Distill Web Monitor vs WebSitePulse

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.

WebSitePulse is a web-based service for monitoring servers, network equipment, websites, web applications, and email infrastructure 24/7/365. Checks can run as often as every minute or as infrequently as once a week, with geographically distinct monitoring locations available for each target. Its listed services cover uptime, webpages, web transactions, email round trips, vulnerabilities, blacklists, and certificates. Before sending an alert, the service detects an error, independently confirms it, and checks it against the notification level. Alerts can go by email, SMS, voice call, instant messenger, pager, SNMP trap, or URL. Reports include uptime and downtime summaries, response-time breakdowns, and downloadable raw data; WSDL and HTTP APIs provide real-time target data. Vulnerability monitoring checks servers and firewalls for more than 60,000 known security issues and exploits and offers recommendations. Dedicated Android and iOS apps support push notifications. Plans are listed from $3/mo, and a free plan and trial are available subject to account and eligibility terms.