Distill.io is a strong personal web monitor, and if one person watches a few pages from a browser extension, it is hard to beat on price. Teams usually start looking for a Distill.io alternative when alerts need to reach several people, when somebody has to explain each change to leadership, or when version history has to go back further than the last few changes. WebsiteChange is built for that case: every real change arrives with a one-line AI summary and an importance score, routed to email, Slack, Microsoft Teams or a webhook.
See the first snapshot and a sample change summary in under a minute, with no card. Compare plans
Distill.io watches the parts of a page you select and checks them either locally, through its browser extension and desktop app, or in its cloud. Local monitors can check as often as every few seconds while your computer is on, which is useful for watching a ticket drop or a restock in real time. It also offers macros that click or type before a check, SMS alerts, apps for every desktop and mobile platform, and it can watch pages behind a login and PDF files.
WebsiteChange does not do some of that. We only read publicly reachable pages, we never log in, and we do not solve CAPTCHAs or run browser extensions on your machine. If your main need is watching a private dashboard from your own laptop, Distill.io is the better fit and we would rather say so here than after you sign up.
The figures for Distill.io come from its public pricing page at the time of writing. Prices change, so check its site before you decide.
| What you are comparing | Distill.io | WebsiteChange |
|---|---|---|
| Entry paid plan | Starter at 15 USD per month, 50 monitors | Starter at 49 USD per month or 24 USD per month billed yearly, 50 pages |
| Fastest cloud check | 10 min on Starter, 2 min on Flexi | Hourly on Starter, 15 min on Growth, 5 min on Business, 2 min on Enterprise |
| Local checks from your computer | Yes, from 5 seconds through the extension or desktop app | No, all checks run in our cloud |
| Pages behind a login | Yes | No, public pages only |
| Change explanation | Shows the changed text | One-sentence AI summary of every real change |
| Importance filter | Conditions you write per monitor | Every change scored low, medium or high, alerts filtered by score |
| Version history | 10 to 20 tracked changes per monitor on paid plans | 6 months, 2 years, 5 years or unlimited, by plan |
| Shared team workspaces | Shared watchlists on Enterprise | Seats and workspaces on every plan, from 2 seats and 1 workspace |
| Alert channels | Email, push, SMS and webhooks | Email on every plan; Slack, Microsoft Teams and webhooks on Growth and up |
| Price and stock as data | Not listed as a feature | Price and stock extraction on Growth and up |
| Reports and API | Not listed on the pricing page | CSV on every plan, PDF change reports and read API on Growth, full API on Business |
| Single sign-on | Not listed on the pricing page | SAML, roles and audit log on Business and Enterprise |
The short version: Distill.io wins on price per monitor, local speed and private pages. WebsiteChange wins when a team needs to understand, route and keep a record of changes on public pages.
A Distill.io alert tells you that the text in your selection changed. Someone still has to open it, read both versions and decide if it matters. WebsiteChange filters dates, counters, cookie banners and tracking parameters first, then an AI model writes what happened in one line, for example "Pro plan raised from 79 to 99 USD per month, annual discount removed". That sentence is what lands in Slack, so a sales lead can act on it without opening anything.
Each change gets a low, medium or high score. You can send every change to the analyst who owns the page and only high changes to the leadership channel. Read more about how scoring works on the ai website monitoring page.
Keeping the last 10 or 20 changes is fine for a personal watchlist. A legal team that needs to prove what a vendor's terms said in March, or a product marketer building a year of competitor pricing history, needs more. WebsiteChange keeps every version with a full-page screenshot, text diff and summary, searchable and exportable. See website archive tools for how search and export work.
Seats and workspaces are part of every plan instead of an Enterprise add-on. Agencies can give each client a workspace, and in-house teams can split marketing, legal and sales so each gets its own alerts and digest.
1. Export or copy the URLs of your cloud monitors from your Distill.io watchlist.
2. Paste them into WebsiteChange, one per line, and they are created in one step.
3. For monitors that watch one element, click the same block on our snapshot or paste the CSS selector you used in Distill.io.
4. Pick a schedule per page. Pricing pages are usually fine on hourly checks; product and stock pages may need 15 minutes.
5. Add ignore rules for the parts that caused false alerts before, then connect email, Slack, Microsoft Teams or a webhook.
Your old change history stays in Distill.io. WebsiteChange starts its own record from the first snapshot, which is why many teams overlap the two tools for a short period.
Every plan is bought online with no sales call and cancels anytime, with access until the end of the paid period. Yearly billing is half the monthly price. Starter is 49 USD per month or 24 USD billed yearly for 50 pages and 2 seats. Growth is 199 USD or 99 USD for 250 pages, 10 seats, Slack, Teams, webhooks and price extraction. Business is 499 USD or 249 USD for 1,000 pages, 30 seats and SSO. Enterprise is 1,199 USD or 599 USD for 5,000 pages and unlimited seats. Compare every limit on website change monitoring pricing, or read our wider buyer's guide to choosing a website change monitoring tool.
Distill.io has a free plan with 25 monitors, 5 of them in the cloud, cloud checks every 6 hours and a small monthly email allowance. Paid plans start at 15 USD per month on its pricing page. WebsiteChange has no free plan, but the demo on our home page runs a real check on any public page with no card.
For teams watching public competitor and vendor pages, a tool with shared workspaces, long version history and explained alerts tends to work better than a personal monitor. WebsiteChange adds AI summaries, importance scores, Slack and Teams routing and up to unlimited history. For private pages behind a login, Distill.io remains the stronger option.
No. WebsiteChange only reads publicly reachable pages, respects robots.txt and never logs in, solves CAPTCHAs or bypasses access controls. That keeps monitoring safe for regulated teams, but it means private dashboards and account pages are out of scope.
They serve different people. Distill.io leans toward individuals who want local browser checks and macros, while Visualping leans toward visual screenshot comparisons. If you are weighing Visualping too, our visualping alternative page lays out the same criteria for that tool.
Distill.io can check every few seconds locally and every 2 minutes in its cloud on its largest plan. WebsiteChange checks hourly on Starter, every 15 minutes on Growth, every 5 minutes on Business and every 2 minutes on Enterprise, all in the cloud, so checks continue when your computer is off.
Paste one of your current monitored URLs into the demo and compare the summary with the alert you get today.