In times like these, digital presence is key to any business’s success. The thought of being unnecessarily offline is daunting, as that would mean reducing your business’s visibility and potential revenue. However, running a website involves various complex components, meanings things can go haywire at times. As per an ITIC study, 98% of organizations say that even an hour of downtime can cost them up to $100,000.

This is where website change monitoring software like Site24x7 come in handy. It's a robust solution that tracks your website components and reports to you if there are any unexpected downtimes. In addition to testing various website components, you can also harness real user website interaction data to identify pain points and customer trends.

Read on as we’ll explore Site24x7 in more detail in this article, discussing its best features, pricing, interface, and more.

• Interested in Site24x7? Check out the website here

Site24x7: Plans and pricing

Site24x7 offers four plans designed for various business sizes. Startups and small businesses can opt for its Web Uptime plan at $9/month. Such a low starting price makes Site24x7 one of the cheapest options in the industry. This plan comes with 25 basic monitors with a check frequency of 1 minute.

A headline feature is that right from the first plan you can choose up to 8 locations to monitor your website – from a selection of 130+ locations worldwide. There are also 3 basic status pages and decent customer support (email and forum).

If this isn’t enough, you can switch to the Pro plan made for SMBs. That's priced at $35/month and comes with 40 basic monitors, 3 synthetic transaction monitors, 5 network monitoring interfaces, and 2 netflow analyzer interfaces.

This is also Site24x7’s first plan that offers Real User Monitoring (RUM) with 500K pageviews and 5 sites. You also get a lot of third-party integrations that allow you to build custom workflows. Chat and phone support is also available from this plan onwards.

All in all, this looks like an ideal plan for most businesses thanks to its excellent value for money. After all, it has all the features Site24x7 has to offer. However, a larger business may need to switch to the Classic plan at $89/month. This one comes with 100 basic monitors and 5 transaction checks, as well as with 1M RUM pageviews.

A good thing about Site24x7 is that you can buy a lot of add-ons, meaning you won’t have to switch to a higher plan just for more threshold limits.

For example, if you’re satisfied with the Pro plan but only need additional monitors, you can simply buy 50 add-on monitors for $18/month instead of switching to the Classic plan. Similar add-ons are available for RUM data points, advanced monitors, and so on.

Additionally, Site24x7 also offers a completely free plan with 5 basic monitors and 3 location checks. However, this plan is very limited and can only be used to test the platform’s interface and efficiency before purchasing a paid plan.

Site24x7: Features

Site24x7’s comprehensive uptime monitoring checks allow you to track the load times of your web pages from as many as 8 locations at the same time. Moreover, you can choose from over 130 global locations to run these tests from.

Unlike a majority of website monitoring tools, Site24x7 comes with defacement monitoring. Defacement refers to unauthorized hacks on your website, which can lead to outages and damaged reputations.

The platform uses a baseline document object model (DOM) mechanism during a standard check for website components like images, scripts, anchors, links, text, etc. Current DOMs are continuously matched against previous ones to identify any unauthorized changes.

Besides this, Site24x7 also runs SSL/TLS certificate expiration checks and sends you notifications well before they expire.

We found the platform’s Real User Monitoring (RUM) functions to be quite comprehensive, too. It uses real data endpoints to identify load times of various components, like CSS, scripts, and images, from different domains (first-party, third-party, and CDN networks) and summarizes the impact of each component on overall response times.

Administrators can use core web vitals and secondary metrics, as well as detailed session replays to gain more insights into how real users interact with the webpages. Site24x7’s RUM also helps identify any JavaScript code errors with details on the type of error, error message, and the exact URL, which helps in quick resolution.

Once you’ve identified key website components, you can subject them to synthetic tests with Site24x7. You can record key business transactions like web checkouts, payment pages, or button clicks with the platform’s simple web recorder and then check them with synthetic traffic.

You can also use JSONPath or XPath assertions to monitor API integrations on your website to check if they’re operational or not. For example, you can set up an API check to monitor the payment page on your e-commerce website.

