A Google Alerts alternative for each job: new mentions or page changes
Ten Google Alerts alternatives compared: free and paid tools for keyword mentions, and page monitors for the edits Google Alerts is not built to catch.
The short answer
The right Google Alerts alternative depends on the job. Google Alerts emails you when new results for a topic show up in Google Search, so it finds new pages that mention a keyword, not edits to a page you already know. For mentions, Talkwalker Alerts is the free like-for-like swap, F5Bot covers Reddit, Hacker News and Lobsters for free, and Syften, Mention and Brand24 are paid listening tools. For changes to specific pages, use a page monitor: Website Change Tracker (ours), Visualping, changedetection.io, Distill or PageCrawl.
What Google Alerts does, and the two jobs people replace it for
We make Website Change Tracker, one of the ten Google Alerts alternatives below. It does one of the two jobs this post covers, and we say plainly which one.
Google's help page describes Alerts in one line: you get emails 'when new results for a topic show up in Google Search.' You give it a topic, not a page. The settings let you choose how often (As-it-happens, At most once a day, At most once a week), which sources (Automatic, News, Blogs, Web, Video, Books, Discussions, Finance), and how many results (Only the best results, or All results).
That design has two consequences worth knowing before you pick a replacement. An alert can only fire after Google has crawled and indexed a page that matches, so it is as fast as Google's crawl of that site. And it reports new matches, so an edit to a page that already matched, or to a page that never mentions your keyword, is not what it is built to tell you about.
So people leave Google Alerts for one of two different jobs:
- Mention monitoring: 'tell me when anyone, anywhere, writes about my brand, my competitor or my topic.' This is Google Alerts' own job, done with more sources, more speed or better filtering.
- Page change monitoring: 'tell me when this particular page changes.' A competitor's pricing page, a regulator's notices page, a careers page, a supplier's terms. You already know the URL. You want to hear when it is edited, and see what changed.
No single tool does both well. Website Change Tracker only does the second. If you need the first, use one of the mention tools below, and do not let anyone, us included, sell you a page monitor for it.
Google Alerts alternatives compared
Free options are as each tool describes them on its own site in October 2026. Paid prices are left out unless the vendor prints them, because plans move every quarter.
| Tool | Job | What it watches | Free option |
|---|---|---|---|
| Talkwalker Alerts | Mentions | News, blogs, forums and X (Twitter) | Free |
| F5Bot | Mentions | Reddit, Hacker News and Lobsters | Free tier |
| Syften | Mentions | Reddit, X, Hacker News, forums, the public web and more | 14-day trial |
| Mention | Mentions | Social media and the web | Free trial |
| Brand24 | Mentions | Social, news, blogs, video, podcasts, forums and reviews | Trial |
| Website Change Tracker | Page changes | Pages you name, or one element on them | None, from $5 a month |
| Visualping | Page changes | Pages you name, with screenshots | 5 pages, checked hourly at most |
| changedetection.io | Page changes | Pages you name, including JavaScript pages | Open source, free to self-host |
| Distill | Page changes | Parts of pages you select | 5 cloud and 25 local monitors |
| PageCrawl | Page changes | Pages you name | 6 pages, checked hourly at most |
Google Alerts alternatives for brand and keyword mentions
If what you want is Google Alerts but better, these are the tools to look at. They search across many sites for a keyword. None of them is ours.
Talkwalker Alerts: the free like-for-like swap
Talkwalker Alerts works the way Google Alerts does, and its page calls itself 'the best free alternative to Google Alerts.' You set up an alert for a brand, a competitor or a topic, pick sources from News, Twitter, Blogs and Discussion forums, and choose how often results arrive, including an 'As it happens' option.
The practical differences are coverage of X, which Google Alerts' source list does not offer, and delivery: email to any address, an RSS feed, or Slack.
Use it if: you were happy with Google Alerts and want the same thing with X and Slack added, for free.
