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You may want to monitor content on a webpage for various reasons. It could be that you’re waiting for your favorite product to be back in stock, or looking for a job, or tracking a competitor to see what they’re up to.
However, manually looking for updates every now and then is impractical and, quite honestly, a waste of time. You need someone to keep an eye on your behalf while you focus on your actual work. This is where an online website change monitoring tool comes in.
Change Detection is an easy, beginner-friendly website monitoring tool that lets you track up to 5,000 URLs at once. Every time there’s an update, you can get alerts via 85 various modes, including SMS, email, Discord, and so on.
In this guide, we will dive deep into ChangeDetector’s plans and pricing, features, customer support, and much more. We’ll also list down a couple of alternatives in case it doesn’t fit your needs.
Change Detection: Plans and pricing
Change Detection has a simple one-tier pricing, starting at only $8.99/month. You can track up to 5,000 URLs at once with a checking frequency of 5 minutes.
You can also track the target website from different virtual locations, get instant notifications on email (or your preferred communication app), and bulk import the list of URLs to be tracked.
The best thing is that everything the platform has to offer has been bundled into a single plan, which is pretty affordable, too, particularly when compared with the likes of Fluxguard or Visualping.
Change Detection: Features
Change Detection is an entry-level content monitoring tool just like Sken. It lets you track up to 5,000 URLs at once – a great add-on for businesses. Once you enter the page URL, the platform will track all changes, be they content changes or visual ones.
You will also be notified about all these changes in real-time. Notifications are unlimited and can be sent to over 85 different platforms, including Discord, email, Telegram, and Slack.
If you don’t want to be bothered about every single update, there are a bunch of filters available to remove unwanted alerts, such as trigger text, CSS/XPath rules, and ignore text.
For instance, if you’re looking for a 3BHK for rent on a website, you can set up alerts for changes that include the words ‘3BHK.’ This way, you won’t be bombarded with all notifications, making your dashboard clutter-free.
You can also customize the time between subsequent checks as per your needs. For instance, you may want to check for news updates only during office hours. Let’s say you know your favorite shoes will be back in stock next Thursday. You can customize Change Detection to run checks only from 00:01 to 23:59 on Thursdays.
Change Detection can also help you identify valuable trends if the web page contains a number. Let’s say you’re looking for the number of apartment listings on a real estate website. You can instruct Change Detection to look over all previous change snapshots, extract the text, and send you a CSV with the time/date.
This can help you identify long-term trends, which can be useful for consumer-driven businesses.
The platform also offers a lot of tools to simplify the website tracking process. For instance, if you have a list of URLs, you can import it on Change Detection through a CSV or Excel file. Another way to add new sites to be tracked is through the Chrome browser extension.
What’s more, you can also use proxy servers to access a site from different geographical locations. For example, if you’re in Asia but want to see what the European version of a certain page has, Change Detection can help you with that.
Change Detection: Interface and in use
The main dashboard is as simple as they come. At the center of the page, there’s an empty field for the new URL that you want to track. Just below that, there’s a list of all the URLs that you are currently tracking.
Changes depicted in text are highlighted in red (for the old version) and green (for the new version) to make it easy for you to spot the difference.
There’s also a settings page for each URL that you are tracking. You can access the settings page through the “Edit” button on the main dashboard. Once inside, you will find another dashboard with a set of menus on the top. The options on the menu are to help you configure how the tracking happens.
Overall, the site is fairly easy to use, but a new user will need some time to find out where all the features are and how to work them.
Change Detection: Support
Change Detection’s support is admittedly a little barebones. There’s a section of tutorials that can help you with basic issues.
Now, if you want to talk to the team directly, there’s a contact form on the home page. You need to share your email ID, existing login URL, and a short message about your concern. However, that’s it – we didn’t find any direct email support option or live chat.
Change Detection: The competition
Because Change Detection is a beginner-level tool, it lacks many advanced features. Two of its biggest competitors are Visualping and Wachete.
Visualping is best known for its AI automation tools that save you tons of time by streamlining mundane tasks. For example, there’s a summarization tool that summarizes all change reports, helping you extract the crux of the matter without having to read through countless pages.
You can also give feedback to this AI about irrelevant notifications, and it will ensure that all similar kinds of alerts are blocked in the future. There’s also another AI tool that helps you set up your account quickly through smart suggestions. Large businesses that have a lot of workload can really benefit from this automation.
Next, we have Wachete. The best thing about it is that it allows third-party integration with Zapier, which in turn allows you to connect with over 7,000 tools. Plus, along with tracking online pages, Wachete also lets you track text documents such as PDFs, Word files, DOCX, and so on. It’s also a bit more affordable than Change Detection, with plans starting from $5.40/month.
Change Detection: Final verdict
Change Detection is a good content monitoring tool, best for beginners. It’s affordable, too, starting at just $8.99/month. Plus, the interface is pretty simple with a minimum learning curve – you can navigate it even if you are not a tech expert.
Its biggest USP is that it lets you track 5,000 URLs at once – something you don’t get with many website monitoring tools. There are also unlimited notifications available on over 85 different types of platforms, such as Slack, Telegram, Discord, and so on.
Last but not least, it comes with a Google Chrome browser extension for JavaScript websites, simplifying the process of adding new pages to be tracked.
However, it does have a few shortcomings. For instance, there are no AI features, password-page tracking, or an option to track pages locked behind pre-defined actions. All this makes Change Detection a little less ideal for large businesses. In that case, you can try alternatives like Wachete or Visualping.
FAQs
What is a content monitoring tool?
A content monitoring tool lets you keep an eye on other webpages, such as your competitors, and see what’s going on. Instead of manually looking for updates, you can use this tool to be notified anytime there’s a major change.
The change could be related to content, visual elements, or the code of the page. Many of these tools, including Change Detection, also offer real-time alerts for such changes so that you can make timely decisions.
Who is Change Detection best for?
Change Detection is best for personal use and small businesses with limited needs. The pricing is quite affordable; any small business can afford to shell out $8.99/month, and such a low price still gives you the ability to track 5,000 URLs with 5-minute checking intervals.
You can also set up a custom check schedule and pull out informative trend reports in a jiffy. Large businesses, however, may feel the lack of advanced tracking options such as password-protected pages or pages that need a pre-defined action to be tracked.
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