Beyond digital experience monitoring, Site24x7 also offers functions like network monitoring, infrastructure monitoring, and application performance monitoring, each of which will cost you extra.

Site24x7 also has the largest collection of free tools we’ve seen. You get 100+ tools you can use without having to pay a single cent to blacklist checks, monitor SSL certificates, conduct DNS analysis, and monitor aspects like website uptime. The assortment of tools also include an SLA uptime calculator and a host of converter and formatter tools.

Site24x7: Interface and in use

Site24x7’s interface is pretty clean and information loaded. You’ll see a quick summary of all your website checks at the top which are color-coded for easy identification. The platform also allows you to build custom dashboards to view key metrics from every tier of your infrastructure.

There are several pre-built reports on availability, performance, SLAs, global benchmarks, and more. You can even customize and schedule reports as per your needs. Site24x7 integrates with a lot of incident management platforms, which helps you quickly communicate outages and resolve them in almost no time at all.

There are also handy mobile apps for iOS and Android, meaning you can keep an eye on your websites on the go and ensure you do not miss any critical updates. These apps are also easy to use and set up, just like the web version of the platform.

Overall, Site24x7 is beginner-friendly and you can get a hang of it in less than a day, making it a good choice even for non-tech-savvy teams.

Site24x7: Support

Site24x7 offers comprehensive support with dedicated emails for support and sales inquiries. Depending on the plan you’re on, you get access to either basic or premium support. Basic support included email and forum access, whereas premium comes with phone and chat support on top of the previous two.

Apart from this, you get access to Site24x7’s rich collection of help documents, knowledge base, how-to’s, and training videos, so you don't have to worry about any common queries. There’s also a very active community space where you can post your questions and get them answered by fellow Site24x7 users.

Site24x7: The competition

Although Site24x7 is undoubtedly a great monitoring solution for every business need, it doesn't hurt to look at the alternatives.

Uptime.com is an enterprise-level monitoring tool ideal for large businesses. In addition to synthetic and RUM tests, you can even run group and cloud status checks. It also offers more than 20 types of basic monitors, which is more than what you get with Site24x7.

Plus, you can run checks from as many as 15 global locations simultaneously and harness 1.5M+ RUM data points for insightful user data. It also supports private location checks and internal status pages for seamless intra-team communications. The only downside is that it can be a bit expensive.

For a more affordable option, try Datadog. It offers feature-specific plans ideal for small businesses with limited needs. For instance, its RUM plan with session replays costs just $1.80/month for 1,000 sessions.

Datadog also offers a very handy Mobile Testing feature that lets you assess your app's stability, identify app crashes, and assist in resolving any glitches. Plus, it has the largest collection of third-party integrations we’ve seen, supporting 800+ applications for seamless workflows and notifications.

Site24x7: Final verdict

Site24x7 is a complete website monitoring solution that allows you to monitor various components of your website, such as APIs, load speeds, and overall uptime. Plus, the platform’s baseline document object model (DOM) mechanism detects any unauthorized changes or hacks before it gets out of hand.

We also liked its dashboards, which are fully customizable and laced with various graphs and charts. Site24x7 is also one of the few monitoring platforms that offer a plethora of free tools, allowing you to monitor websites, networks, and servers.

Paying users will find Site24x7 quite affordable, as plans start from just $9/month. Moreover, you can purchase a lot of add-ons to increase monitoring limits. To top it all off, you get a 30-day free trial, too.

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FAQs

Content monitoring has risen in popularity in recent times - for both personal and business use. You may want to know when your favorite product is back in stock or when your job listing is updated. Similarly, businesses need a solution to monitor their competitors’ websites and execute compliance monitoring. Enter content monitoring tools like Visualping.

Visualping tracks the URLs you want and notifies you of any changes in the webpages. You even have the option to select a specific area to be tracked on the page. To top it all, there are AI features that summarize and analyze the changes for you, saving you a ton of time.

