A competitor's own website is one of the highest-signal places to watch — pricing, positioning, new features, and messaging changes all show up there first, often before any press release or social post. It's also one of the least convenient things to monitor for free, because none of the free tools available were actually built for this specific job. Here's what's out there, and where each one runs out of road.
Manual checks + a calendar reminder
Zero cost, zero setup: put a recurring reminder on your calendar to visit the page yourself. This genuinely works — for a while. It fails the same way every manual process fails: a busy week happens, the reminder gets snoozed once, and once is usually enough to turn a habit into something you meant to keep doing.
The Wayback Machine
archive.org's Wayback Machine is excellent for comparing how a page looked at two points in time after the fact — useful for research, bad for alerting. It only helps if you already know roughly when something changed and want to confirm it; it won't tell you the moment it happens. Think of it as a rearview mirror, not a warning light.
Change-detection tools (Visualping, Wachete, Distill.io)
These are the closest thing to purpose-built for this job, and their free tiers are genuinely useful for a single page. Point one at a competitor's pricing page and it'll flag when the underlying HTML changes. The limits show up quickly once you're tracking more than a page or two:
- Free tiers typically cap how many pages you can watch and how often they're checked — often once a day at best.
- They flag any change — a testimonial rotation and an actual pricing change look identical until you open the diff and read it yourself.
- There's no sense of which competitor or which page matters more; every watcher is equally weighted; every alert lands with equal urgency (none).
RSS and blog feeds
If a competitor publishes a changelog or blog, subscribing to its RSS feed is free and reasonably reliable — for the changes they choose to announce. It does nothing for the changes they don't write about, which in practice is most pricing and packaging changes. Nobody publishes a blog post titled "we quietly raised our prices."
Google Alerts
Good for catching press coverage and mentions elsewhere on the web. Essentially useless for on-page changes, since Alerts is built around newly indexed content, not diffs of an existing page. It's solving a different problem than "did their website change."
The pattern across all of them
Each tool here catches a different slice of the problem, and none of them judges significance for you. Get serious about tracking more than one competitor and you end up running several of these in parallel — a Visualping watcher here, an RSS subscription there, a recurring calendar check for the pages nothing else covers — which quickly becomes its own maintenance job (see our broader look at tracking competitors without enterprise software for how this compounds across more than just websites).
When free is genuinely enough, and when to graduate
If you're watching a single competitor's single page with no real urgency, stick with the free tools — there's no reason to pay for anything. The moment it's worth automating is when you're tracking multiple competitors, need something to judge what's actually significant instead of flagging every change equally, and need it to keep running reliably through a busy month without you remembering to maintain it. That's the specific gap CompScan is built to close: automated website checks alongside news, reviews, and hiring signals, with a judgment layer that only interrupts you for things worth interrupting you for.
Try it free — add a competitor's website and see your first scan in under a minute.