How to Use Visualping for Competitive Monitoring

Visualping is a SaaS tool designed to track website changes, whether they are visual updates (design/layout) or text changes (content, pricing, keywords). It sends alerts when key changes occur, helping you stay informed.

In this review, I’ll walk you through how Visualping works, its free vs. paid plans, and how to maximize its potential for competitive monitoring. No affiliation—just my honest opinion.

TL;DR

What is Visualping?

Visualping is a Canadian SaaS web monitoring tool that helps users "save time and get notified of the important changes your team needs."

Among its business use cases, Visualping highlights:

• Competitor monitoring
• Regulatory intelligence
• Compliance monitoring
• Regression monitoring
• SEO monitoring

In the context of competitor monitoring, Visualping positions itself as the "#1 Competitor Monitoring Tool," claiming to be "trusted by 85% of Fortune 500 companies and more than 200,000 businesses across 180 countries."

Pricing

For the latest details, visit their pricing page, but here’s a breakdown as of February 2025:

* available advanced features like AI analysis, Google Sheets integration, Slack/Teams alerts, and more

Regardless of the plan, Visualping can track both visual and text changes, including monitoring for specific keywords.

Visual comparison

A visual comparison works by capturing a snapshot of a selected area on a webpage and comparing it with a previous snapshot of the same area. This method focuses on detecting visual changes, including layout or design modifications, by analyzing pixel-level differences.

Text comparison

Text comparison allows you to track a webpage by monitoring and comparing the HTML text. Unlike visual comparison, this method focuses on textual content, detecting changes in the wording, structure, or formatting without considering visual aspects like images or layout.

Is it legal?

Visualping was part of the 2021 Google for Startups Accelerator Canada cohort, includes a good bot disclaimer on its website, and claims that 85% of Fortune 500 companies use its services. However, if you're uncertain about its legality in your specific use case, it's always a good idea to consult with your legal team to ensure compliance with relevant regulations.

Free Plan

The Visualping free plan is perfect for testing the tool.

On the free plan, you get access to 5 pages checked daily and up to 150 page checks per month.

A check occurs every time Visualping visits a page to monitor for changes.

For example, if one page is monitored daily on workdays, it would use ~ 20 checks per month. With 5 pages, that's 100 checks per month, leaving you with 50 remaining checks. Note: Unused checks don’t roll over to the next month.

You'll also receive email alerts whenever a change is detected.

To get started, simply register for an account. Once you've registered and verified your email, your dashboard will look like this:

Visual Comparison

A whole discussion can be held on the importance of the hero section of any website, so let’s see how Visualping tracks visual changes in this area.

Here’s how the original design looked:

Steps to track visual changes with Visualping

1. Click on New Job

2. Add the URL of the page you want to monitor for changes and press Go.
   Wait for the page to load. If the page fails to load initially, try reloading.

3. Once loaded, you'll see something like this:

4. Adjust the dotted rectangle to fit the area you want to track.
   In this example, I selected the hero section.

5. Next, choose the days you want to monitor changes.
   I selected the option to check for changes once a day on weekdays.

6. Once everything is set, press Create Job.
   Your dashboard should look like this, confirming the job was successfully created.

To track changes, I updated the image, changed the font color, reduced the line spacing in the headline, and added a button.

Receiving the notification

The next day, I received an email notification. Right away, Visualping notified me about the most significant change—the addition of the CTA button.

The addition of a 'Book the Demo' option indicates a new feature that allows users to schedule a demonstration, enhancing user engagement and interaction with the service.

The email also included screenshots of the old and new versions of the page, with the areas of change clearly highlighted.

By clicking View changes, I was taken to a detailed comparison with a slider to view the before-and-after changes.

Additionally, on the Text Changes tab, I could see the Change Summary, which, in this case, was the addition of the button.

Text Comparison

Now, let’s see how Visualping handles tracking text changes.

For this test, I monitored a service description page of my fictional company.

Steps to track text changes with Visualping

1. Just like before, click New Job, add the URL, and wait for the page to load.

2. Change Compare Type from Visual to Text.

3. Adjust the schedule if needed and click Create Job.

Now that the job was set up, I made a few text changes on the page.

First, I updated the numerical data in the section below.

These were the new figures:

Then I made several changes to the data visualization section below.

Specifically, I mentioned Tableau, Power BI, and Looker as examples of visualization tools and changed some of the figures.

Receiving the notification

The next day, I received an email alert stating:

The page has undergone significant changes in numerical data, with notable additions and deletions of figures, but the core content regarding data visualization services remains consistent.

Clicking View changes, I saw the following:

While Visualping's text comparison did a great job tracking numeric and general text changes, the change summary missed an important update—my mention of Tableau, Power BI, and Looker as visualization tools. However, not all web monitoring tools provide a summary feature, so Visualping still performed well overall.

Keyword Alerts

To ensure you don’t miss critical text updates, like the overlooked changes in the previous example, you can use Keyword Alerts.

Here’s how to set it up:

1. Edit your existing monitoring job.
   Go to your dashboard, find the job, and click the gear icon in the top right.

2. Add keywords.
   Scroll down to the keywords alert section and add the keywords you want to track. I added Tableau, Power BI, Looker.
3. Save the changes.

Now, Visualping should prioritize alerts when these keywords appear or change.

Receiving the notification

The next day, I received an email alert stating:

The page has removed specific references to visualization tools like Tableau, Power BI, and Looker, while retaining the overall message about data visualization support.

Paid Plans

The free version is quite useful—but it only allows tracking up to 5 pages.

For more coverage, the Personal plan offers up to 20 pages, starting at $120/yr (pricing scales up to $600/yr, depending on the number of monthly checks).

However, the Business plans provide a better value (in my humble opinion).

For example:

• 200 pages can be monitored for $1,200/yr.
• You also gain access to AI-based alerts, which provide better explanations of detected changes.
• Plus, you get advanced notifications via Slack, MS Teams, Google Sheets, and more.

FAQ