Distill.io alternative for competitor monitoring, with Distill.io pricing compared and alerts grouped by rival
Distill.io is a sharp, cheap page monitor: pick an element, set an interval, get an alert. It works well until the pages you watch belong to fifteen competitors and three people need to act on what changed. Competitors tracks rivals instead of page elements, reads prices as numbers, adds their ads, reviews and rankings, and sends one Monday digest per team. Plans start at $99 per month, month to month.
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The short answer
The best Distill.io alternative for competitor monitoring is a tool built around companies, not selectors. Distill.io costs $15 to $35 per month for 50 to 150 monitors with checks every 5 or 10 minutes, and its browser extension can also run monitors locally. That is hard to beat for watching a few dozen pages. Competitors costs more, from $594 per year, and earns it by grouping every change under the rival it belongs to, filtering out dates and banners, and adding ads, reviews and keyword positions your team would otherwise check by hand.
Distill.io vs Competitors at a glance
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| Distill.io | Competitors | |
|---|---|---|
| What it tracks | A page or a selected element, added by URL | Competitors, each with a set of pages plus ads, reviews and rankings |
| Where checks run | Cloud monitors, plus local monitors in the browser extension or desktop app | Cloud only, nothing to keep open on your machine |
| Entry price | $15 per month or $144 per year (Starter, 50 monitors) | $99 per month or $594 per year (Starter, 5 competitors with 10 pages each) |
| Fastest cloud check | Every 10 minutes on Starter, 5 on Professional, 2 on Flexi | Daily on Starter, every 6 hours on Growth, hourly on Scale |
| Usage caps | Cloud checks per month (30,000 on Starter) and email alerts per month (2,000 on Starter) | No check or alert quotas inside your plan |
| Price changes | Text or visual diff of the element you selected | Reads the amount, currency and billing period and reports the percentage change |
| Pages behind a login | Macros replay clicks and form fills | Public pages only on standard plans |
| Competitor ads | Not a feature | New and stopped ads from public ad libraries, Growth and above |
| Competitor reviews | Only if you add a review page as a monitor | New reviews and rating changes on G2, Capterra, Trustpilot and Google, Growth and above |
| Keyword rankings vs rivals | Not a feature | 50 keywords on Growth, 250 on Scale |
| Report format | One alert per monitor change, by email, push or SMS | Monday digest grouped by competitor, plus instant alerts and Slack on Growth |
| Best for | Individuals and small teams watching specific pages for any reason | Marketing, product marketing and pricing teams watching named rivals |
Distill.io figures come from Distill's public pricing page, checked September 2026. Plans change, so check their page before you buy.
When Distill.io is still the better choice
We would rather you buy the right tool, and for some jobs that is Distill. Stay with it if most of these are true:
- You watch fewer than 50 pages and one person reads the alerts.
- You need a check every few minutes, for stock, a job board, a court docket or a government notice.
- The page sits behind a login and a macro is the only way in.
- The target is one element on a page, and nothing else on that page matters to you.
At $144 a year for 50 monitors, nothing in competitor intelligence will undercut Distill on cost per page. If you want other page monitors to compare, our Visualping alternative page covers that group.
When Competitors is the better Distill.io alternative
The trouble starts when the monitors pile up. Ten rivals with five pages each is 50 monitors, and each fires on its own. A rotating testimonial, a new cookie banner or a copyright year counts as a change, so someone has to open every alert to find the one that matters: a rival that moved its mid tier from $49 to $59 and dropped the annual discount.
- You follow 5 to 40 named competitors and want every change filed under the company that made it.
- You need prices and plan limits as data you can compare week to week, not highlighted text.
- Your team, not one person, needs the same weekly view, and some of them will never install an extension.
- New ads, fresh one-star reviews and ranking swings matter as much as page edits.
- You are tired of tuning selectors every time a rival redesigns a page.
For the page side in detail, see website change monitoring. For pricing pages, see competitor price monitoring.
What you get that a page monitor does not give you
- Changes grouped by rival, so the Monday digest reads "Acme raised Pro by 20 percent and launched a new comparison page", not 14 separate alerts.
- Prices read the way a buyer sees them, including prices loaded by scripts, with the old and new amount and the billing period.
- Noise filtering on by default: dates, counters, cookie banners and rotating promos are ignored without any selector work.
- New and stopped ads from the Google and Meta ad libraries on Growth and above, see competitor ad tracking.
- New reviews and rating changes on G2, Capterra, Trustpilot and Google on Growth and above.
