enterprise plan, which starts at $299/month (billed monthly). Here you can monitor a page every three minutes, track over 2000 URLs, monitor text-based files and PDFs, receive advanced support and setup assistance, and much more.

Plus, you get 1 Enterprise seat that allows you to create your own monitors, view the comments and notifications for each of them, and then share them with your colleagues. We found this plan ideal for large businesses with constant monitoring needs.

It's worth noting that the prices mentioned above are for monthly billing. If you choose the annual plan, you get a two-month subscription for free. For instance, the Power User plan will cost you $90 for the whole year.

ChangeTower: Features

ChangeTower’s core feature is very simple – it tracks a given URL and notifies you about the changes on it. The change can range from textual and image changes to code changes. Text-based pages such as .CSS, .txt, and .js and PDFs can also be monitored.

You can decide what kind of changes you want to be notified about from the settings page and set up unlimited conditional alerts. For instance, you can choose to be notified only when certain keywords appear in the changes.

You can also add various user actions. For instance, if the website you want to monitor requires a few clicks before displaying the content, you can configure ChangeTower to perform it before running the checks.

We also liked ChangeTower’s collaboration tools. For instance, if multiple people from your team are using this platform, you can choose who gets notified about the changes and who doesn't. They will have read-only access and won't be able to make any changes to the monitor. This is ideal for businesses that have defined teams with assigned roles.

All the update reports you get will be stored in ChangeTower’s own archive. Depending on the plan you choose, you can archive a report for up to 12 months. This helps you pin down the exact time when the changes took place.

To further simplify managing updates, ChangeTower lets you assign tags and categorize them accordingly. There’s also a one-week timeline on the dashboard in case you want to filter the updated reports as per date.

If its native features are falling short, you can always integrate your account with Zapier to set up a seamless workflow.

ChangeTower’s Domain Scanner is a lifesaver for large organizations that need to ensure complete coverage of a domain. It scans an entire domain to discover any newly published URLs and sets up monitors on them. This way, you don’t have to manually look for new pages on domains you already track.

Going a step ahead, there’s also a new KW Discovery tool that actually extracts & examines the content of each page it discovers. It can come in handy when you’re hunting for specific keywords or phrases. ChangeTower will not only identify new URLs but also generate reports of pages containing these keywords.

ChangeTower: Interface and in use

The interface of ChangeTower is extremely simple and beginner-friendly. Once you create an account (which only takes a minute, by the way), you’ll be directly led to your all-in-one dashboard.

You get various options while adding a monitor: single URL, multiple URLs, or entire domain. This is further drilled down into categories like visual monitor, SEO monitor, HTML monitor, and so on.

On the left side of the dashboard, you’ll see a menu where you can choose between different options such as Monitors, Recent Notifications, Settings, Billing, and more.

In the center, you’ll have an overview of all your active and paused monitors, notifications, and a timeline of the past week.

Here you’ll also find a filter menu where you can assign tags such as “important” and “reviewed” to different updates and organize them accordingly.

Overall, the interface is simple, compact, and navigable—everything you need in monitoring software. There’s also an iOS app that helps you keep track of the changes on the go, which is fairly simple to use.

ChangeTower: Support

ChangeTower has a detailed knowledge base where you’ll find information about almost everything – whether that's setting up your account, managing your plans, or integrating with Zapier.

Apart from that, they also have a contact form on their website where you can submit your issues. There’s space to fill in your email ID, subject, a detailed explanation of the problem, and an attachment in case you need to explain it properly.

ChangeTower: The competition

ChangeTower is a great option for monitoring websites. But if you're looking for alternatives, Versionista and Visualping are equally good.

Verionista lets you customize things like the timing of the crawl, frequency and location of the crawl, what to look for, and what to ignore. Along with a knowledge base, Versionista also offers email support with a guaranteed response time of 12 hours. What’s more, these responses come directly from their senior engineers. However, it can be a bit more expensive than ChangeTower.

Similarly, Visualping outperforms ChangeTower with its wide array of AI features. There’s an AI tool to summarize change reports, saving you the hassle of going through it manually. It also has an AI to give you suggestions throughout the setup process to speed it up.

In addition to that, if you find a certain update alert irrelevant, you can give that feedback to the AI, and it will block all similar types of alerts in the future.

ChangeTower: Final verdict

ChangeTower is a great pick for businesses looking for a competent monitoring tool. Its free plan and customizable pricing make it perfect for budding businesses. Depending on the plan you choose, you can monitor more than 2,000 URLs, which should be enough for most businesses. In addition to live pages, you can also monitor PDFs, .txt, and .CSS files.

If you have a team-oriented organization, you can choose which team gets the change notifications. There’s an option to provide read-only access so that no unauthorized changes can be made.

ChangeTower’s interface is very simple and easy to navigate, making it beginner-friendly. The dashboard is compact, bringing everything you need on one page.

Overall, it is a good business content monitoring tool, delivering excellent value for money. However, its AI features are still a work in progress. If that’s a concern, you can consider alternatives like Visualping and Versionista.

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