The 7 Best Free and Paid Website Change Detection Tools (2024)

Website change monitoring tools are beneficial for both professionals and average consumers. You can configure them to receive price alerts, keep a tab on your competitors, get new job opening alerts, and monitor your own business website for quality checks.

Using website change detection tools is easy enough. All you have to do is add a website URL to monitor, enter a recipient’s email address to receive the alerts, configure the detection frequency and area, and you are good to go.

Here we have jotted down a list of the best website detection tools to help you easily track all the changes on the internet that are important to you.

1. Visualping

Visualping is a powerful but easy-to-use website change detection tool. It allows you to configure the pages you want to monitor, and sends you an alert when a change is detected.

You can customize the service to alert you about specific changes. For example, you can configure it to get alerts when a change is detected at a selected area on the webpage. In addition, you can also get text and element-based changes as they happen.

Depending on how quickly the website content is updated, you can set the update interval from every five minutes to once a month. So, if you set it to daily, Visualping will check the website for updates and report any new developments every 24 hours.

Furthermore, it lets you customize the trigger point as well. You can receive notifications as they happen, wait for a tiny change of 1%, or only receive updates when there is a gigantic 50% change on the web page.

Visualping is available in free and paid versions. The free version lets you monitor up to five pages daily with one check, limited features, and low-priority support. The paid version lets you invite team members to collaborate, manage pages in bulk and create advanced reports.

2. Wachete

Wachete is a website change monitoring service offering a similar set of features as Visualping and some more. In addition, it can monitor text changes in various formats including PDF, DOCS, and XLSX formats, which is a limitation on Visualping.

However, Wachete is a bit more complex than Visualping, and the free features are extremely limited. After entering a website and selecting the content to monitor, you can choose from the type of content to extract and the frequency of checking value on the page.

Similar to Visualping, it can detect and report changes in a select area or all changes to a website. In addition, you can include or exclude specific paths to monitor changes. It also supports proxy-based monitoring and lets you customize the HTTP request method and headers.

The basic version of Wachete is free to use, but caps the page monitoring to 5 pages a day. The premium version starts at $4.90/month and gives you access to multiple page monitoring, more frequent content crawling, data history reporting, password-protected page monitoring, the ability to monitor text in PDF, DOCX, DOCS, XLSX files, and more.

3. PageCrawl.io

PageCrawl.io is a website change monitoring service that lets you track price changes and text and receive alerts on your email. It works similarly to other website change monitoring services and can store and auto-update all tracked pages in a Google Sheet document.

You can track changes for a single page or multiple URLs, scan a website, and select matching pages. Furthermore, it lets you configure the URL filter to import only specific pages and configure mouse-click actions to exclude unnecessary elements before capturing the text on a web page.

It has a built-in price detection feature that can detect and extract the first price on the page. If you have programming skills, you can also execute JavaScript functions to return results.

PageCrawl.io’s Free Forever plan lets you track up to six pages every 24 hours. It also supports alerts via team collaboration tools like Slack, email, and Discord and integrates with Zapier for everyday automation. The premium plans start at $8 a month with up to 100-page tracking, 15-minute updates, multiple content type support, and an advanced configuration option.

4. Sken.io

Sken.io lets you monitor websites for changes and notifies you when a change is detected. You can enter a URL and select a part or full page to track changes. The advanced scheduler lets you fine-tune and set update day and time and the frequency of checks. Element blocking removes any unnecessary pop-ups and other elements blocking the web page.

Sken.io is a premium utility and starts at €3 per month with 500 checks monthly. There is no free plan, but you can use the free 14-day trial to try the service.

5. ChangeTower

ChangeTower is a powerful website changing monitoring and archiving solution. You can use it to monitor web page URLs with custom alert criteria to get detailed website changes.

It lets you monitor single and multiple URLs or an entire website. You can select from different monitor types to get alerts for newly published content, keyword, and visual changes and monitor changes in HTML code.

ChangeTower can monitor both public and password-protected web page URLs. You can set the monitoring frequency to five minutes on the premium plan, though limited to 12 hours on the free plan.

ChangeTower is available in basic free and premium Power User plans, starting at $9 a month. The free plan limits you to a maximum of six daily checks with limited features and one-month of data archival.

6. Trackly

Trackly is a simple website change monitoring tool to track web pages and get notified via email with the changes highlighted. You can customize the specific changes you want to be notified about so that small changes are ignored.

You can create a track by adding a URL and title. Next, set the update frequency to weekly, daily, or hourly. Configure the track to ignore small changes and select the part of the web page to track. For example, if you want to receive price alert notifications, select the pricing area on the web page and save it as a selection.

Tacky is available in a limited free version with up to three web page tracking and daily updates. Premium plans start at $9 monthly with 20 web pages and hourly tracking.

7. Pagescreen

If you need a web change monitoring tool that keeps an archive of website changes with screenshots, PageScreen is a good choice.

The two major aspects of pagescreen are Captures and Monitoring. Captures helps you capture live screenshots and keep an archive of the website’s changes. Monitoring lets you define periodical captures for the URL based on the changes detected.

It supports both individual page and bulk monitoring via a bulk import. You can capture an entire page or part of the page only. In addition, you can set intervals, choose days to repeat monitoring, and even specify the exact capture time and time zone.

Pagescreen is a premium utility with a free 14-day trial. The premium plans start at €14.90 per month for unlimited monitoring and 1,000 captures.

Website change detection tools are available with different toolsets. If you are a shopper, you probably only need a tool to track price changes and recieve notifications. Businesses, however, can use these tools to monitor their competitors and own websites to detect unintended changes right away.