The best Distill.io alternative

No. You recreate the URLs you monitor today in SiteGauge, map any Distill.io selectors to SiteGauge ignore rules and keyword alerts, and reconnect your alert channels. Most teams migrate in under an afternoon, and you can run both tools in parallel for a cycle to confirm SiteGauge catches the same changes before you cancel Distill.io.

Your Distill.io history stays in Distill.io until you cancel, so export anything you need to keep first. SiteGauge starts a fresh baseline the moment you add a page and builds its own change history from there, with retention that scales by plan.

Yes, and it is the safest way to migrate. Point both tools at the same pages for one or two billing cycles, compare what each catches, then cut over to SiteGauge once you are confident nothing is missed.

Both monitor web pages for changes, but Distill.io is browser-extension-first with broad platform reach (extensions, mobile, desktop) and a strong visual selector, while SiteGauge is an AI-first cloud platform that categorizes changes, scores their importance, and shows before/after visual diffs. Distill.io tells you that something changed; SiteGauge focuses on telling you what changed and whether it matters.

Yes, particularly if you want AI change summaries, importance scoring, reliable always-on cloud monitoring of bot-protected sites, and team governance with audit-grade evidence. Distill.io remains the better pick if you specifically need a native mobile or desktop app or cross-browser extensions, which SiteGauge does not offer (SiteGauge does ship a Chrome extension and native Discord, Teams and SMS alerts).

Yes. Distill.io's free plan includes 25 total monitors, but only 5 of those are cloud monitors that run 24/7; the other 20 are local monitors that only work while your browser is open with the extension active. It also caps you at 1,000 checks per month, a 6-hour minimum interval, and email-only alerts.

Distill.io has a free tier, then Starter at $15/month (50 monitors, 10-min interval), Professional at $35/month (150 monitors, 5-min interval), and Flexi at $80+/month (500+ monitors, 2-min interval) with usage-based overage. Annual billing gives a 20% discount.

Partly. Distill.io added AI change summaries in 2026 with a basic AI importance flag, but they are limited to the top Flexi and Enterprise plans and cloud monitors only, and it still offers no change categorization and no smart noise filtering. On its lower tiers you rely on conditions and triggers alone, whereas SiteGauge provides categorized AI summaries with importance scores across its paid plans.

Yes. Distill.io has an API and broad integrations including Slack, Discord, MS Teams, webhooks, SMS, and push notifications, plus JSON/CSV import-export. SiteGauge matches much of this with a read/write API, a Chrome extension, and native Slack, Teams, Discord, Telegram, SMS and webhooks; Distill.io's genuine edge is its wider platform reach, namely native mobile and desktop apps, which SiteGauge does not offer.

SiteGauge is generally better for competitor monitoring because it adds AI categorization (pricing/messaging/product/SEO), importance scoring, and before/after visual diffs that speed up triage. Distill.io can reliably flag changes on competitor pages but leaves all interpretation to you.

Distill.io often wins for simple, single-user monitoring on a budget, thanks to its $15/month entry tier, free local monitors, browser extension, and mobile apps. SiteGauge is built more for AI-driven intelligence and team use than for the lightest hobbyist monitoring.

To a degree: Distill.io's local monitors run in your own browser using your existing session and IP, which lets them see logged-in or block-restricted pages, but those monitors only run while your browser is open. SiteGauge instead uses cloud residential rendering to handle bot-protected sites without needing a local browser.

No. Distill.io keeps only a shallow version history (around 10-20 changes on paid tiers) and offers no tamper-evident, signed audit-evidence export. SiteGauge retains up to 3 years of history and offers tamper-evident audit evidence (Ed25519 + RFC-3161 timestamp with a public verify page), which matters for compliance use cases.

Partially. Enterprise/Flexi plans add team sharing and centralized billing, but there is no documented role-based editor/viewer model. SiteGauge provides Owner/Admin/Member editor roles plus unlimited free read-only viewers, which is better suited to sharing results widely across a team or with clients.

SiteGauge is generally better for SEO teams because it natively tracks SEO/metadata changes, supports whole-domain sitemap-based monitoring, and bundles free SEO tools. Distill.io can monitor any element you manually select but has no dedicated SEO-metadata or domain-wide layer.

Yes. When a change is significant, SiteGauge reads it with AI and produces a plain-English summary that says what changed, categorises it (pricing, messaging, product or SEO), and scores how important it is, alongside before/after visual and text diffs. Routine, low-importance edits are still logged, without spending an AI pass on them. This is its core differentiator versus tools that only show a raw diff.

Yes. Point SiteGauge at any pricing page and it detects changes to prices, plan structure, and CTA copy, then sends an alert with an AI summary explaining exactly what shifted. It captures before/after screenshots so you can see the change visually.

Yes. SiteGauge has a free plan ($0) that monitors up to 5 pages with daily checks, AI change summaries, and email alerts plus an RSS change feed, no credit card required. Paid plans add more monitors, faster cadence, and team integrations.

Yes. When an ordinary fetch is blocked, SiteGauge renders the page through a residential browser so it can still capture bot-protected sites behind Cloudflare or Akamai. Most monitors never need this, so it is reserved for the pages that do.

Yes, on the Business and Enterprise plans. SiteGauge exports signed, tamper-evident evidence of a change, using an Ed25519 signature (with an RFC-3161 trusted timestamp attached when the timestamp authority is reachable), packaged as a downloadable bundle with a public verification page that anyone can check against our published key. Most monitoring tools do not offer independently verifiable evidence, which makes SiteGauge a fit for compliance and legal teams.

Email alerts and an RSS change feed are on every plan, including Free. Slack, Microsoft Teams, Discord, Telegram, Google Chat, webhooks, SMS and Google Sheets are available on Standard and above. You can also connect Zapier (through our REST-hook API and your API key) and n8n (via our community node) to reach thousands of other apps, and drive everything from your AI assistant through the built-in MCP server.

Yes. SiteGauge ships an MCP server, so AI assistants like Claude, ChatGPT and Cursor can connect to your account, create monitors, read change history and pull exactly what changed on a page, without leaving your assistant. You connect once by signing in, with no API key to copy and paste.

Yes. SiteGauge importance-scores every change, and you can set an alert filter so you only hear about the changes that matter, such as a competitor's price or pricing-page edit, while routine tweaks are still logged quietly. It cuts alert noise sharply without hiding anything.

Paid plans include a set number of editors plus unlimited free read-only viewers, so you can share monitoring across a whole team or with clients without paying per seat for people who only need to view results.

Yes. Unlimited free viewers, multiple workspaces, tag-scoped digests, and competitor monitoring make SiteGauge well suited to agencies managing monitoring across many clients and reporting results back to them.