Monitor Website Changes Like a Pro with changedetection.io

Ever needed to track when a webpage updates—whether it’s a price drop, a product restock, or even unauthorized changes to your own site? Manually refreshing and comparing pages is tedious, and most monitoring tools are either overkill or expensive. Enter changedetection.io, a free, open-source tool that does one thing really well: detect and alert you when a website changes.

What It Does

changedetection.io is a lightweight but powerful tool that:

• Monitors web pages for content changes (text, HTML, or visual diff).
• Sends alerts via email, Slack, Discord, or webhooks when changes occur.
• Supports filters to ignore irrelevant changes (like ads or timestamps).
• Runs self-hosted (Docker, Python) or as a managed SaaS.

It’s like a git diff for the web—continuously checking pages and flagging what’s new.

Why It’s Cool

• No fluff, just tracking: Unlike bloated SaaS tools, this focuses purely on change detection with minimal setup.
• Flexible filtering: Use CSS selectors or text patterns to ignore noisy updates (e.g., "Last updated" timestamps).
• Privacy-first: Self-host it to avoid sharing your tracked URLs with third parties.
• Use cases galore:
  • Scrape without scraping: Get alerts for price drops or inventory restocks.
  • Monitor competitors’ pricing/features.
  • Catch unauthorized edits (e.g., defacement) on your own site.

How to Try It

1. Quickest way: Use the free SaaS version.
2. Self-host: Run it in Docker (recommended for privacy):

   docker run -d --name changedetection -p 5000:5000 -v datastore-volume:/datastore dgtlmoon/changedetection.io
   

   Open http://localhost:5000, add a URL, and configure alerts.

For more options (like Kubernetes or Python CLI), check the GitHub repo.

Final Thoughts

changedetection.io is one of those tools that feels obvious once you see it. It’s not trying to be a full-scale scraping suite—just a reliable, no-nonsense way to know when something online changes. If you’ve ever wasted time manually checking a page, give it a spin. Bonus points for being open-source and easy to hack on if you need custom behavior.

Got a creative use case? Let us know @githubprojects.