Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Distill Web Monitor VS Simple Scraper

Compare Distill Web Monitor VS Simple Scraper 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.

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.

Simple Scraper logo Simple Scraper

Extract data from any website in seconds — download instantly, scrape in the cloud, or create an API.
  • 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.

  • Simple Scraper Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-08-29

Simple scraper is the easiest way to scrape the web — turn any website into an API in seconds and use ready-made scraping recipes to scrape popular sites with ease.

Simple Scraper

$ Details
freemium $30.0 / Monthly (6,000 credits)
Release Date
2019 November

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.

Simple Scraper features and specs

  • Ease of Use
    SimpleScraper offers a user-friendly interface that allows even those without technical knowledge to easily extract data from websites.
  • Speed
    The tool allows for fast data extraction, reducing the time needed to gather information manually.
  • Automation
    Users can set up automated scraping tasks to run at regular intervals, which is useful for keeping data up-to-date without manual intervention.
  • API Access
    SimpleScraper provides API access, allowing developers to integrate scraping functionality into their own applications seamlessly.
  • Browser Extension
    The tool offers a browser extension, making it convenient to set up scraping tasks directly from the browser.

Possible disadvantages of Simple Scraper

  • Cost
    Advanced features and higher usage limits come with a subscription fee, which may not be feasible for all users.
  • Website Restrictions
    Some websites employ measures to prevent scraping, which may limit the effectiveness of SimpleScraper on such sites.
  • Data Quality
    Automated scraping can sometimes result in incomplete or inaccurate data, requiring manual verification.
  • Learning Curve
    Though designed to be user-friendly, there can still be a learning curve for those completely new to web scraping.
  • Resource Intensive
    Running multiple or complex scraping tasks can be resource-intensive and may affect the performance of your system.

Analysis of Distill Web Monitor

Overall verdict

  • Overall, Distill Web Monitor is a reliable and efficient tool for those needing to keep up with web page changes. Its robust set of features and ease of use make it a strong choice for both personal and professional use.

Why this product is good

  • Distill Web Monitor is considered good due to its user-friendly interface, customizable monitoring features, and compatibility with various websites. It allows users to track changes on web pages and receive alerts, making it ideal for monitoring price changes, product availability, and content updates.

Recommended for

  • Individuals tracking price changes on e-commerce websites
  • Professionals who need to follow content updates on competitors' sites
  • Researchers who want to monitor specific changes in online publications
  • Anyone interested in receiving timely alerts for changes in web content

Analysis of Simple Scraper

Overall verdict

  • Overall, Simple Scraper is a reliable and effective web scraping tool that balances ease of use with powerful features. It is well-suited for both beginners and experienced users seeking a quick and straightforward solution for extracting data from the web.

Why this product is good

  • Simple Scraper is considered a good tool primarily due to its combination of user-friendly design and robust functionality. It allows users without extensive technical skills to easily scrape data from websites with its visual point-and-click interface. Additionally, it offers features like scheduling, API access, and integration options that cater to more advanced use cases. The platform's flexibility and efficiency make it a suitable choice for many data scraping projects.

Recommended for

  • Individuals or businesses looking for a no-code solution to web scraping.
  • Marketers and researchers needing to extract and analyze web data.
  • Developers who want an API-accessible scraping solution.
  • Users who require scheduling capabilities to automate the data collection process.

Distill Web Monitor videos

No Distill Web Monitor videos yet. You could help us improve this page by suggesting one.

Add video

Simple Scraper videos

Super Simple Scraper Review

More videos:

  • Review - Super Simple Scraper RevieW
  • Review - Scraping with Simple Scraper in under 30 seconds

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Distill Web Monitor and Simple Scraper)
Monitoring Tools
100 100%
0% 0
Web Scraping
0 0%
100% 100
Website Monitoring
100 100%
0% 0
Data Extraction
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

Share your experience with using Distill Web Monitor and Simple Scraper. For example, how are they different and which one is better?
Log in or Post with

Reviews

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

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

Simple Scraper Reviews

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

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Simple Scraper seems to be a lot more popular than Distill Web Monitor. While we know about 21 links to Simple Scraper, we've tracked only 2 mentions of Distill Web Monitor. 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.

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: about 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

Simple Scraper mentions (21)

  • Scraperr – A Self Hosted Webscraper
    1. Clicking the box programmatically – possible but inconsistent 2. Outsourcing the task to one of the many CAPTCHA-solving services (2Captcha etc) – better 3. Using a pool of reliable IP addresses so you don't encounter checkboxes or turnstiles – best I run a web scraping startup (https://simplescraper.io) and this is usually the approach. It has become more difficult, and I think a lot of the AI crawlers are... - Source: Hacker News / 28 days ago
  • Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (October 2024)
    Making my data extraction Saas (https://simplescraper.io) more LLM friendly. Markdown extraction, improved Google search, workflows - search for this terms, visit the first N links, summarize etc. Big demand for (or rather, expectation of) this lately. - Source: Hacker News / 7 months ago
  • The Architecture Behind a One-Person Tech Startup
    Things are much easier for one-person startups these days—it's a gift. I remember building a todo app as my first SaaS project, and choosing something called Stormpath for authentication. It subsequently shut down, forcing me to do a last-minute migration from a hostel in Japan using Nitrous Cloud IDE (which also shut down). Just pain upon pain.[1] Now, you can just pick a full-stack cloud service and run with it.... - Source: Hacker News / 12 months ago
  • A list of SaaS, PaaS and IaaS offerings that have free tiers of interest to devops and infradev
    Simplescraper — Trigger your webhook after each operation. The free plan includes 100 cloud scrape credits. - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
  • Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
    I run Simplescraper (https://simplescraper.io). Started in 2020 and it's now profitable. > Have any recent trends affected your business? Not really. People like data as much as ever. As a one-person biz, the main dilemma remains how to juggle development, marketing and support. Reaching a point where the price of context-switching to customer support is becoming a little too high. But that's easily fixable and... - Source: Hacker News / about 2 years ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

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

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.

Octoparse - Octoparse provides easy web scraping for anyone. Our advanced web crawler, allows users to turn web pages into structured spreadsheets within clicks.

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.

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

Content Grabber - Content Grabber is an automated web scraping tool.