Read on as we explore Visualping, one of the best in the business, in more detail. We'll discuss its best features, pricing, interface, and customer support, as well as compare it with some of its top rivals.

• Interested in Visualping? Check out the website here

Visualping: Plans and pricing

Visualping offers two pricing tiers: Personal and Business. The Personal plan priced at $50 per month can support up to 10K checks in a month limited to a maximum of 200 pages. However, there are cheaper plans, too. For instance, if you only want 1K monthly checks of 25 pages, you’ll have to shell out just $10/month.

There’s also a free Personal plan that lets you run 150 checks a month limited to 5 pages – good enough for personal needs.

The Business plans start at $100/month and allow up to 20K checks of around 500 pages. You can scale all the way up to the $250/month plan that offers 50K checks covering 1,500 pages in a month.

Business plans also come with a host of features not offered on the Personal plans. For instance, you can get alerts via Slack, Teams, and Google Sheets. However, on the Personal plan, messages are your only alert option. Likewise, you can add up to 5 users on the Business plans as compared to just 1 on Personal.

Visualping: Features

Visualping offers a ton of handy features that make content monitoring easy. For starters, it's one of the few platforms that use AI to detect website changes. The Visualping AI saves you a ton of time through summaries, smart alerts, and mind reader features.

You can read AI-generated summaries of all the changes observed instead of skimming through them manually. The platform uses advanced AI algorithms to understand the context of the webpage. This helps to avoid meaningless changes and content shifts and generates alerts only based on contextual changes.

Visualping also offers a lot of integrations so that you can build your own business workflows. For instance, you can connect Visualping with Slack so that you don’t have to keep returning to Visualping every time there’s an alert - you can get them on Slack itself. The same goes for Microsoft Teams, Discord, and Google Sheets as well.

Plus, if you do not find an integration for your needs, you can use the Visualping API to build a custom integration for your business.

Now, if you’re a website owner, you also have the option of adding a Visualping button on your webpage to notify your users of crucial changes. This can come in pretty handy for small businesses that can notify users of price drops or sale offers. Similarly, government bodies, universities, and corporations can use it to intimate users regarding important notification uploads.

All Business accounts have a central location called Workspace where you can invite your team members to manage the changes. Teams can use labels, folders, and various filtering options to organize the observed changes.

However, Workspaces need to be purchased separately – you can do so for a specific project, team, or client. Although a handy feature for large businesses, it can quickly add up to your total subscription cost.

Visualping: Interface and in use

Visualping is extremely easy to use – even beginners can track websites effortlessly. You only have to enter the URL of the website and select a specific area on the webpage you want to track.

The dashboard is clean and easy to understand. You can see all your active jobs on the left side and the changes detected on the right. To make it easier for you, there’s a Visualping Chrome extension, which you can add to your browser. This way, you won’t have to manually add links on the dashboard – simply deploy the extension on the webpage you want to monitor.

Visualping: Support

Visualping's support options are minimal. You only get basic email support irrespective of the plan you're on – dedicated support, however, is available on the Business plans, but at an extra cost.

The Basic Support add-on costs a whopping $600/year, followed by the Advanced plan at $1,200/year and the Dedicated Support at $3,000/year. That's borderline nerve-wracking.

However, paid support executives take care of everything for you – from setting up your account to monitoring pages and guaranteed response times. Your own team can also benefit from dedicated training on how to get the best out of Visualping.

Although beneficial, the dedicated support can make your overall Visualping bundle very expensive, which may not be ideal for small businesses.

Visualping: The competition

Let's see how Visualping stacks up against the competition.

Distill.io is a more advanced and complicated content monitoring tool ideal for large businesses. You can define your tracking selections with CSS, XPATH, and regular expressions. Plus, you can even automate workflows with JavaScript.

Its free plan is also more generous than Visualping – you can run 1,000 monthly checks with 25 monitors. Even its most expensive plan costs $80/month, which is much cheaper than Visualping’s Business plans.

