Both watch a page and tell you when it changes. The difference is where the check happens, and that decides which sites they can actually read.
Free plan forever · No credit card · Set up in under a minute
Which should you choose?
Distill.io if you are watching sites that block automated traffic — retailers, ticketing, anything behind a login — because its local checks run in your own browser, from your own address, with your own session. Visualping if you want checks that keep running when your laptop is closed. The two are more complementary than competing, and the honest answer for a lot of people is local checks for the hard sites and cloud checks for the rest.
Written by MonitoringDaddy, who also sell monitoring. We have tried to be straight about where each of these wins, including where they beat us. Prices and features are as at August 2026 and change often.
| Visualping | Distill.io | MonitoringDaddy | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Where checks run | Their cloud | Your browser, or their cloud | Our cloud |
| Works with your laptop closed | Yes | Only for cloud checks | Yes |
| Sites that block bots | Often blocked | Local checks usually work | Often blocked |
| Behind a login | Difficult | Local checks can use your session | No |
| Free tier | Yes, small | Yes, local checks | Yes |
| Also does uptime, SSL, cron | No | No | Yes, one allowance |
Both meter checks rather than pages, which is the number that matters. A page watched every five minutes uses far more quota than the same page watched daily.
| Tier | Visualping | Distill.io | MonitoringDaddy |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | A small monthly check allowance | Local checks, generous | One page watch, permanent |
| Entry paid | Around $10–14/month | Around $6–10/month | From $5/month |
| What you are buying | Cloud checks and shorter intervals | Cloud checks and more watches | Every check type on one allowance |
| Watch the quota | Checks per month, not pages | Checks per month for cloud | Interval floors rather than a balance |
| Feature | Visualping | Distill.io | MonitoringDaddy |
|---|---|---|---|
| Visual change detection | Yes — its strength | Yes | Text changes |
| Text change detection | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Element / region selection | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Local browser checks | No | Yes — the differentiator | No |
| Works behind a login | Limited | Yes, with local checks | No |
| Sites that block automated traffic | Often blocked | Local checks usually succeed | Often blocked |
| Runs with your machine off | Yes | Cloud checks only | Yes |
| Alert channels | Email, webhooks, integrations | Email, webhooks, integrations | Email, Slack, Teams, Discord, Telegram, Flock, webhooks |
| Cron / scheduled job monitoring | No | No | Yes, same allowance |
| Uptime and SSL monitoring | No | No | Yes, same allowance |
| All check types on one allowance | No | No | Yes |
A tick in a table hides most of the difference. This is what each row is really saying.
This is the entire comparison. Distill can run the check inside your own browser, which means the request carries your residential address, your cookies and your logged-in session. Sites that reject datacentre traffic — most large retailers, most ticketing — simply cannot tell it apart from you browsing. No cloud service can match that, including us.
They only run while your browser is open. Close the laptop and the watch stops, which for an overnight restock is exactly when you needed it. This is the trade, and it is why people end up using both modes.
If your list is retailers, ticketing or anything with a serious bot defence, test before you pay. A cloud checker that cannot read the page will either alert on a challenge screen or silently compare one error page against the next, and both are worse than no monitoring.
Visualping leads on visual diffing — an image comparison showing what moved. Distill does both text and visual. Visual is more intuitive to review; text is far less prone to false alarms from a rotating banner or a lazy-loading image.
Both meter checks, not pages, and that catches people out. One page at five-minute intervals is 8,640 checks a month; the same page daily is 30. Read the interval, not the page count, when comparing plans.
Neither watches uptime, certificates, domains or cron jobs. If you need those as well, that is another subscription — which is the case for keeping every check type on a single allowance.
This category lives or dies on whether the tool can read your specific pages. Put your three hardest URLs into a free tier of each before deciding anything else.
Price and stock tracking on large e-commerce sites is exactly the case where cloud checking fails and Distill's local mode wins. That is not a marketing claim; it is how bot defences work.
A local check with the laptop closed is not monitoring. For anything where the change happens outside your working hours, you need something hosted.
Both meter checks. Watching hourly instead of every five minutes cuts the quota by a factor of twelve and, for most pages, changes nothing about when you find out.
You want checks that run around the clock without your machine involved, the sites you watch are readable by a cloud service, and visual diffing suits how you review changes.
You are watching sites that block automated traffic or sit behind a login, and you can accept that local checks only run while your browser is open.
We are a cloud checker, so on the hardest retail and ticketing sites Distill's local mode beats us and we will say so plainly. Where we differ from both is scope: page-change watching sits on the same allowance as uptime, SSL expiry, domain expiry, API checks and cron heartbeats, so a team needing more than change detection is not buying a second and third tool.
Uptime, SSL expiry, domain expiry, API checks, cron heartbeats and page-change watching all draw on one allowance here, rather than being separate products or separate bills.
Start freeThe 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.
Large retailers and ticketing sites deliberately reject traffic that does not look like a person in a browser, to stop scraping and scalping. A cloud checker arrives from a datacentre address and is refused. This is not a bug in the tool and no hosted service fully solves it.
With local checks, yes — the check runs in your browser and uses the session you are already signed in with. Cloud checks cannot do this without you handing over credentials, which is a bad idea for both parties.
Distill, if the retailer blocks automated traffic — which most large ones do. Test with the actual product pages before committing, because the answer depends entirely on the site.
No, and this is the main limitation. If the change you care about happens overnight, you need a cloud check, which brings the blocking problem back. Many people run both for that reason.
By check, not by page, on both. A single page watched every five minutes uses over eight thousand checks a month. Choosing an hourly interval instead is usually the difference between a free tier being enough and not.
No. Both are change detection only. If you also need to know a site is up or a certificate is expiring, that is a separate tool and a separate bill.
Last updated August 2026 · Written by Amit Gupta, founder of MonitoringDaddy