DNS Spy vs Visual Sentinel
DNS Spy
dnsspy.ioVisual Sentinel
visualsentinel.comSide by side
| Figure | DNS Spy | Visual Sentinel |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $9/mo | $4.50/mo |
| Free plan | — | Yes |
| Free trial | Yes | Yes |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| iOS | — | Yes |
| Android | — | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 2 | 15 |
| Spec score · DNS Monitoring Software | 8.0 (#16) | 8.5 (#7) |
| API | The Enterprise REST API provides 50+ endpoints, bearer-token authentication, and 10,000 calls per month. | The public REST API uses scoped organization keys and exposes monitors, incidents, status pages, maintenance windows, reports, notification channels and servers. |
| DNS monitoring | It monitors 60+ DNS record types across authoritative nameservers and keeps a diff-level change history. | It keeps six-hour snapshots for selected A, AAAA, CNAME, MX, TXT and NS records and shows observed changes. |
| Intended users | DNS Spy describes its product as suitable for individuals and small projects, and says Enterprise supports teams, organizations, MSPs, and agencies managing client domains. | The maker describes the product as serving small teams, agencies, and site owners. |
| Purpose | DNS Spy monitors DNS records from worldwide resolvers, tracks domain and SSL expirations, audits security, and detects look-alike phishing domains. | Visual Sentinel monitors websites and servers and detects visual page changes that ordinary uptime checks may miss. |
| Support | DNS Spy lists email support at [email protected] for technical, billing, and monitoring questions. | The company says human support replies typically within 24 hours by email. |
Plans
Visual Sentinel
- Solo$6 a month
- Solo$54 a year
- Starter$12 a month
- Starter$108 a year
- Business$39 a month
- Business$351 a year
- FreeFree
- Agency$149 a month
- Agency$1,341 a year
- FreeFree
In their own words
Visual Sentinel
Visual Sentinel monitors websites and servers, including page changes that ordinary uptime checks may miss. Its monitoring covers uptime, screenshot-based visual comparison, SSL, DNS, performance, content, APIs, endpoints, and servers. For visual checks, it captures a page in a browser and compares the screenshot with a prior baseline. Users can exclude changing page elements with CSS selectors and set the amount of change needed to flag a capture. Failed uptime checks are repeated; a site is marked down only if it fails from all selected regions. Alerts can go to email, Slack, Discord, WhatsApp, Telegram, Microsoft Teams, PagerDuty, OpsGenie, webhooks, Prometheus, and browser push. The REST API manages monitors, incidents, status pages, maintenance windows, reports, and notification channels; API access is listed for Business and Agency. The Free plan costs nothing and includes three monitors, 10-minute checks, and one status page. Solo costs $6 a month. Visual Sentinel is built and operated by Acefina LLC and is intended for small teams, agencies, and site owners.