WatchSumo vs WebSite-Watcher, and why they aren't the same

Elisa Keller
Digital Marketing Strategist
March 05, 2024

We get a lot of traffic coming to us looking for an alternative to WebSite-Watcher. In this article we'll compare the features of WatchSumo and Website-Watcher, and explain why WatchSumo is not an alternative to it.

What is WatchSumo?

WatchSumo is an uptime monitoring tool, designed to help you ensure your website is reliable and available for customers. Every minute we will make a request to your website, and if a problem is identified we will send an alert your way. We track data such as:

  • Whether your website is up and available to customers
  • The time it takes for your server to respond
  • Whether your SSL certificate is valid

This has a number of purposes. First of all, ensuring your website is working is a good business practice. If customers can't visit your website, then you are going to have a hard time making sales.

However we go further than just checking if it's up or down, we also help you to identify and diagnose problems before they lead to downtime. We also continuously check that your SSL certificate is valid and the speed of your website which is important for SEO.

What is Website-Watcher?

Website-Watcher is a tool that monitors changes on websites. It is inteded to be used for tasks such as as monitoring competitors websites, monitoring when a price changes or when a product goes out of stock. The way they work is by looking at the HTML of the page, and the next time it checks, if the HTML has changed they send you a notification. They can also visually highlight what has changed on the page. They don't monitor uptime or ensure your site is reliable, they tell you when the page has changed.

As you can see WatchSumo isn't the same, so it is not an alternative to WebSite-Watcher. We believe the confusion comes as both are website monitoring tools, however the intended purpose and the way they work is very different.

If you are after an uptime monitorig tool, then stick around as that's what we do best. Otherwise if you came here looking for a tool to tell you when a website changes, then we highly recommend you head over to WebSite-Watcher. 😊