Website Change Monitor Comparison

Three numbers everyone repeats, and the truth

These are not small discrepancies. Each one would change which tool a reader picks.

• ChangeTower's entry plan is daily-only. It is widely listed as $15 a month for 50 monitors at ten-minute checks. Per ChangeTower's pricing page, the $12 Lite plan covers 25 pages and still checks once a day. Hourly checks start on the $36 Essential plan.
• Hexowatch has no free plan, and starts at $24.17. It is commonly described as free for 75 checks a month with paid plans from $14.99. Its pricing page shows no free tier at all and its cheapest plan at $24.17 a month for 4,500 checks.
• Wachete is far stronger than any summary says. It is usually written off as five static pages checked daily. Its own site lists that free plan as also including one JavaScript-rendered page, no cap on the number of checks, twelve months of history, monitoring of pages behind a login, and text extraction from PDF, doc, docx and xlsx files.

The ten, ordered by what you get for nothing

The trap in every free plan: the interval you cannot afford

Most of these tools advertise a check interval and, separately, a monthly budget of checks. On the free plans the two rarely agree, and the budget always wins. Multiply pages by checks per day by thirty and compare:

Distill's version of this is the one to watch for. A thousand checks a month sounds generous next to everyone else, and then thirty email alerts a month caps what you can be told. For watching a job board or a restock, being told is the entire product.

Which one to pick

• Watching a handful of pages, free: Wachete. Daily checks are slower than Distill's six hours, but nothing is capped and you keep a year of history.
• You need it faster than daily, free: Distill, and accept thirty alerts a month. Or Visualping if you want its AI change summaries more than you want frequency.
• You can run Docker: changedetection.io, self-hosted. Unlimited, Apache-2.0, real Chrome for JavaScript pages, and visual diffing. The cost is that you are now the operator.
• Dozens of pages on a small budget: Wachete at $5.40, or PageCrawl at $13.33 annually if you want fifteen-minute checks and Slack.
• You need near-real-time: Sken.io offers one-minute intervals from 3 euros, but at 500 checks a month that is one page for about eight hours. Real minute-level monitoring means Distill Professional or PageCrawl Enterprise.
• Pages behind a login: Wachete is the only one of the ten that lists this on a free plan.

What we could not verify

Saying so is the point of a comparison like this, because the parts nobody checks are where the errors above came from. Follow That Page publishes no pricing page; its site offers a form and an email field, and reads like a long-running service run by one person. PageProbe is a browser extension rather than a hosted service, so its unlimited trackers only run while your browser does, which makes it incomparable on price by design. PageCrawl and Sken.io do not state whether they render JavaScript, and both are marked accordingly rather than guessed. Wachete publishes tiers above Starter that were not read for this page.

Method

Every figure was read from the vendor's own pricing page in September 2026, not from a review or a roundup. Hexowatch and Wachete render their prices with JavaScript, so those two pages were opened in a real browser; both turned out to differ from what the summaries say, which is probably not a coincidence. Product names and trademarks belong to their respective owners, and none of these companies was contacted or consulted. Where a vendor does not state something, this page says so instead of filling the gap.