Hexowatch Review: the Next-Generation Website Monitoring Worthy of 2024?

The Web is in constant flux. In the days of yore, all you could do to stay in the loop is constantly refreshing pages by pressing the F5 key on your keyboard…

These days, many devices don’t even have an F5 – while the instrumentation has evolved beyond simple ping-tools 🤖

One of the new cohort of automation products for monitoring for changes on the web is called Hexowatch, and in this review we are going to look at it from all possible angles.

First things first – what exactly is Hexowatch and how does it work?

What Is Hexowatch?

Hexowatch is a cloud based page change monitoring service that lets you check any page for changes.

Did a competitor make changes to their landing pages? Did the price go down on a competing product or service? Is a product out of stock? Was my brand mentioned? Did my affiliate change his review or remove his affiliate disclosure? Did my link partner modify the backlink in his article?

Hexowatch provides a wide range of different monitors that lets you check any page for visual, content, keyword, source code, technology, availability, price or WHOIS changes.

When changes are detected on a page, Hexowatch then proceeds to archiving a snapshot of the page sending an alert via email, Slack, Telegram or any app compatible with the Zapier or Pabbly Connect ecosystem.

You can specify how frequently to check pages (from every few months down to every 5 minutes on the higher plans), which device type to check from (mobile / tablet / desktop) as well as which location to check from for websites that personalize prices based on the visitors location.

So what can you monitor with Hexowatch?

Monitoring Modes

Hexowatch provides 9 different monitoring options based on your objectives:

• The visual monitor enables you to monitor the whole page or a specific area for visual changes only.
• The HTML element monitor enables you to monitor one or more fields within a page, for example prices or product availability.
• The keyword monitor alerts you if specific keywords are found or go missing from a page.
• The technology monitor can detect changes that occur to the technology powering a website (for example if it uses wordpress / woocommerce / cloudflare) or to 3rd party scripts used on page (for example Google analytics / Intercom / Tag manager etc).
• The code monitor alerts you when the source code of a page is modified, this is useful when tracking backlinks on 3rd party websites.
• The content monitor enables you to focus on content changes only, alerting you when the text part of the page is updated.
• The availability monitor checks the page for uptime and alerts you when a page becomes unavailable or when it comes back online.
• The WHOIS monitor enables you to receive alerts when a change of domain ownership occurs or when a domain status changes (for example when a domain becomes available after expiring).
• Lastly there is an AI monitor which looks for any changes whether these are visual, content, HTML or technology based.

That last bit is probably the most interesting one – the team at Hexowatch have trained a machine learning system to look for various changes in target websites, regardless of their specific nature.

This is especially convenient for monitoring your own website, and also the ones of the very closest competitors. More on that – in the next section:

Hexowatch Use Cases

When we started reviewing Hexowatch, we could think of maybe a couple; however, after digging deeper into the various available options, it’s clear that page change monitoring can be used for a wide variety of use cases including:

• Checking key pages on your website for any visual bugs after deploying a dev update or updating plugins.
• Checking your competitors landing pages for any changes, price updates, new product launches or new service ideas.
• Keeping an eye on agency client websites to spot when tracking scripts go missing or when clients update their websites.
• Affiliates can use Hexowatch to monitor merchants and competitors for new product ideas and promotions.
• Affiliate managers can monitor affiliate reviews for any changes or to ensure affiliate compliance wording on the pages.
• SEO teams can monitor 3rd party backlink partners to ensure links are not deleted or modified once an article has been published.
• If you have your eye on an expiring domain, Hexowatch can alert you as soon as the domain becomes available on the open market.

So yes, it’s not solely for spying on your competition (although that is definitely an important use case!). To accommodate this wealth of potential uses, Hexowatch have created a pricing structure to fit every possible level of sophistication:

Hexowatch Plans and Pricing

Hexowatch provides 5 different plans based on your needs:

There is a Free plan provides 75 checks per month and pages can be checked down to every 12 hours. This is ideal to try out the different monitoring types available.

The Standard plan at $14.99 provides 2000 checks per month and pages can be checked down to every 30 minutes. This plan provides alerts via Slack, Telegram and Zapier.

The Pro plan at $24.99 provides 4500 checks per month and pages can be checked down to every 15 minutes. This plan provides all the above plus Pabbly connect and webhooks integrations as well as custom actions that can be performed before a page is checked (for example you can perform clicks, close modal windows, login to password protected websites, set cookies etc).

The Business plan at $49.99 provides 10000 checks per month and pages can be checked down to every 5 minutes. This plan provides all the above plus the ability to check a page as if you were browsing from the US / EU or Asia).

The Business + plan at $99.99 provides all the above features with 25000 checks per month.

Should You Use Hexowatch?

Now that we know much more about this toolkit, are we ready to answer the question? Is Hexowatch worth your time and money?

Considering it actually saves you time and provides troves of easily manageable data, the Free plan is a no-brainer choice to get used to the interface and check if there’s really value for you in using this service.

Hexowatch is one of those tools that are valuable precisely because they work away silently in the background – always alert, ready to notify you whenever there’s a ripple in the fabric of the Web.

Who knows, maybe after a couple of months of continuous monitoring you will feel as data-deprived without Hexowatch as most webmasters feel themselves without Google Analytics…