Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

BrowserCat VS Distill Web Monitor

Compare BrowserCat VS Distill Web Monitor and see what are their differences

Note: These products don't have any matching categories. If you think this is a mistake, please edit the details of one of the products and suggest appropriate categories.

BrowserCat logo BrowserCat

Easy, fast, and reliable browser automation and headless browser APIs. The web is messy, but your code shouldn't be.

Distill Web Monitor logo Distill Web Monitor

Distill is a web monitoring tool. It can monitor RSS feeds, a webpage or a part of webpage. Alerts in the form of pop-up, audio or emails can be received.
  • BrowserCat Home Page
    Home Page //
    2023-12-21
  • BrowserCat Metrics Dashboard
    Metrics Dashboard //
    2023-12-21
  • BrowserCat Easy Setup
    Easy Setup //
    2023-12-21

Finally, you can develop browser automation without the pain and the cost of deploying a fleet of headless browsers. Connect to BrowserCat, scale globally, and pay only for what you use. Scrape the web, automate your workflows, test your apps, generate beautiful images and pdfs from HTML, give you AI agent web access, and more.

Get started in minutes. Our forever-free plan gives you 1,000 free requests per month.

  • Distill Web Monitor Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-05-07

Distill is a web monitoring tool. It can monitor RSS feeds, a webpage or a part of webpage. Alerts in the form of pop-up, audio or emails can be received.

Featured highlights:

• Content selection from any webpage including iframes. • Supported actions: • Push notifications on phone • Pop-up • Audio • Email • SMS • Webhook • Easy to use inbox style Watchlist with label, trash etc. • Conditions for smart actions. • History of previous changes for each monitor. • Powerful expressions to select source content. Supports XPath expression, CSS rule or JavaScript expression to select content. • View highlighted changes.

BrowserCat

$ Details
freemium $10.0 / Monthly
Platforms
Web REST API Google Chrome Firefox Safari

BrowserCat features and specs

No features have been listed yet.

Distill Web Monitor features and specs

  • User-Friendly Interface
    Distill Web Monitor features an intuitive and easy-to-navigate interface, making it accessible even for users with limited technical skills.
  • Multi-Platform Support
    It supports multiple browsers and platforms including Chrome, Firefox, and iOS, providing flexibility for users.
  • Customizable Notifications
    Users can tailor notification settings to receive alerts via email, SMS, or push notifications, ensuring they stay informed in real-time.
  • Advanced Monitoring Options
    Offers a range of monitoring options including visual comparison, text recognition, and element-based tracking, catering to various monitoring needs.
  • Free Version Available
    A free basic version of Distill Web Monitor is available, allowing users to try out the service before committing to a paid plan.

Possible disadvantages of Distill Web Monitor

  • Limited Features in Free Plan
    The free version has limited functionalities, such as fewer checks and longer intervals, which may be inadequate for intensive monitoring needs.
  • Pricing
    The cost of premium plans can be relatively high for individuals or small businesses, potentially limiting accessibility for cost-sensitive users.
  • Resource-Intensive
    Running continuous monitoring can consume significant system resources, particularly affecting performance on lower-end hardware.
  • Learning Curve
    While the interface is user-friendly, some of the advanced features and customization options may require a learning curve for less tech-savvy users.
  • Privacy Concerns
    Monitoring sensitive or personal data on some websites could present privacy risks, depending on the sites being tracked and how data is handled.

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to BrowserCat and Distill Web Monitor)
Web Scraping
100 100%
0% 0
Monitoring Tools
0 0%
100% 100
Web Crawling
100 100%
0% 0
Website Monitoring
0 0%
100% 100

Questions and Answers

As answered by people managing BrowserCat and Distill Web Monitor.

Which are the primary technologies used for building your product?

BrowserCat's answer

BrowserCat is built on robust open source technology that's under active development. The star of the show is Playwright, which is our recommended automation library. It's maintained by Microsoft, it officially supports JS, Python, Java, and .NET, and it's fast becoming the industry standard. BrowserCat also supports Puppeteer and numerous unofficial Playwright ports to Go, Rust, PHP, and Ruby.

What makes your product unique?

BrowserCat's answer

Unlike other headless browser providers, BrowserCat gives you total control over your browser instances for as long as you need them. Leverage the browsers cache, cookies, and storage for bespoke browser automation jobs that truly differentiate your business from the competition.

What's the story behind your product?

BrowserCat's answer

In previous corporate and startup gigs, I faced the challenge of developing robust, fast, and scalable browser automation. Most APIs in the space are too limiting for our needs and they were often incredibly slow. On the other hand, hosting your own headless browser fleet was a pain. I founded BrowserCat to make scaling up browser automation as easy, reliable, and affordable as deploying a serverless function.

How would you describe your primary audience?

BrowserCat's answer

We primarily serve developers, whether the seek to develop unique browser automation jobs or radically improve the performance of their integration tests. However, we frequently work with management, biz ops, and product leaders to solve problems they can't solve any way but through automation.

Why should a person choose your product over its competitors?

BrowserCat's answer

BrowserCat is built for performance, scalability, stability, and affordability using modern web technologies. Many of our competitors were early to market and compete on entrenchment rather than functionality. Still others are bound by their existing users to continue supporting legacy tech, rather than embrace improved, modern standards. BrowserCat is focused on supporting your for the next ten years, rather than the past ten years.

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare BrowserCat and Distill Web Monitor

BrowserCat Reviews

We have no reviews of BrowserCat yet.
Be the first one to post

Distill Web Monitor Reviews

  1. Great tool to keep track of competitor's website

    One of the best tools I have used to keep track of changes on my competitors website. I love the chrome extension and its ease of use.

    👍 Pros:    Advanced features|Easy to use|Chrome extension available|Sync across all my devices

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Distill Web Monitor seems to be more popular. It has been mentiond 2 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

BrowserCat mentions (0)

We have not tracked any mentions of BrowserCat yet. Tracking of BrowserCat recommendations started around Dec 2023.

Distill Web Monitor mentions (2)

  • looking for a specific software
    I haven't used any in recent years so I'm not up to speed with the pros/cons of each, but PageProbe, SiteDelta Watch, and Distill Web Monitor are a few to try. Source: almost 3 years ago
  • App monitoring and reading parts of the screen
    I’ve had pretty good luck with the distill web monitor https://distill.io/apps/web-monitor. Source: about 4 years ago

What are some alternatives?

When comparing BrowserCat and Distill Web Monitor, you can also consider the following products

Microlink - Extract structured data from any website

Visualping - Visualping is the easiest to use website checker, webpage change monitoring, website change detector and website change alert software of the web. Read more about Visualping.

Apify - Apify is a web scraping and automation platform that can turn any website into an API.

Wachete - Track web page changes and get notified. Free Sign-up. Have all data in one place

Scrapy - Scrapy | A Fast and Powerful Scraping and Web Crawling Framework

WebSite-Watcher - WebSite-Watcher detects website updates and highlights all changes in the text. WebSite-Watcher monitors web pages, password protected pages, disucssion forums and much more.