The Stillio alternative for teams that also need to know what changed

Looking for a Stillio alternative? Here's the one-line version: Stillio is good at taking scheduled screenshots and storing them, but it leaves you to spot changes yourself. Snapshot Archive captures on the same schedule and then compares each new capture against the last one, pixel by pixel, and tells you what moved.

If your job is just to keep a visual record, that difference might not matter. If your job is to act when a page changes, whether it's a competitor's pricing, a vendor's terms, or your own production site after a deploy, it matters a lot. That's the gap this page is about.

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What Stillio does, honestly

Stillio has been around for years and the product is mature. It does one thing and does it well: you give it a URL (or point it at a sitemap.xml to archive a whole site), pick a frequency anywhere from every minute to monthly, and it captures and stores screenshots on that schedule without you touching anything. People who use it tend to like the support, with chat replies that arrive fast from a team that's thorough.

A few things Stillio genuinely does well, some of which we don't match:

• Geo-IP capture lets you take the screenshot as it appears from a specific country, which is useful if you run localized pages or geo-targeted ads.

• Pointing it at a sitemap and archiving an entire site in one go is a clean workflow for whole-site preservation.

• It syncs captures to Google Drive and Dropbox, so your screenshots land in storage you already use.

• The page-prep options (click, hover, hide elements before capture) handle a lot of the cookie-banner and popup mess that ruins automated screenshots.

So if what you need is a focused, well-supported archiving tool and nothing more, Stillio is a reasonable choice. We'd rather tell you that up front than pretend otherwise.

Where the two tools actually diverge

The honest summary is that Stillio is an archive and Snapshot Archive is an archive plus a monitor. Stillio stores what a page looked like. We store it too, and then we do the comparison work for you.

The clearest example is visual diff. Every time we capture a page, we line the new image up against the previous one and highlight the pixels that changed — a swapped hero image, a moved CTA, a new pricing tier, a banner that appeared. Stillio doesn't do this; its archives are images you open and eyeball yourself. Independent reviews describe the same limitation: screenshot archives give you visual evidence but not structured change detection.

That comparison feeds change detection with a threshold you set, so a one-pixel antialiasing wobble doesn't wake you up but a real edit does. When something crosses the line, an alert fires to email, Slack, or a webhook, with a diff summary and a direct link to the before/after. With a pure archive, nobody tells you anything, and you find out when you happen to look.

Two more differences worth naming. We have a REST API, and Stillio doesn't offer one, so automating captures or pulling results into your own systems isn't really on the table there. And for anyone using screenshots as evidence, our PDF export ships each capture as a timestamped PDF with a SHA-256 hash, which is a different kind of artifact than a loose image file. A hash gives you a way to prove a file hasn't been altered since capture, which is exactly what comes up when a screenshot has to hold up under scrutiny. The same logic extends to our watermark and timestamp options, where the capture time is baked into the image itself.

None of this makes Stillio wrong. It makes it a different category of tool. Stillio optimizes for "capture and keep." We optimize for "capture, compare, and tell you." Knowing which sentence describes your actual need is most of the decision.

What it's like to actually live with it

A few things about Snapshot Archive are easy to underrate until you've used it for a week.

Setup barely counts as setup. You add a URL, pick how often to capture it, and choose full-page or viewport. No code, no crawler config, no scripts to babysit. Switch on visual diff, tell it where alerts should land, and the rest runs on its own. The work comes to you: instead of remembering to check pages, you hear about a change only when something actually moved, with the diff already highlighted.

Retention is the part people underestimate. Your snapshots don't quietly disappear after a couple of weeks. The free plan keeps 30 days of history, Starter holds 90, and the paid tiers stretch from a year on Pro to three years on Business. If you're keeping records for compliance, or you just want a long visual trail of how a page changed over time, that timeline is the difference between "we have proof" and "we think it looked like that."

Then there's getting your data back out, which is where a lot of archiving tools quietly lock you in. Every capture here is yours to take with you: a full-page image, a PDF carrying a timestamp and SHA-256 hash, and the raw HTML of the page exactly as it was. From Starter up you also get shareable links, so handing a snapshot to a colleague or a client is a link instead of a zip file. Nothing about the setup traps your history inside the product.

Price is what ties it together. Most of what's above — full-page capture, PDF and HTML export, visual diff, alerts across four channels, 90-day retention, twenty sites — sits on the $14 Starter plan, below where Stillio's archiving-only product even begins. You're paying less for more, and the free plan lets you confirm that's true for your own pages before you spend anything.

Feature comparison at a glance

A note on that table: we kept it to the differences that change a buying decision. For anything where the honest answer is "both do this fine" — reliable capture, full-page screenshots, retention — there's no point pretending one wins.

