changedetection.io is excellent, genuinely free, and open source. If you are comfortable running a Docker container, keeping it updated and making sure its email actually lands in inboxes, it is hard to argue against. This page is for people who tried that and decided they would rather not be the operations team for their own monitoring.
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Should I use MonitoringDaddy instead of self-hosting changedetection.io?
Only if you do not want to run infrastructure. changedetection.io is free, capable and yours — the argument for a hosted service is not features, it is that somebody else keeps it alive, keeps the alerts deliverable and gets paged when it breaks. If you enjoy self-hosting, or your data genuinely cannot leave your network, stay where you are.
The failure mode of self-hosted monitoring is quiet: the container stops, the disk fills, an update breaks something, and nothing tells you — because the thing that would have told you is the thing that stopped. People move to a hosted service after discovering a watch had been dead for weeks.
Alerts are only worth anything if they reach the inbox. Sending mail from a home server or a small VPS means SPF, DKIM, DMARC, reverse DNS and reputation, or paying for a relay anyway. This is usually the least fun part of self-hosting a notifier.
The software is free; the VPS, the backups, the mail relay and the hours are not. A small server plus a transactional email plan is often more than a hosted plan costs, before counting your own time.
Green marks the stronger option on that row. Third-party pricing and limits change without notice — treat the changedetection.io column as a starting point and confirm current figures on their site before you decide.
| Feature | changedetection.io | MonitoringDaddy |
|---|---|---|
| Licence and cost | Open source, free to self-host; hosted plan from around $8.99/mo — verify on their site | Hosted only. Free plan, paid from $5/mo |
| Infrastructure to run | A Docker host you maintain, back up and update | None |
| Data stays on your own hardware | Yes, entirely | No — pages are fetched and stored on our servers |
| Email deliverability | Yours to solve — SPF, DKIM, DMARC, or a paid relay | Handled, sent from an authenticated domain |
| JavaScript rendering | Yes, with an optional browser/Playwright container | Yes — opt-in per watch on paid plans, checked at most every 15 minutes |
| Browser steps before a check | Yes | No |
| Number of watched pages | Whatever your hardware can take | 1 free, 25 at $5/mo, up to 100 at $34/mo |
| Check frequency | Whatever you configure | 30 min free, 5 min from $5/mo, 60 sec at $34/mo |
| Element / region picker | Yes | Yes — click the part of the page you want watched |
| Full-page before and after images | With the browser container configured | Yes, by default |
| Uptime, SSL and domain expiry monitoring | Uptime-style checks only | Yes, all three, on every plan |
| Hosted status page | No | Yes, on every plan |
| Upgrades and security patching | Yours | Ours |
| Community and extensibility | Large, active, fully hackable | Closed product, feature requests only |
Every comparison page on the internet claims the author's product wins on everything. Here is where it does not.
If any of those are load-bearing for your team, staying put is the correct decision and this page has done its job. Monitoring you actually trust beats monitoring that is marginally cheaper.
Six monitor types and one dashboard. No add-on products, no separate SKUs for the features you assumed were included.
HTTP checks from external infrastructure, as often as every 60 seconds, with downtime and recovery alerts. See the uptime setup guide.
A dedicated monitor type with configurable advance warnings, so a certificate never lapses because nobody owned the renewal. See SSL expiry monitoring.
Registration expiry tracked as its own monitor, warning you months ahead. The outage nobody has a runbook for. See domain expiration monitoring.
Alert when a phrase appears or disappears on a page — defacement, stock changes, silent policy edits. See website change detection.
Watch a competitor or supplier price string and get told the moment it moves. See the price monitoring guide.
Public status pages included on every plan, hosted independently of your infrastructure so they stay up when you do not. See hosted status pages.
Alerts from any of these can be routed to email, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Discord, Telegram, Flock or a generic webhook, and a single monitor can carry several channels at once. Everything is available through the REST API on paid plans, so monitors can be created and torn down programmatically rather than clicked through a form.
