How to monitor competitor website changes
This page lists the pages worth watching on a competitor's site, what five page-change monitors cost (prices read on 13 October 2026), and how many of the changes our own monitor reported could not be seen on the site.
Which pages to watch
| Page | What a change shows |
|---|---|
| Pricing | A new price, a changed plan limit, a free plan added or removed |
| Changelog or release notes | What shipped and how often |
| Homepage | The headline, the buyer it names, new customer logos |
| Integrations and docs | New integrations and API changes |
| Careers | The roles being hired |
Three pages per competitor is a workable start: pricing, changelog and homepage. For ten competitors that is 30 pages, and checking each once a day is about 900 checks a month.
Page monitors and what they cost
A page monitor loads a URL on a schedule, compares it with the last copy and emails you the difference. Prices and limits below are from each vendor's pricing page on 13 October 2026.
| Tool | Free plan | First paid plan |
|---|---|---|
| Visualping | 5 pages, 150 checks a month, hourly at most | $14/month: 10 pages, 1,000 checks, every 15 minutes |
| Distill | 25 monitors (5 run in the cloud), 1,000 cloud checks a month, every 6 hours | $15/month: 50 monitors, 30,000 checks, every 10 minutes |
| PageCrawl | 6 pages, 220 checks, hourly at most | $160/year: 200 pages, 30,000 checks, every 15 minutes |
| changedetection.io | Open source, free if you host it yourself | $8.99/month hosted, 5,000 URLs |
| Wayback Machine | Saves a copy of a page on request and compares two saved copies | None |
The 30 pages from above do not fit Visualping's $14 plan (10 pages) or its $35 plan (20 pages); the first plan that holds them is $70/month with 40 pages. Distill's $15 plan and PageCrawl's $160/year plan both cover 30 pages checked daily.
Most differences are noise
A page changes for reasons that say nothing about the company: a testimonial carousel in a new order, a date in the footer, a cookie banner, a CAPTCHA served instead of the page. Page monitors deal with this by letting you select one part of the page, such as the price table, or by alerting only when a keyword appears.
Our monitor passes every difference to a model that decides whether it is worth an email. In the first week of October 2026 it ran 30 to 40 checks a day and sent between 1 and 5 emails a day.
What a page monitor does not see
Between 5 September and 4 October 2026 our monitor sent 117 emails about 58 companies. We sorted them by the main subject of each email.
| Subject | Emails | Where we read it |
|---|---|---|
| Ads and marketing channels | 60 | Ad libraries, search keyword data, tracking code in the page source |
| Pricing | 27 | The company's own pages |
| Product | 23 | The company's own pages |
| Social posts | 4 | Social accounts |
| Positioning | 3 | The company's own pages |
53 of the 117 were about pricing, product or positioning, which a page monitor pointed at the right pages can catch. The other 64 were about ads, channels and social posts. Most of those are read from sources outside the visible page, so a tool that compares page text or screenshots would not have reported them. Some emails cover more than one subject, so the split is approximate.
The ad sources are public and can be checked by hand: Meta, Google, LinkedIn and TikTok each have a library.
Doing both in one tool
CompetitorBase checks each competitor's site, its ads and its channels daily (X ads weekly) and emails you when pricing, ads, product or channels change. Starter costs $29/month for 10 competitors, with a 3-day free trial.
Look up a competitor · Pricing · CompetitorBase and Visualping compared · How to track competitors