Distill Web Monitor vs Downdetector

Distill Web Monitor tracks selected website or document content on a schedule, compares it for changes, and sends alerts. Local monitors run in a browser or on the user's computer; cloud monitors run on Distill's servers without requiring the device to stay on. Users can select a whole page or a portion visually, then refine the selection with XPath, CSS, regular expressions, or JavaScript. Monitor types include webpages, PDFs, JSON, Word, XML, feeds, uptime, and sitemaps. Alert rules can use text matches, numeric ranges, and regular expressions. Notifications include email, SMS, phone push, Slack, Discord, Microsoft Teams, and webhooks. Macros can fill forms and click, and API access is available on request. Local checks can run at intervals as short as five seconds; Free cloud checks start at six-hour intervals. The free plan costs nothing and includes 25 monitors, five cloud monitors, 1,000 cloud checks per month, two devices, and 30 email alerts per month. Starter begins at $15 a month. Unused resources expire at the billing period's end, and cloud checks count in ten-second units.

Downdetector collects user reports and monitors other online sources so consumers can check service status and businesses can see when customers report problems. It identifies an incident when reports rise significantly above the average for that time of day over the prior six months, and updates monitored service status every four minutes. Downdetector says it covers over 36,000 services in 72 countries and processes tens of millions of reports each month. Consumers can use the Free plan for up to five favorites, with outage notifications through the Speedtest app subject to daily limits. Pro costs $13.99 a month and allows up to 10 favorites, offers more daily notifications and removes ads on the web and in the Speedtest app. For organizations, Explorer has a real-time dashboard for multiple services, configurable alerts, geographic breakdowns and historical analysis. Communicate lets companies post customizable status updates for affected customers. Downdetector is available on Android, iOS, web and API, and mobile access is also available in Speedtest. A free trial is listed.