Diffy vs Pagescreen
Pagescreen is a visual monitoring tool. Automated website change detection, monitoring, and alerts. The main idea behind the service is to run monitoring regularly (up to hourly) and notify you of any changes on the site.
Overview
| Pagescreen | Diffy | |
|---|---|---|
| Bypass Cloudflare | No support found | Single IP address to allow |
| Tools to stabilize screenshots | Just setting delay | Superior toolset to deal with false positives |
| Comparison | Pixel perfect (a lot of noise) | Custom that recognizes vertical shifts (way less noise) |
| Notifications | Email, Slack, webhooks | Email, Slack, webhooks |
| Unique features | Hourly monitoring | Multiple breakpoints, mock content, screenshots as logged-in user |
Screenshots quality / bypass Cloudflare
Unfortunately, we didn’t find a way to bypass Cloudflare protection with Pagescreen. Support was not helpful either.
Diffy, on the other hand, provides a static IP address that can be allowed, so Cloudflare won’t block it.
Tools to stabilize screenshots
We scanned a site and discovered that Pagescreen captured a slider in different positions that led to false positives. This means that if you have any dynamic elements on the site, they will keep bothering you visually even though there were no real changes to the site.
Pagescreen only allows setting a delay when taking screenshots.
Comparison of screenshot-related tools
| Pagescreen | Diffy | |
|---|---|---|
| Delay | ✅ | ✅ |
| Masking / Removal elements | ❌ | ✅ |
| Inject CSS / JS | ❌ | ✅ |
| Night mode / Enforce Retina images | ❌ | ✅ |
| Mock dynamic content | ❌ | ✅ |
| HTTP headers, cookies | ❌ | ✅ |
Comparison algorithm
Pagescreen uses a pixel-perfect comparison algorithm, while Diffy uses its own solution that recognizes vertical shifts. This helps to avoid highlighting the whole page when there was a change in the header.
Notifications
Both Pagescreen and Diffy offer email / Slack / webhook notifications.
Conclusion
If you have a very simple website with no dynamic elements, you can use Pagescreen to monitor pages and receive notifications. But if your site has any dynamic elements or needs any fine-tuning, Diffy would be a superior choice.
The latest blog post on the Pagescreen site is from 2022, so it doesn’t look like the project is currently being actively developed.