F5Bot: free alerts for Reddit, Hacker News and Lobsters
F5Bot watches three communities and nothing else: posts and comments in every subreddit, Hacker News, and Lobsters. It emails you when your keyword appears, instantly, batched, or as a daily digest. The free tier is described as 'free forever', and paid tiers add Slack, Discord, RSS and JSON feeds.
Those three sites are where a lot of product and developer conversation happens, and Google surfaces only some of it, so F5Bot fills a gap Google Alerts leaves open.
Use it if: your audience talks on Reddit or Hacker News and you want to hear about it the same day.
Syften: filtered mentions across communities
Syften describes itself as 'an AI-filtered keyword monitoring tool for the public web, Reddit, X/Twitter' and a long list of communities, including Hacker News, GitHub, Product Hunt, Stack Exchange, Bluesky, Mastodon, newsletters and podcasts. It filters out spam, duplicates and automated self-promotion before the alert reaches you. It does not monitor LinkedIn.
Alerts go to email, Slack, RSS, an API or webhooks. For Reddit it aims for at most a one-minute delay. Plans start at $29.95 a month, with a 14-day trial.
Use it if: you sell to people who discuss tools in public communities and you want fewer, better matches.
Mention: social listening with reporting
Mention tracks a topic 'on social media and the web', with analytics dashboards and tools for publishing and replying. It is a step up from alerting into social listening: you get dashboards and analytics as well as the mentions themselves. Its site now states that Agorapulse has acquired Mention.
There is no free plan on its homepage, only a free trial.
Use it if: a marketing team needs mentions alongside reporting and social publishing.
Brand24: the widest list of sources
Brand24 tracks mentions across social media, news, blogs, videos, forums, podcasts and reviews, and names sources Google Alerts cannot reach, such as TikTok, Instagram, Telegram and app store reviews. Its homepage leads with AI-powered access to those mentions.
It offers a trial. Prices are on its pricing page, not its homepage.
Use it if: your brand is discussed mostly on social platforms rather than on the open web.
Google Alerts alternatives for changes to a specific page
Here the question is not 'who mentioned this?' but 'what changed on this page?' These tools fetch a URL on a schedule, compare it with the last version, and tell you what is different. They do not search the web, so they will not find a page you have not given them.
If you only need to know when a site publishes something new, check for a feed first. How to get an RSS feed from a website covers where hidden feeds live.
Website Change Tracker: plain-English rules and a saved history
Ours. You paste a URL and describe the change that matters in plain English, such as 'tell me when a new notice mentions our product' or 'alert me when the Pro plan price changes'. Each check reads what changed and alerts only when it matches the rule, so routine edits stay quiet. On Starter and up you can track one element, such as a price block, instead of the whole page.
The alert shows the lines that were removed and the lines that replaced them, and every version of the page is saved with a timestamp (7 days of history on Basic, unlimited from Starter), so you can show what it said on a given date. Pricing is flat by pages: $5 a month for 5 pages checked daily, up to 5-minute checks on Pro.
What it does not do: it reads public pages only, it fetches the page as served without running JavaScript, so text a script draws in after loading is not seen, and it does not read the page head, so title tags and meta descriptions are out of scope. There is no free plan.
Use it if: you know which pages matter and want a filtered alert with the before and after in it.
Visualping: screenshots and the most established product
Visualping is the best-known page monitor. Its alerts include 'a highlighted screenshot whenever a change is detected', it has a Chrome extension for starting a monitor from the page you are on, and it uses AI to flag whether a change is important. Its free plan covers 5 pages and 150 checks a month, checked at most every 60 minutes.
If the changes you care about are visual, such as layout, banners and images, its screenshot comparison is the clearest way to see them. Our full comparison is Visualping vs Website Change Tracker.
Use it if: changes are visual, or you want a browser extension and a mature product.
changedetection.io: open source, and it renders JavaScript
changedetection.io is a fully open-source project you can run on your own server for free. Its hosted service costs $8.99 a month for up to 5,000 URLs and includes a real Chrome browser for JavaScript-heavy pages, plus Browser Steps for logging in or filling a search before the check. It supports 85+ notification formats, including Slack, Discord, Telegram, Matrix and email.
