Compare · Distill Web Monitor
PulseNotice compared with Distill
Distill is strong if you want to maintain selectors. PulseNotice is for when you would rather name the event and ignore the rest of the DOM. If you want a screenshot of any change, look at Visualping instead.
| Topic | Distill | PulseNotice |
|---|---|---|
| What fires an alert | A watched region or selector matches a condition you configured (text, availability, regex, and many more). | A natural-language goal is newly true. Selectors, if present, are capture hints that can self-heal — not the product. |
| Setup | Mature, powerful, and easy to overfit: pick elements, conditions, local vs cloud. Great if you like maintaining selectors. | URL + a sentence + optional selected text. Teams who are tired of selector churn usually land here. |
| Noise | Dynamic regions you did not exclude will fire. Distill gives you the tools to tighten the box; you own that maintenance. | We fingerprint extracted facts. Cookie banners and counters that miss the goal should not email you. |
| Local vs cloud | A well-known split: local checks while the browser is open, cloud checks when you pay for 24/7. | Capture can happen in Chrome; checks always run in our cloud against the public URL. There is no “only while Chrome is open” mode. |
| Login and CAPTCHA | Distill has historically supported more authenticated / complex page setups than we will. | Public URLs only. No origin cookies, no CAPTCHA solve, no session stealing. |
| AI | Not the core of Distill; the product is conditions and selectors. | Compile ambiguous goals at save time; optional relevance after a candidate change. Not an LLM on every poll. |
| Evidence | Diffs and watched-text changes, depending on how you configured the monitor. | Excerpt + facts on the alert, stored on the check run. |
| Price | See distill.io for current cloud vs local pricing and check limits. | Free (5 hourly monitors, no card), Pro $8.99, Pro+ $17.99, Team $39. Playwright only on Pro+ / Team. |
| Who it is for | Power users who want to own CSS/XPath conditions and already think in watched regions. | People who can say the event in English and do not want to babysit a selector when the page ships a new class name. |
If you want a screenshot of any change, use Visualping or Distill. If you want one email when your condition becomes true on a public page, use us.
FAQ
Do you call an AI model on every check?
No. Keyword and price goals compile to deterministic rules. An LLM is used when a goal is ambiguous at save time, and a relevance classifier can run after a candidate change that would notify. Pixel-diff tools that score “is this important?” on every poll are a different product.
Can you watch pages behind a login?
No. We only fetch public URLs. We do not store your site passwords, replay sessions, solve CAPTCHAs, or send cookies to origin servers. If the page requires a login, it is out of scope — by design, not as a missing feature.
What is a check?
A check is one fetch of your public URL. We extract facts from the page and compare them to your goal. You are emailed only when the goal is newly true — not on every poll, and not when a cookie banner or visitor counter moves.
Do you send Slack, Teams, or SMS?
Not yet. Every plan can email you. Pro+ and Team can also POST an HTTPS webhook so you can fan the alert into the tools you already use. Slack, Teams, SMS, and a public API with keys are separate product work — we will not list them as shipping features until they do.