Have you ever considered doing visual screenshots comparison of changes like Visualping does? I wish you did as you have a better pricing model than they do.
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Most of our customers need to monitor changes to textual content on the page. There have been occasional enquiries, but they are very rare, like once or twice in a year. As a result, we haven’t considered monitoring changes to pixels in a screenshot.
Can you share your use case for monitoring changes to screenshots? Thanks!
One example is front page news articles. Yes I know you can get changes with text but there is a reason Visualping is so successful and it is because an image is just easier on the eyes than just plain old text.
Can you share your experience monitoring changes visually? How did you tweak the threshold for triggering notifications?
To monitor a change visually you just select a part of a website you want to monitor and if it changes by a percentage (they have 1/10/25/50% ) you get a notification. You can test it for free on visualping.io
I have tried and talked to quite a few customers and have heard their experiences. I was curious what your experience has been.
I will be honest. If they offered more checks for the money I would’ve stayed there. You guys still wins with macro checks, checking offline, working text triggers (finally working with v2) and of course more checks for the monthly subscription.
The difficulty with Distill.io is that websites that don’t want to be scraped intentionally use i-frames and other HTML techniques to hide content. The only way to detect and capture this is to literally render and screenshot the page. Anything else means changes and content are missed.
Distill can monitor changes to iframes too.
It is certainly possible to do that by making the page harder to use. But they are usually uncommon.
Any examples where you faced such challenges?