Change Tower is yet another affordable option starting at just $9/month for 1,500 checks. You even get 2 months free subscription with the annual plan. Users can check as many as 500 URLs with this plan without any daily check limits. Its Enterprise plan can run checks every 3 minutes and monitor 2,000+ dynamic URLs.

With that said Visualping's premium pricing is justified, seeing as it offers a handful of unique features. This includes its game-changing AI checker tool and a nifty Visualping button.

Visualping: Final verdict

Visualping is hands down one of the best content monitoring tools out there. One of the highlights is its ease of use; all you have to do is enter the target website's URL and select the area on the webpage you want to track.

Plus, it's one of the few monitoring tools that use AI to enhance monitoring results – you benefit from AI summarizing and analysis.

For businesses, Visualping offers a dedicated button to send content updates to their users. Plus, there are a lot of integrations with platforms like Slack, Teams, and Google Sheets. You can even make your custom alert software through the Visualping API.

Visualping also offers a free plan with 150 checks a month for up to 5 pages, which can be handy for personal and non-commercial use. Its paid plans start from $10/month and go all the way up to $250/month – you can pick one as per your needs.

All in all, Visualping is an excellent content monitoring tool good for both personal and business use. That said, it can be a touch expensive, especially if you wish to get the add-on for dedicated support.

FAQs

• Creating a new website? Check out our roundup of best website builders.

Website content monitoring is essential for businesses, especially those that rely heavily on their online presence. For instance, you may want to keep an eye on your competitor’s websites, check for news and updates, and monitor compliance-related websites.

ChangeTower is a cloud-based website content monitoring platform that helps you monitor third-party sites. Founded in 2016, it's the go-to monitoring solution for many big brands such as KPMG, Disney, IBM, The Wall Street Journal, etc.

Using it is pretty easy, too. You can just enter the URL of the page that you want to track, and it will notify you about every small change that takes place henceforth. Each change notification is supported by a snapshot of the same, which you can archive in your account for up to 12 months.

Read till the end to know everything about ChangeTower, including its best features, pricing, and interface, as well as how it compares to the rest of the competition.

• Also check out our complete list of the best website monitoring software

ChangeTower: Plans and pricing

ChangeTower has three plans: two paid and one completely free. The free plan is ideal for those who are just getting started. It allows you to monitor up to 3 URLs with 6 daily checks. What's more, you can archive up to one month of data.

The first paid subscription is the Power User plan, starting at $9/month (billed monthly). Under this, you get tracking for 500 URLs, 1,500 checks per month, Zapier integration, and up to 3 months of content archive. Additionally, you get to simulate user actions, monitor websites that require a login, and enjoy full-page visual snapshots.

The best part is this is a flexible plan. This means you can change the number of monthly checks, the number of users, and the number of months your data is archived. All these things are customizable, and your plan's price will change accordingly.

Next is the Enterprise plan, which starts at $299/month (billed monthly). Here you can monitor a page every three minutes, track over 2000 URLs, monitor text-based files and PDFs, receive advanced support and setup assistance, and much more.

Plus, you get 1 Enterprise seat that allows you to create your own monitors, view the comments and notifications for each of them, and then share them with your colleagues. We found this plan ideal for large businesses with constant monitoring needs.

It's worth noting that the prices mentioned above are for monthly billing. If you choose the annual plan, you get a two-month subscription for free. For instance, the Power User plan will cost you $90 for the whole year.

ChangeTower: Features

ChangeTower’s core feature is very simple – it tracks a given URL and notifies you about the changes on it. The change can range from textual and image changes to code changes. Text-based pages such as .CSS, .txt, and .js and PDFs can also be monitored.

You can decide what kind of changes you want to be notified about from the settings page and set up unlimited conditional alerts. For instance, you can choose to be notified only when certain keywords appear in the changes.

You can also add various user actions. For instance, if the website you want to monitor requires a few clicks before displaying the content, you can configure ChangeTower to perform it before running the checks.

