Page change monitor alternative
This page compares page change monitors and Stillindexed on price, check cadence and alerts. A generic change monitor tells you that a page is different. An SEO monitor tells you which directive changed and what it now says. That distinction decides this comparison. Most of these tools can be aimed at a meta tag with enough selector work, but the interpretation of what the change means for indexing stays with you, and only one of those changes can remove the page from search.
Where these tools are the better buy
Three of the four do something we do not do at all, so take these first.
- Visualping does visual diffing of an area you choose. Watching a client quietly rebuild a landing page is a real job and we do not do it.
- Hexowatch watches "visual, content, keyword, technology stack, HTML, availability, price or WHOIS changes". That spread is wider than ours.
- UptimeRobot does uptime, ping, port and DNS monitoring, none of which we offer, and it has a free tier.
- changedetection.io is open source and free to self-host, which no paid product can beat on price.
UptimeRobot also watches TLS certificate and domain expiry. Those are two of our own seven check families, so on that slice we are not offering anything it lacks.
The one thing that decides it
Every product on this page answers the question "did this change".stillindexed answers "is this page still indexable", which needs the content parsed rather than compared.
The closest any of them gets is UptimeRobot's keyword monitor, which their documentation describes as a check of "if a specific keyword is present in the HTML source of a website". You can point that at the string noindex, and it will fire when the string appears. Three things it still cannot do:
- An
X-Robots-Tagarrives in an HTTP response header. It is not in the HTML source, so a check of the source cannot see it. - A canonical is not present or absent, it points somewhere. The question is whether the target moved, which needs the old value and the new one compared.
- robots.txt has to be evaluated against the specific path you care about, for a specific user agent. The file changing and your page becoming blocked are different events, and only one is worth waking up for.
The numbers
| Product | Price | How it reads SEO signals | What it is for |
|---|---|---|---|
| changedetection.io | $8.99/mo, free self-hosted | element/trigger you configure | watching any page for any visible change |
| Visualping | free, from $14/mo | user-configured robots.txt and page-element watches (meta robots, canonical, headings listed) | seeing that a page looks different, and what part of it moved |
| Hexowatch | from $24.17/mo billed annually | HTML/source watch you configure | watching many kinds of change on one platform |
| UptimeRobot | free, or from $9/mo | keyword string in HTML source | knowing the server answered, every 60 seconds |
| stillindexed | $39/mo, $79/mo | automatic semantic interpretation | knowing a page stopped being indexable |
Prices read from each vendor's own pricing page, most recently on 2026-09-02.Hexowatch's figures are JavaScript-rendered and were read from the live page.
How to choose
Buy a generic monitor when the thing you want watched is arbitrary: a competitor's price, a policy page, a client's hero copy. You define what matters and it tells you when that part moved.
Buy an SEO specific monitor when the thing you want watched is whether a page can still be found, and you would rather not maintain a selector per client site to find out. We check seven families on a schedule: noindex, canonical, robots.txt effect per URL, status and redirects, title and H1, certificate expiry and domain expiry.
If you already run UptimeRobot for uptime and it covers your certificate and domain expiry, the honest question is whether the other five families are worth a second subscription. For a hobby site they are not. For eight client sites on retainer, one missed noindexcosts more than a year of either product.
Questions
Can a generic page change monitor detect a noindex tag?
It can detect that the HTML changed, and UptimeRobot can check whether a chosen string is present in the HTML source. Neither is the same as reading a directive. An X-Robots-Tag is a response header rather than HTML, a canonical has a target to compare rather than a presence to assert, and robots.txt has to be evaluated against the specific path you care about.
Can UptimeRobot tell me a page was deindexed?
Not directly, though it is closer than the others. Its keyword monitor "check[s] if a specific keyword is present in the HTML source of a website", so you can aim it at the literal string noindex and be told when that string appears. It will not see an X-Robots-Tag header, will not compare a canonical target, and will not evaluate robots.txt against a path.
Is changedetection.io enough to watch SEO tags?
You can get close. It watches the part of the page you select, using their "Trigger Text, CSS/xPath Rules, Ignore Text and many more filters", so it can tell you when a chosen element changed. What it does not do is interpret the change: the correctness of the check is your selector, defined and maintained by you, per site, and a directive change means nothing to it until you have written the rule that cares.
What do these tools do that stillindexed does not?
Visualping does visual diffing of a page region, which we do not do at all. Hexowatch watches WHOIS and technology stack changes, which we do not. UptimeRobot does uptime, ping, port and DNS monitoring, which we do not. changedetection.io is open source and free to self-host. If those are the jobs you need, buy them.
Where do stillindexed and UptimeRobot overlap?
On TLS certificate expiry and domain expiry, which both products watch. If those two are the whole of your requirement, UptimeRobot has a free tier and we do not.
What does stillindexed cost?
Starter is $39 a month for 15 sites, checked every 30 minutes. Agency is $79 a month for 50 sites, checked every 15 minutes. Card first, no free tier and no trial, with a 30 day refund.
We make one of the products on this page, so read it accordingly. Every claim about another vendor is quoted from their own site and dated above. If one of them is wrong, tell us and we will correct it: a comparison page that is wrong in our favour is worth less than no page. Try the free tools on a real URL before believing any of it.
Other comparisons: Search Console alternative · Ahrefs alternative.
Check it yourself before believing any of this
We make one of the products being compared, so the useful thing we can offer is not another claim. These run one check against any URL, free, with no account and no email.
If a result surprises you on a client site, that is the thing this category exists to catch. Six checks when a site disappears from Google walks the same ground by hand.