- Keyword positions next to your rivals, 50 keywords on Growth and 250 on Scale.
- 12 to 24 months of change history, unlimited on Scale, so you can show sales when a rival last cut prices.
Export your Distill monitor list
Distill lets you export your monitors. Group the URLs by the company they belong to and drop the ones that are not competitors, such as stock pages or news feeds you can keep in Distill.
Add each rival by domain
Competitors suggests the homepage, pricing, product and changelog pages for every rival you add. Paste in the extra URLs from your Distill list. Ten pages per rival on Starter covers most SaaS and ecommerce setups.
Pick what should reach you instantly
Set alerts for the moves you act on the same day, such as a price change on a pricing page or a new product page. Everything else lands in the Monday digest.
Keep Distill for the odd jobs
Many teams keep a cheap Distill plan for pages that are not about competitors, like supplier portals or a regulator's notices, and move rival tracking to Competitors. The two do different jobs.
Distill.io pricing next to Competitors pricing
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| Plan | Monthly | Per year | What you get |
|---|---|---|---|
| Distill Starter | $15 | $144 | 50 monitors, cloud checks every 10 minutes, 30,000 cloud checks a month |
| Distill Professional | $35 | $336 | 150 monitors, cloud checks every 5 minutes, 100,000 cloud checks a month |
| Distill Flexi | From $80 | Usage based | 500+ monitors, checks every 2 minutes, 200,000+ checks a month |
| Competitors Starter | $99 | $594 | 5 competitors, 10 pages each, checked daily, digest and alerts |
| Competitors Growth | $249 | $1,494 | 15 competitors, 25 pages each, every 6 hours, ads, reviews, 50 keywords, Slack |
| Competitors Scale | $599 | $3,594 | 40 competitors, 60 pages each, hourly, 250 keywords, API and webhooks |
Distill wins on price per page, by a wide margin. The comparison that matters is time. If one person spends an hour a week triaging page alerts for 15 rivals, that is about 50 hours a year, and Growth at $1,494 a year replaces most of it while adding ads, reviews and rankings. Full limits are on the pricing page.
Other Distill.io alternatives, and who each suits
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| Tool | Type | Suits |
|---|---|---|
| Visualping | Page change monitor with visual diffs and AI summaries | A few important pages, any purpose |
| PageCrawl | Cloud page monitor | Teams that want cloud checks without a browser extension |
| ChangeTower, Wachete | Page change monitors | Archiving and compliance style page tracking |
| Prisync, Price2Spy | Product price trackers | Stores repricing hundreds of SKUs, see our Prisync alternative |
| Crayon, Klue | Enterprise competitive intelligence platforms | Large sales teams with a full-time analyst, see our Crayon alternative |
| Competitors | Competitor monitoring across pages, prices, ads, reviews and rankings | Teams watching 5 to 40 named rivals |
Distill.io alternatives FAQ
What is a good alternative to Distill.io?
For general page monitoring, Visualping and PageCrawl are the closest Distill.io alternatives. For tracking competitors, Competitors is the better fit: it groups every change by rival, reads prices as numbers, filters out noise and adds ads, reviews and keyword rankings, from $99 per month or $594 per year.
How much does Distill.io cost?
Distill.io has a free plan with 25 monitors, 5 of them in the cloud. Paid plans cost $15 per month or $144 per year for Starter with 50 monitors, $35 per month or $336 per year for Professional with 150 monitors, and from $80 per month for the usage based Flexi plan.
Is Distill.io good for competitor monitoring?
It works for a handful of pages. Distill alerts you when a selected element changes, which is reliable and cheap. It does not group pages by competitor, read prices as data, or track ads, reviews and rankings, so at 10 or more rivals most teams spend their time triaging alerts rather than acting on them.
Distill.io vs Visualping, which is better?
Distill.io is cheaper per monitor and can run local checks in your browser, which suits power users. Visualping has a simpler interface, visual screenshots and AI summaries, which suits less technical teams. Neither is built around competitors. Our Visualping pricing guide compares its plans in detail.
Does Competitors need a browser extension?
No. Every check runs in the cloud, so nothing needs to stay open on your computer and everyone on the team sees the same digest. You add a rival by domain in the web app.
Can I try Competitors before I buy?
Yes. The demo takes a snapshot of any competitor page and shows what Competitors extracts from it. Plans are billed monthly or yearly and you can cancel at any time.
Swap 50 page alerts for one digest per rival
Add your first competitor by domain and get your first digest this Monday.