changedetection.io is one of the best deals in website monitoring: it’s a fully open-source project you can run yourself, and its hosted plan watches up to 5,000 URLs with a real Chrome browser and more than 85 notification types. If you enjoy tuning CSS/xPath rules and keeping a server running, you may not need anything else.
People look for alternatives when the setup and upkeep start costing more than a subscription would, when selector-based rules keep breaking on redesigns, or when a team needs alerts it can trust without reading every diff. We make Monity, so this guide leads with it and says why. All prices come from vendor pricing pages, checked in October 2026.
Our pick for teams that are done maintaining selectors: Monity
Monity replaces the selector with a sentence and the server with a hosted service:
- One sentence per page. Write the change you care about, for example “the price of any plan has changed”. When the page changes, AI checks the change against it and ignores noise such as cookie banners, so a redesign doesn’t flood the channel.
- It checks its own setup. A few minutes after you save, Monity’s AI opens the page, closes anything in the way and confirms it reads the same values twice. Every check then compares those values item by item.
- The data comes with the alert. Each alert can add a row to Google Sheets with the value Monity read, and a webhook can receive every completed check, not only alerts. Webhooks are signed and retried.
- Every channel and the REST API on every plan. Slack, Teams, Discord, Telegram, email, webhooks, Google Sheets and push in the iOS and Android apps, plus the REST API and MCP server for every account.
Want to see it on your own pages first?
Send us the pages you check by hand. We set up the monitors, confirm they read the right thing and email you the first result, usually within a business day. Free, no account, no card.
changedetection.io alternatives compared
| Tool | Free plan | Paid plans from | Fastest checks | Setup style |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Monity (ours) | 3 tasks, 100 checks/month, every 3 hours | Personal: $10/mo billed yearly ($12 monthly); Business: $25/mo billed yearly ($35 monthly) | Every 5 min (Personal 10k, Business 20k and up); every 1 min on Enterprise | A plain-English condition per page, checked by AI; setup verified by AI |
| changedetection.io | Open source, self-hosted | One hosted plan, priced in your local currency | About every 5 minutes per runner | Selectors, trigger text and filters |
| Visualping | 5 pages, 150 checks/month, hourly | $14/mo monthly or $120/yr (Personal 1K) | Every 2 min (Personal 10K and Business) | Visual, text and element detection; AI summaries on every plan |
| Distill.io | 25 monitors (5 in cloud), cloud checks every 6 hours | $15/month (Starter) | Every 2 minutes (Flexi, $80+/month) | Browser extension and selectors |
| Wachete | 5 static pages and 1 dynamic page, daily | $5.40/month (Starter) | Every 5 minutes (Premium and Ultimate) | Watch a whole page or select parts of it |
| PageCrawl.io | 6 pages, 220 checks | $160 billed annually (shown as $13.33 / month) | Not published on the pricing page | Hosted, many pages per plan |
What a Monity alert gives you
Instead of a raw diff, each alert opens the check behind it: the screenshot, the page before and after, an AI summary in plain words and every text change, with the old wording struck through next to the new.
Pages behind a login or a cookie wall work too: before each check Monity can accept cookies, sign in and click through to the right tab. Saved browser sessions (Devices) come with every paid plan and the Business trial, and free accounts can sign in through the live browser.
Price: Personal starts at $10/mo billed yearly ($12 monthly) for 1,000 checks a month and 20 tasks. Business starts at $25/mo billed yearly ($35 monthly), and Business 10k, with 10,000 checks a month, 100 tasks and 5 seats, is $50/mo billed yearly or $70 monthly. Every alert channel is on every plan, every tier is on the pricing page, and there’s a 7-day Business trial with no card. See Monity vs changedetection.io.
The other alternatives, briefly
Visualping
Visualping is fully hosted and includes AI change summaries, an important-or-not flag and actions such as logging in before a check on every plan. Its REST API and MCP server also come with every plan. Slack, Teams and Google Sheets alerts need a Business plan. Personal 1K is $14/mo monthly or $120/yr; Personal 10K checks every 2 minutes for $70/mo or $600/yr.
How Monity compares: the same API and MCP access on every plan, plus Slack, Teams and Sheets on every plan and a condition you write yourself.
Distill.io
Distill.io keeps the hands-on feel, with selectors and macros, but adds browser extensions for Chrome and Firefox and a free plan with 25 monitors, 5 of them in the cloud. Starter is $15/month for 50 monitors with checks every 10 minutes, and Flexi starts at $80/month with checks every 2 minutes.
How Monity compares: no selectors or macros to keep working, and nothing runs on your own devices.
Wachete
Wachete runs in the cloud, even when your devices are off, and has no limit on the number of checks on any plan. Starter is $5.40/month billed monthly for 50 static pages checked every 60 minutes; dynamic (JavaScript) pages are capped separately on each plan.
How Monity compares: JavaScript pages count the same as any other, and the alert is tied to the change you described.
PageCrawl.io
PageCrawl.io’s free plan covers 6 pages and 220 checks. Paid plans are priced yearly: $160 billed annually (shown as $13.33 / month) for up to 200 pages and 30,000 checks, or $300 billed annually for up to 500 pages, 100,000 checks and 4 users.
How Monity compares: monthly or yearly billing, setup verification by AI and every alert channel from the free plan up.
Moving from changedetection.io
- Export your watch list. Most hosted tools accept a pasted list of URLs, and Monity’s Import tasks takes rows of URL, name and condition for business accounts.
- Start with the watches whose filters break most often. Those gain the most from a plain-English condition.
- Route alerts to the same place they go today (Slack, email or a webhook) so nothing changes for your team.
- Keep both running for a week, then compare how many alerts were worth reading.
Stay with changedetection.io if you need to self-host, or you watch thousands of URLs and are happy maintaining the filters.
Our free text diff and full-page screenshot tools are handy for checking what changed on a page while you compare.
Further reading
- How to monitor a page behind a login for changes
- How to get notified when a product is back in stock
- The best website change monitoring tools in 2026, by use case
Try Monity on the pages you watch today
Start on the free plan in a few minutes, or let us set it up and send you the first result. Slack, Teams, Google Sheets and every other alert channel are included either way.
