When Visualping is the better choice
Visualping is built around visual comparison: it renders pages in a browser, lets you select an area, and shows highlighted before/after screenshots. If you need to monitor JavaScript-heavy pages, compare layouts visually, or share annotated reports with a team, use a tool like that. PingWhen does none of those things.
When PingWhen is the better choice
- You care about the words on the page, not pixels.
- You want a plain, predictable price: $9/month for 10 pages every 15 minutes, or $19/month for 40 pages every 5 minutes.
- You want alerts in a webhook as well as email. Every plan includes signed JSON webhooks.
- You want down and up alerts on the same URL, not just change detection.
- You want an AI agent or script to create watches:
POST /v1/watchesreturns a Stripe Checkout link, documented in llms.txt.
How a check works
On your plan's interval we fetch the URL with PingWhenBot/1.0. For HTML we drop scripts, styles and comments, keep the visible text, collapse whitespace, lowercase it, and mask ISO-8601 timestamps. We hash that text. The first successful fetch is the baseline and never alerts. After that, a different hash means a change alert with a one-line excerpt of what is new.
What you give up
No screenshots, no visual diff, no area selection, no JavaScript rendering, no team workspaces, no free tier. Because we compare the whole page's visible text, pages with rotating content will alert more than a region-based visual monitor would. If your page renders its content with JavaScript, we'll see an empty shell. Check "View page source" first.
Moving watches over
There's no import tool. Paste each URL into the form above (the first one goes through Stripe Checkout; after that, sign in and add the rest from your watch list). The first check becomes the baseline, so you won't get a burst of alerts on day one.
Honest limits
- We watch the HTML we receive. Pages that only render their content with JavaScript (many single-page apps, some store stock widgets) are not supported: we would see an empty shell.
- We watch the whole page's text, not a CSS selector. Pages with rotating quotes, "5 minutes ago" labels, view counters or ads that change the text on every load will alert often. After a burst of alerts we pause that watch for 24 hours and email you a resume link.
- No logins, cookies, or pages behind a paywall. Public URLs on ports 80/443 only, up to 2 MB.
- No free plan. Cancel anytime in the Stripe customer portal.