Distill is good software aimed at documents. Its fast option runs on your own machine, its cloud floor is six hours free, and its staff say outright that a captcha page cannot be monitored.
Most people looking for a Distill.io alternative have hit one of three walls: the free cloud tier only checks every six hours, the fast 5-second option needs your own computer awake with the browser open, or the shop they want to watch sits behind a bot check that Distill's own staff say cannot be monitored. Distill is good software. It was built for documents rather than shops, and that shows up in specific, documented places.
Distill's pricing page sets the free plan at 25 monitors, of which 5 run in the cloud, with 1,000 cloud checks a month and 30 email alerts. Twenty-five monitors is more than most free plans give you, including ours.
The number that decides whether it suits you is the minimum cloud interval, which is six hours. That is fine for a policy document, a grant deadline or a competitor's pricing page. It is no use for stock. A Pokemon Center exclusive or a beauty advent calendar can appear and sell out several times over inside one six-hour gap, and you would learn about it long after it finished.
Distill advertises intervals as low as 5 seconds, and that is true, but it applies to local monitors rather than cloud ones. Their own documentation is clear about the difference: a local monitor "Requires your computer's browser to be open", while a cloud monitor "Works if your PC is off or browser is not open".
There is a second condition in the same page that matters more for shops than it first appears. Local checks run "in your browser either in the background, in a tab (default), or in a sticky window", but "background checks only work for static web pages". Modern shop pages build their stock state with JavaScript, so the quiet background mode is the one least likely to work on exactly the pages you want.
So the practical reading of Distill's speed is this: fast means a laptop that never sleeps with a tab held open. If that is acceptable, it is genuinely fast. If you want to be told about a drop while you are asleep or at work, you are on the cloud tiers, and those start at six hours free and reach two minutes at $80 a month.
| Free plan, checks that run without your machine on | Free plan monitors | Cheapest paid tier | Fastest without your browser open | How it decides something changed | Sites behind a captcha or bot wall | Proxy cost | Pages behind your own login | Alert channels | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Distill.io | Every 6 hours | 25 total, 5 of them in the cloud | $15/mo for 10-minute cloud checks | 2 minutes, on Flexi at $80+/mo | Compares the page content you selected | Staff say it is not possible | Professional ($35/mo) and up; US residential burns 7 checks per check | Yes, via local monitors using your own session | Slack, Discord, Teams, webhooks, SMS, push |
| StockWatch | Every 60 seconds | 5, all server-side | £4/mo for 15-second checks | 5 seconds, on Power at £20/mo | Reads stock and price as fields from the shop's own data | Handled per site as part of the plugin | Included on paid plans for a set number of monitors | Only through the browser extension | Discord, email and Telegram |
This is the sharpest difference, and Distill is refreshingly honest about it on their own forum. Asked what to do when monitoring hits a block or captcha, staff member Ajit answered on 6 November 2023:
When there is no way to work around a captcha, it is not possible to monitor that page.
Three days later the same staff member confirmed this holds "even when using a local monitor". Their suggested routes around it are to try a local monitor or to pay for better proxies, and their proxy documentation prices that honestly too: "The Professional plan and above include proxy servers", custom proxies need Flexi or Enterprise, and "using the 'Residential - US' proxy will consume 7 checks for each single monitor check". A protected page therefore costs seven times your quota on a plan starting at $35 a month.
That matters in the UK more than it might sound. A large share of the retailers worth watching sit behind Cloudflare, DataDome, Akamai or Imperva. What those systems actually do is worth understanding, because a block is often not an error: it can arrive as a normal-looking page with nothing in it, which a general differ will happily record as a shop with no stock.
A change watcher compares what a page said last time with what it says now. It works, but it does not know what any of it means. It cannot tell a restock from a rotated banner, a new review or a changed recommendation strip, which is why people who point one at a shop either drown in false alerts or narrow the selection so tightly that they miss the real change when the template shifts. That noise is one of the reasons restock alerts arrive too late to act on.
Distill's feature list is built around exactly this method: visual selectors, XPath, CSS, regex and conditions you write yourself. There is no stock field and no price field, because that was never the point of it.
StockWatch reads the shop's own data instead. On Shopify it reads the product feed, on WooCommerce the store API, on Magento and BigCommerce their GraphQL endpoints, across 34 monitor types. Stock and price arrive as fields rather than pixels, so it can tell you that a specific size came back rather than that something on the page moved, and a redesign does not read as a sell-out.
Free monitors run on our servers from a shared address rather than a dedicated proxy. On an ordinary shop that is fine. On a site that rate-limits hard or runs a strict bot wall it can be refused, and the ways round it are to bring your own proxy or run that monitor through the browser extension. Paid plans include proxies for a number of monitors, which is what that line in the pricing is for.
We would rather say so here than have you discover it on the drop you cared about.
For restocks and price drops, a tool that reads a shop's product data beats a general page differ. Distill's free cloud tier checks every 6 hours and its 5-second option needs your browser open. StockWatch checks every 60 seconds free and 5 seconds on its top plan, all server-side, and reads stock and price as structured fields.
Cloud monitors have a minimum interval of 6 hours on the free plan, with 5 cloud monitors and 1,000 checks a month. Local monitors can run as fast as 5 seconds but require your computer's browser to be open.
Distill's docs say a local monitor requires your computer's browser to be open, while a cloud monitor works if your PC is off. Local runs as fast as 5 seconds; cloud starts at 6 hours on free and reaches 2 minutes on the Flexi plan. Local background checks only work for static web pages.
Their own staff say no. On the Distill forum in November 2023 a staff member wrote that when there is no way around a captcha, it is not possible to monitor that page, and confirmed this applies even to local monitors. The suggested alternatives are better proxies, which start on the $35 Professional plan.
Yes. Distill supports Slack, Discord and Microsoft Teams, plus webhooks, SMS and push. Neither Distill nor Visualping offers Telegram, which StockWatch does.
If you are watching documents, private pages behind your login, or anything where six-hourly is fast enough, yes. If you are chasing stock on public shops and want to know within a minute without leaving a laptop on, a purpose-built stock monitor fits better.
Try 60-second checks free Five monitors, no card, no browser left open.