Visualping Alternatives in 2026: 5 Tools, Prices and Free Plans
Last checked: September 2026. Competitor prices come from their public pricing pages on that date. Prices change, so confirm on their site before you pay.
The short answer
- Want a free plan that runs in the cloud, plus alerts that fire only when "Sold out" or "No appointments" disappears? Site Spy. Free for 2 pages, paid from EUR 4 a month.
- Want to watch lots of pages for free from your own browser? Distill. Its free plan runs 25 monitors, but only 5 of them in the cloud.
- Need archived snapshots and team reports for compliance work? ChangeTower.
- A government agency or large organisation? Look at Versionista.
- Want to host it yourself? Klaxon, or one of the other open-source monitors on GitHub.
The rest of this page explains how we got there and where each tool falls short, Site Spy included.
Why people look for a Visualping alternative
Visualping is one of the best-known change monitors, and it does the job. The reasons people shop around tend to be these:
Price grows with volume. Visualping prices by how many pages you watch and how often they are checked. Its pricing page is a calculator with no fixed plan list, so we won't quote a number here. If you watch many pages at short intervals, the bill climbs fast. Run your own numbers on their calculator.
Developer and team features are on Business plans. Visualping lists its API, integrations such as Slack and Microsoft Teams, bulk import and advanced reports as Business features that personal plans don't get.
False alerts. Any tool that compares whole pages will ping you about rotating banners, "3 people are viewing this" counters and timestamps. Visualping has a feedback loop for false alerts. Other tools handle it differently, which matters more than most feature lists admit.
Comparison table
Prices are monthly, for the cheapest paid plan, as listed in September 2026.
| Site Spy | Distill | ChangeTower | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free plan | 2 pages, checked hourly, in the cloud | 25 monitors, but only 5 in the cloud, 6-hour cloud checks | Free trial, no free plan |
| Cheapest paid plan | EUR 4: 25 pages, 10-minute checks | $15: 50 monitors, 10-minute checks | $12: 25 pages, checked every 24 hours |
| Fastest checks | 1 minute (Pro, up to 10 pages) | 2 minutes (Flexi) | 5 minutes |
| Pick one part of the page | Yes, on all plans | Yes | Yes, from Essential ($36) |
| Alert when text disappears | Yes, on all plans | Yes (conditions) | Yes (keyword triggers) |
| Browser extension | Chrome and Firefox | Chrome, Firefox and more | None listed |
| API | Yes, on all plans (100 requests a day on Free) | Not listed on its pricing page | Yes |
| MCP server for AI assistants | Yes, on all plans | No | No |
| Alert channels | Email, Telegram, browser push, webhooks to Discord, Slack and 90+ services | Email, push, SMS on paid plans, webhooks | Email, integrations, webhooks |
We left Visualping out of the table because its prices depend on a calculator. It has a Chrome extension, a free tier, and puts its API and integrations on Business plans.
Site Spy
Site Spy is a change monitor with a web dashboard and extensions for Chrome and Firefox. Disclosure: this is our product, so read this section with that in mind. We have tried to list the weak spots too.
Plans
These come straight from our pricing page:
- Free: 2 pages, checked every hour, forever. Every alert channel is included, plus the API, the MCP server and RSS feeds.
- Starter, EUR 4 a month: 25 pages, checks every 10 minutes, 90 days of history, bulk import.
- Pro, EUR 8 a month: 100 pages, 10 of them checked every minute, screenshots and visual diffs, AI summaries of changes, 1 year of history.
- Business, EUR 99 a month: 500 pages, all at 1-minute checks, 5 team seats.
New accounts get Pro features free for 5 days.
What is actually different
"Alert me when this text goes away." Most monitors tell you something changed. For restocks and appointments that is the wrong question. You want to know when "Sold out" or "No appointments available" is gone. In Site Spy you paste that message into Waiting For Text To Clear, switch on Alert only when it clears, and you get one alert when the message disappears and nothing else from that page. Our users run it on toy restocks at small shops and on government appointment pages. See back in stock alerts and appointment slot alerts.