Pricing, compared the useful way

Exact numbers move around, so check both sites before deciding, but here's the shape of it. Stillio starts at $29/month for up to 5 pages and climbs through $79, $199, and $299/month as you add pages and faster capture intervals. There's a 14-day trial but no permanent free plan, so $29 is the floor.

Snapshot Archive starts at $0. The free plan covers 3 URLs with daily captures, 30-day retention, and viewport screenshots, and visual diff is included even there, which is enough to put a competitor's pricing page, your own homepage, and a vendor's terms page under watch and see whether monitoring catches something you'd have missed. The first paid tier, Starter, is $14/month and already covers 20 sites with full-page, PDF, and HTML capture, 90-day retention, and alerts to email, Slack, Discord, and Telegram. So our entry paid plan is both cheaper than Stillio's ($14 vs $29) and covers four times the pages (20 vs 5).

One honest caveat on where features sit. The API and webhooks aren't on Starter; they start at Pro, which is $39/month and bumps you to 50 sites, captures every 30 minutes, and a year of retention. So if an API is the reason you're switching, Pro is the real comparison point, not the $14 plan. Even then, $39 for monitoring plus an API undercuts Stillio's $199 tier, which has neither.

The short read: at the bottom we're cheaper and include a free plan, in the middle we include monitoring and an API that Stillio doesn't offer at any price, and the one thing money can't buy from us is Stillio's Geo-IP capture.

What teams actually monitor (and where a pure archive falls short)

It helps to get specific about why the diff matters, because "change detection" sounds abstract until you map it to the pages you'd actually watch. A few patterns come up again and again.

Competitor pricing pages change quietly. A rival adds a tier, renames a plan, moves a feature from one bracket to another, or drops a launch discount. None of it gets announced. With an archive, you'd catch it on your next manual review, maybe weeks later. With visual diff running daily, the changed region is highlighted the morning after it happens, and the alert lands before your next planning meeting instead of after it. We dug into which pages are worth watching in what competitor pages to monitor.

Vendor terms and privacy policies are the opposite problem: they change rarely, so nobody checks them, and then one day a clause shifts in a way that affects your contract or your compliance posture. A scheduled archive captures the new version, but it won't flag that anything moved. Monitoring does, which is the whole point of putting a low-traffic legal page under watch.

Then there's your own site after a deploy. A CSS change ships, a third-party script breaks a layout, an A/B test leaks to everyone. Visual regression on production catches the ones your test suite didn't, and a screenshot archive simply records the broken state without telling you it's broken. That's a monitoring job, not an archiving one.

The thread running through all three is the same. Archiving answers "what did this page look like on March 3rd." Monitoring answers "did anything change, and when." Stillio is built for the first question. If most of your needs are actually the second question wearing the first question's clothes, that's the signal to look past a pure archive.

Who should pick which

Pick Stillio if you want a mature, narrowly-focused archiving service, you need Geo-IP capture from specific countries, you like the sitemap-to-whole-site archiving flow, or you want native Google Drive and Dropbox sync and don't need change alerts or an API.

Pick Snapshot Archive if you need to be told when a page changes rather than checking manually, you want pixel-level visual diff to see exactly what changed, you need alerts routed to email, Slack, or a webhook, you want a REST API to automate things, you need court-ready PDF evidence with a hash, or you simply want to start free and grow into a paid plan.

Plenty of teams sit in the second group without realizing it. They sign up for "screenshot archiving," then a quarter later they're manually flipping between snapshots trying to figure out when a competitor changed their plans. That manual flipping is the thing visual diff removes.

Moving from Stillio to Snapshot Archive

Migration is mostly recreating your watchlist, and it's quick.

First, export or note your existing Stillio setup: the list of URLs you're capturing and the frequency for each. If you've been syncing to Google Drive or Dropbox, your historical screenshots already live there and stay yours — nothing forces you to delete them.

Then add those same URLs in Snapshot Archive, set the frequency per page, and switch on visual diff and alerts for the ones where you care about changes (you probably don't need a diff alert on a page you only archive for the record). Pick your capture mode — full-page or viewport — and you're done.

One honest limitation: your old Stillio screenshots won't retroactively become a diff baseline here. Visual diff compares captures we took, so the timeline starts fresh from your first capture with us. Your Stillio history remains a valid archive on its own; it just lives alongside the new monitored timeline rather than merging into it. For most people that's fine, because the reason they're switching is to monitor going forward.

If you're weighing this against staying on a pure archive for the long haul, we wrote up the broader case in Wayback Machine vs Snapshot Archive, which covers the same "store vs. monitor" distinction in more detail.