It beats us on price and on pages that only render in a browser. More in Website Change Tracker vs changedetection.io.
Use it if: you are technical, want to self-host, or need pages that only work with JavaScript.
Distill: select exactly what to watch
Distill lets you select the parts of a page to track, and offers both local monitors and cloud monitors. Its free plan lists 25 local monitors, 5 cloud monitors and 1,000 checks a month, and alerts can arrive by notification, email, SMS or its mobile apps.
Use it if: you want fine control over the part of the page that counts, and some monitors running locally.
PageCrawl: a generous free plan
PageCrawl monitors the URLs you give it, with visual diffs and AI summaries. Its free plan covers up to 6 pages and 220 checks a month, at most every 60 minutes. It also publishes its own Google Alerts comparison, which makes the same point this post does: Google Alerts watches Google's index for keywords, and cannot show you what changed on a page.
Use it if: you want to try page monitoring on a few pages without paying.
How to monitor a page for changes instead of waiting for Google Alerts
If the thing you were using Google Alerts for is really one page, or a handful, a page monitor tells you sooner and shows you what moved. With Website Change Tracker:
- Find the page where the change will appear. For news from one organisation, that is its news or notices page, not its homepage. For a competitor, it is the pricing, product or changelog page.
- Paste the URL into Website Change Tracker and pick how often it is checked: daily on every plan, hourly from Starter, every 5 minutes on Pro.
- Add a plain-English rule for the change worth an alert, such as 'tell me when a new press release mentions Canada'. Changes that do not match are kept in the history, marked as held back, so you can check the rule is doing what you meant.
- On Starter and up, narrow the check to one element if only one part of the page matters, such as a price or a table.
- Choose where the alert lands: email on every plan, Slack and webhooks from Starter.
Each website change alert shows the removed and added lines. If a page changes for reasons you do not care about, such as timestamps, counters or rotating banners, how to stop false positives covers rules, ignore lines and selectors.
Which plan you need
Pick by how many pages you are watching and how late an alert can be before it stops being useful.
| If you need | Plan | Price | What you get |
|---|---|---|---|
| A few pages, and a day late is fine | Basic | $5 a month | 5 pages, daily checks, email alerts, 7 days of history |
| A team that needs it in Slack within the hour | Starter | $30 a month | 50 pages, hourly checks, Slack and webhooks, one-element tracking, unlimited history |
| Minutes matter, or you watch a whole site | Pro | $150 a month | 250 pages, checks every 5 minutes, whole-site tracking from a sitemap, 5 team members |
Yearly billing is 20% less. Full details are on the pricing page.
When to use a mention tool and a page monitor together
Plenty of teams need both jobs done, and the two tools do not overlap. A mention tool tells you a competitor launched something because someone wrote about it. A page monitor tells you the competitor changed its pricing page at 3pm, before anyone wrote about it, and shows the old and new prices side by side. How to monitor competitors lists the competitor pages worth watching.
A common pairing is Talkwalker Alerts or F5Bot for mentions, which costs nothing, and a page monitor for the five to fifty pages that would cost you money if they changed unnoticed. For more on the second half, see how to get notified when a website is updated and the full round-up of website change monitoring tools.
Sources
- Create an alert, Google Search Help
- Google Alerts settings: frequency, sources and results (google.com/alerts)
- Talkwalker Alerts (talkwalker.com)
- F5Bot: Reddit, Hacker News and Lobsters alerts (f5bot.com)
- Syften sources, delivery and plans (syften.com)
- Mention, now part of Agorapulse (mention.com)
- Brand24 sources (brand24.com)
- Visualping features (visualping.io)
- Visualping plans at a glance (visualping.io/pricing)
- changedetection.io hosted plan and features (changedetection.io)
- Distill free plan and alert channels (distill.io)
- PageCrawl plans (pagecrawl.io/pricing)
- PageCrawl's Google Alerts comparison (pagecrawl.io)