We also liked ChangeTower’s collaboration tools. For instance, if multiple people from your team are using this platform, you can choose who gets notified about the changes and who doesn't. They will have read-only access and won't be able to make any changes to the monitor. This is ideal for businesses that have defined teams with assigned roles.

All the update reports you get will be stored in ChangeTower’s own archive. Depending on the plan you choose, you can archive a report for up to 12 months. This helps you pin down the exact time when the changes took place.

To further simplify managing updates, ChangeTower lets you assign tags and categorize them accordingly. There’s also a one-week timeline on the dashboard in case you want to filter the updated reports as per date.

If its native features are falling short, you can always integrate your account with Zapier to set up a seamless workflow.

ChangeTower’s Domain Scanner is a lifesaver for large organizations that need to ensure complete coverage of a domain. It scans an entire domain to discover any newly published URLs and sets up monitors on them. This way, you don’t have to manually look for new pages on domains you already track.

Going a step ahead, there’s also a new KW Discovery tool that actually extracts & examines the content of each page it discovers. It can come in handy when you’re hunting for specific keywords or phrases. ChangeTower will not only identify new URLs but also generate reports of pages containing these keywords.

ChangeTower: Interface and in use

The interface of ChangeTower is extremely simple and beginner-friendly. Once you create an account (which only takes a minute, by the way), you’ll be directly led to your all-in-one dashboard.

You get various options while adding a monitor: single URL, multiple URLs, or entire domain. This is further drilled down into categories like visual monitor, SEO monitor, HTML monitor, and so on.

On the left side of the dashboard, you’ll see a menu where you can choose between different options such as Monitors, Recent Notifications, Settings, Billing, and more.

In the center, you’ll have an overview of all your active and paused monitors, notifications, and a timeline of the past week.

Here you’ll also find a filter menu where you can assign tags such as “important” and “reviewed” to different updates and organize them accordingly.

Overall, the interface is simple, compact, and navigable—everything you need in monitoring software. There’s also an iOS app that helps you keep track of the changes on the go, which is fairly simple to use.

ChangeTower: Support

ChangeTower has a detailed knowledge base where you’ll find information about almost everything – whether that's setting up your account, managing your plans, or integrating with Zapier.

Apart from that, they also have a contact form on their website where you can submit your issues. There’s space to fill in your email ID, subject, a detailed explanation of the problem, and an attachment in case you need to explain it properly.

ChangeTower: The competition

ChangeTower is a great option for monitoring websites. But if you're looking for alternatives, Versionista and Visualping are equally good.

Verionista lets you customize things like the timing of the crawl, frequency and location of the crawl, what to look for, and what to ignore. Along with a knowledge base, Versionista also offers email support with a guaranteed response time of 12 hours. What’s more, these responses come directly from their senior engineers. However, it can be a bit more expensive than ChangeTower.

Similarly, Visualping outperforms ChangeTower with its wide array of AI features. There’s an AI tool to summarize change reports, saving you the hassle of going through it manually. It also has an AI to give you suggestions throughout the setup process to speed it up.

In addition to that, if you find a certain update alert irrelevant, you can give that feedback to the AI, and it will block all similar types of alerts in the future.

ChangeTower: Final verdict

ChangeTower is a great pick for businesses looking for a competent monitoring tool. Its free plan and customizable pricing make it perfect for budding businesses. Depending on the plan you choose, you can monitor more than 2,000 URLs, which should be enough for most businesses. In addition to live pages, you can also monitor PDFs, .txt, and .CSS files.

If you have a team-oriented organization, you can choose which team gets the change notifications. There’s an option to provide read-only access so that no unauthorized changes can be made.

ChangeTower’s interface is very simple and easy to navigate, making it beginner-friendly. The dashboard is compact, bringing everything you need on one page.

Overall, it is a good business content monitoring tool, delivering excellent value for money. However, its AI features are still a work in progress. If that’s a concern, you can consider alternatives like Visualping and Versionista.

• We've also featured the best webpage change monitoring software

FAQs