Distill.io is a capable monitor with a generous free plan, and its browser extension is the reason many people start with it. The usual reasons to look further: local monitors only run while a device is on, free cloud checks are slow, and sharing a watchlist across a team means moving to a separate plan.
We make Monity, so this guide leads with it and says why. All prices and limits come from each vendor’s pricing page, checked in October 2026.
What Distill.io gives you today
- Free: 25 monitors, 5 of them in the cloud, with cloud checks at most every 6 hours, 1,000 cloud checks a month and 30 email alerts a month.
- Starter: $15/month for 50 monitors, checks every 10 minutes and 30,000 cloud checks a month.
- Professional: $35/month for 150 monitors and checks every 5 minutes.
- Flexi: from $80/month, with checks every 2 minutes.
- Annual billing takes 20% off, and teams sharing one watchlist use the Enterprise plan.
Our pick for most teams: Monity
Monity is cloud-only, so nothing depends on a laptop staying open, and it replaces selectors and macros with plain English:
- Describe the change, not the page structure. Write “a sub-processor has been added or removed” or “tell me when the price drops below $200”. When the page changes, AI checks the change against that sentence and ignores noise such as cookie banners.
- Know it reads the right thing. A few minutes after you save, Monity’s AI opens the page and confirms what it will compare (a price, a list, a table), so each alert can name the item that changed.
- Alerts where your team works, on every plan. Slack, Microsoft Teams, Google Sheets, Telegram, Discord, email, webhooks and push notifications in the iOS and Android apps are all included, Free plan too.
- Built for a team. Business plans add seats (up to 15 on Business 50k), Admin, Editor and Viewer roles, and Import tasks, which turns pasted rows of URLs and conditions into tasks in one go.
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.
Distill.io alternatives compared
| Tool | Free plan | Paid plans from | Fastest checks | How you say what to watch | Runs in the cloud |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 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 sentence, checked by AI; setup verified by AI | Yes, always |
| Visualping | 5 pages, 150 checks/month, hourly | $14/mo monthly or $120/yr (Personal 1K) | Every 2 min (Personal 10K and Business) | Visual, text or element detection, with AI change summaries | Yes |
| Wachete | 5 static pages and 1 dynamic page, daily | $5.40/month (Starter) | Every 5 minutes (Premium and Ultimate) | A whole page or the part you pick | Yes, even when your devices are off |
| changedetection.io | Open source, self-hosted | One hosted plan, priced in your local currency | About every 5 minutes per runner | Trigger text, CSS/xPath rules and ignore filters | Hosted plan or your own server |
| PageCrawl.io | 6 pages, 220 checks | $160 billed annually (shown as $13.33 / month) | Not published on the pricing page | Not covered here | Yes |
| ChangeTower | 3 pages, daily | $12/mo (Lite) | Hourly (Essential and Business) | Pages, sections or elements; AI monitoring on every monitor | Yes |
What a Monity alert gives you
Alerts include an AI summary of what changed and link to the check behind them: the screenshot, the page before and after and every text change. On a changelog, each release is an item, so a new one is named in the alert instead of “the page changed by 3%”.
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. For the head-to-head, see Monity vs Distill.io.
The other alternatives, briefly
Visualping
Visualping runs every check in the cloud and includes AI change summaries, actions such as logging in before a check, and its REST API and MCP server on every plan. Slack, Teams and Google Sheets alerts are on Business plans only. Personal 1K is $14/mo monthly or $120/yr; Personal 10K checks every 2 minutes for $70/mo or $600/yr.
How Monity compares: Slack, Teams and Sheets on every plan, and at least twice the pages on each Personal tier for the same price.
Wachete
Wachete watches pages around the clock, even when your devices are off. Starter is $5.40/month billed monthly for 50 static pages checked every 60 minutes, and every plan has no limit on the number of checks, 12 months of history and pages behind a login. Dynamic (JavaScript) pages are capped separately: 1 on Starter, 2 on Standard, 10 on Premium.
How Monity compares: every page runs in a real browser and counts the same, and you write the condition instead of picking page parts.
changedetection.io
A fully open-source project you can host yourself. Its hosted plan watches up to 5,000 URLs with a real Chrome browser, re-checks about every 5 minutes per runner and supports more than 85 notification types. Like Distill, it gives you fine control through trigger text, CSS/xPath rules and ignore lists.
How Monity compares: nothing to host or tune: one sentence per page, checked by AI.
PageCrawl.io
PageCrawl.io’s free plan covers 6 pages and 220 checks with 90 days of history. Its next plan is $160 billed annually (shown as $13.33 / month) for up to 200 pages and 30,000 checks.
How Monity compares: monthly billing on every tier, every alert channel on the free plan, and setup verification by AI.
ChangeTower
ChangeTower includes extra team members from its first paid plan (1 on Lite, 3 on Essential, 5 on Business) and AI monitoring on every monitor. Checks are daily on Lite and hourly above that; Lite is $12/mo for 25 pages.
How Monity compares: checks every 15 minutes from Personal 5k and Business 1k, and every 5 minutes from Personal 10k and Business 20k.
Moving your Distill monitors
- List the URLs you watch in Distill and note any that depend on a macro or a login.
- Recreate the important ones first. In Monity you paste the URL and write the condition as a sentence instead of a selector; business accounts can paste many rows at once with Import tasks.
- Run both tools side by side for a few days and compare which alerts were actually useful.
- Turn off the old monitors once the new ones have caught a real change.
Keep Distill if you want monitors that run inside your own browser session, or checks every 2 minutes from $80/month on Flexi.
Before you move, our free text diff and before-and-after comparison tools are a quick way to see how a page changed.
Further reading
- How to get an alert when a web page changes
- How to monitor a page behind a login for changes
- Visualping alternatives in 2026
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.