Flat monthly tiers. No per-seat charges, no credit top-ups, no usage meters — the number below is the whole bill.
| Plan | Monitors | Fastest interval | Alert channels | API | Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | 1 | Every 30 minutes | — | $0 | |
| Founding Member first 20 only | 25 | Every 5 minutes | Email + webhook & chat | Yes | $5/mo |
| Basic | 10 | Every 10 minutes | Email + webhook & chat | Yes | $8/mo |
| Growth | 50 | Every 5 minutes | Email + webhook & chat | Yes | $19/mo |
| Pro | 100 | Every 60 seconds | Email + webhook & chat | Yes | $34/mo |
Annual billing is cheaper on every paid tier. The pricing page is the authoritative list.
There is no automated importer — monitors are re-created by hand, or scripted through the API on paid plans. Budget about a minute per monitor.
List every active check: URL, interval, condition and alert recipients. Most teams find monitors nobody needs any more.
Start with revenue-critical URLs. Set the interval, add the condition, attach the channels your team already watches.
Keep changedetection.io live while the new monitors settle. Compare alerts and confirm nothing is missing.
Move any public status page across, confirm a clean week of overlap, then cancel the old subscription.
This page is written by the team that builds MonitoringDaddy, so treat it as an informed argument rather than a neutral audit. What we can promise is that the claims about our own product are checked against what the software actually does, and the rows where changedetection.io is stronger are marked as such rather than quietly omitted.
Details about changedetection.io come from their public pricing and documentation at the time of writing. Monitoring vendors change plan limits and prices frequently and without announcement, so every third-party figure here carries a "verify on their site" caveat and you should take it seriously before making a decision on cost.
One thing worth stating plainly, because most comparison pages fudge it: MonitoringDaddy checks run from our own infrastructure, which is external to yours, but from a single origin rather than a global probe network. That is enough to catch outages and content changes independently of your stack. It is not enough to tell you a site is down in Frankfurt but up in Ohio. If regional verification is a hard requirement, a larger platform will serve you better and we would rather you knew that now.
Found something out of date or wrong? Tell us and we will correct it.
Every recorded change is compared word by word and kept with a before-and-after image. This is the real output, shown with worked example data.
Price fell from $49 to $39, and an annual discount was added.
The item is available again and the basket button returned.
A new subprocessor was added in another jurisdiction.
The free plan sends to one email address. Every paid plan adds the chat and webhook channels below, with 2 to 10 destinations depending on the plan. However many alerts you receive, the price does not change — nothing here is metered or charged per alert.
There are no voice calls and no SMS. If a phone call at 3am is a hard requirement, say so before you subscribe — we would rather tell you now than refund you later.
For capability and cost, in many ways yes — it is free, open source, renders JavaScript, and will happily watch far more pages than our top plan. What it does not do is run itself. The honest pitch here is not a better feature list, it is that nobody has to keep it alive, keep it patched, or make its email deliverable.
If you are comfortable with Docker, you should consider it seriously. Self-hosting stops making sense when the monitoring itself needs monitoring, when alerts land in spam, or when the hours spent maintaining it are worth more than the subscription.
The software is free. A small VPS capable of running it with a browser container, plus backups and a transactional email relay so alerts arrive reliably, typically lands somewhere around or above the cost of a hosted plan — before counting your time.
Yes. Data export is available on paid plans, covering check history and recorded page versions, so nothing is trapped here.
Yes, on paid plans. Switch on 'Load this page in a browser first' and the page is fetched with a real browser before comparison. It is capped — one to ten such watches depending on plan, checked at most every 15 minutes — because each render costs seconds rather than milliseconds. changedetection.io with its browser container has no such cap if you are running your own hardware.
A single origin. There are no multi-region probes, and we do not claim any — if a page is reachable from one part of the world and not another, that difference will not be detected.
Over SMTP from an authenticated sending domain with SPF and DKIM in place, which is the part of self-hosting people most often underestimate. Alerts can also go to Slack, Microsoft Teams, Discord, Telegram, Flock and generic webhooks.
The same thing that happens when a self-hosted container stops — checks do not run. The difference is whose problem it is to notice and fix. There is a public status page and checks resume automatically.
Yes: one page watch and one uptime monitor, checked every 30 minutes, no card required. Running both side by side on the same page for a week is a reasonable way to compare them.
There is a bulk import for up to 100 URLs at a time, and an API on paid plans, so moving an existing watchlist across does not have to be manual.
Last updated August 6, 2026 · Written by Amit Gupta, founder of MonitoringDaddy
Set up a monitor on your most important URL and run it alongside changedetection.io for a week. Free plan, no credit card.