You point at what matters. Paste a URL, and Site Spy shows you a picture of the page. Click the price or the stock line, or drag a box around an area. Only changes inside your selection reach you. If you click inside a product grid or a feed, it asks whether you meant that one item or the whole list, because the two behave very differently when the list reorders.
Noise handling that doesn't guess. Two filters are on by default for every watch: one strips relative timestamps and view counters, the other strips ads and cookie banners. If a watch still keeps alerting about nothing, automatic noise repair proposes ignore rules and first tests them against that watch's saved snapshots. It refuses any rule that would hide a price or a stock line. It never changes what you picked to watch.
It tells you when a page fails. When a site blocks us, asks for a login or drops the element you picked, the watch shows a health badge and you get an email explaining what went wrong. It won't sit there quietly reporting "no changes".
API and MCP on the free plan. Every plan includes the REST API and an MCP server, so Claude, Cursor or another MCP client can create watches and read changes for you. See the MCP guide.
Where Site Spy falls short
- Screenshots and visual diffs are Pro only. Free and Starter get text diffs.
- AI change summaries are Pro and Business only. Free and Starter get the diff without a summary.
- No SMS alerts. Use Telegram or push if you need something on your phone.
- Login steps and the price/restock mode are API-only for now. There is no dashboard editor for them yet.
- Alerts are capped at 4 an hour and 24 a day per watch, so a page that changes constantly can't flood you.
- Heavily protected sites can still beat us. Checks move to heavier fetch methods when a site blocks the first attempt, but some anti-bot vendors stop everything we have tried.
Start free with 2 pages. No credit card.
Distill
Distill has been around for years and is built around its browser extension.
Pricing (September 2026): Free, then Starter at $15 a month, Professional at $35 and Flexi from $80. Annual billing takes 20% off.
Free plan: 25 monitors, but only 5 run in Distill's cloud, at 6-hour intervals, with 1,000 cloud checks and 30 email alerts a month. The rest run locally, so your computer and browser need to be open for them to check.
Strengths: Very flexible. Local monitors can check every few seconds. Paid plans add SMS alerts, macros that click through a page before checking, and captcha solving on premium plans.
Weaknesses: The free plan only covers much ground if you leave your browser running. Cloud checks are metered, and slow checks count as more than one. The jump from free to $15 is steep if you only need a handful of pages checked often.
Best for: Technical users who want lots of control and don't mind local monitors.
ChangeTower
ChangeTower is aimed at compliance, legal and competitor-intelligence teams.
Pricing (September 2026): Lite at $12 a month for 25 pages checked every 24 hours, Essential at $36 for 100 pages checked hourly, Business at $78 for 200 pages. You start with a free trial. There is no free plan.
Strengths: Snapshot archive and history, team members on every plan, AI change analysis, keyword triggers, webhooks and an API, and white-label reports for agencies.
Weaknesses: Daily checks on the entry plan are too slow for prices, restocks or appointments. Watching only one section of a page starts at the $36 plan. No browser extension listed.
Best for: Teams that need a dated record of what a page said and when.
Other options
Versionista is built for organisations that watch large numbers of pages and need detailed change reports. It is used by public-sector and research groups. Check their site for current pricing. For one person watching a few pages, it is more than you need.
Klaxon is an open-source monitor from The Marshall Project, made for journalists watching government sites. It's free, but you host and maintain it yourself. There are other open-source, self-hosted monitors on GitHub too. They cost nothing but your time: you run the server, handle updates, and deal with sites that block you.
How to choose
Ask three questions:
- How fast do you need to know? Prices and restocks on popular items can go in minutes, so you need 1 to 10-minute checks. Documentation, policy pages and competitor copy are fine with hourly or daily checks.
- What exactly counts as a change? If the answer is "this one price" or "when this message disappears", pick a tool that lets you say that. Whole-page diffs will bury you in alerts.
- Does it need to run while your laptop is closed? Then look at cloud checks, not local ones.
If you want to try Site Spy against the tool you use now, set up the same page in both and compare the alerts for a week. The free plan is enough for that. Create a free account or see pricing.