The short answer
Distill is more powerful and more configurable, and it is not close. Its browser extension runs monitors locally with intervals down to seconds, free and unmetered, and its cloud plans go to every 10 minutes at $15. SurveiLN has nothing that competes on either.
What Distill asks in return is setup. You pick the part of the page to watch, usually with a selector, and you maintain that when the site is redesigned. That is a fair trade for someone monitoring a dashboard; it is a lot of work for someone who wants to know when a manga chapter is out.
SurveiLN takes the opposite trade. There is nothing to select and nothing to maintain — you paste a URL, write a sentence, and it works out the rest. The cost is that the fastest check is every 3 hours.
Side by side
Comparable paid tiers, chosen as the cheapest plan each product offers above its free one. Distill counts browser and cloud monitors together.
| SurveiLN Pro — $10/mo | Distill Starter — $15/mo | |
|---|---|---|
| Pages tracked | 20 | 50 monitors (browser + cloud) |
| Fastest cloud check | Every 6 hours | Every 10 minutes |
| Local/browser checks | None — runs on our servers | Yes, down to seconds, unmetered |
| Check allowance | Unmetered at that interval | 30,000 cloud checks/month |
| Free plan | 5 pages, once a day | 5 cloud monitors, 1,000 checks/month, 6 hours |
| Setup | Paste a URL, describe the change | Select the region, usually a selector |
| Lists of items | One alert per new item, each linked | Change detection on the selected region |
Distill’s figures were read from distill.io/pricing in August 2026. Pricing changes — check their page before deciding.
Choose Distill if
- You want checks every few seconds or minutes — the local extension is genuinely hard to beat, and it is free.
- You are comfortable picking selectors, and you want exact control over which part of a page is watched.
- You need the page checked from your own browser, with your own session — Distill can watch things a server never sees.
- You want SMS alerts, or a large number of monitors on one plan.
Choose SurveiLN if
- You do not want to configure anything. No selectors, no regions, no maintenance when the site redesigns.
- What you follow updates a few times a day, so a 3–6 hour check is early enough.
- You want the filtering to be a sentence — “only official English releases”, “only senior backend roles” — rather than a region of the page.
- The page is a list and you want one linked alert per new item.
The difference that actually matters
Distill watches a place on a page. SurveiLN watches for a thing you described.
That sounds like a distinction without a difference until the site is redesigned. A selector-based monitor either breaks loudly or, worse, keeps matching something that is no longer what you meant. A description does not care where on the page the chapter list moved to.
The flip side is honest: a description is fuzzier than a selector. If you need to know that one specific number in one specific table changed, a selector is the right instrument and SurveiLN is not.
Try it on 5 pages, free.
No card. If the cadence does not suit you, you will know inside a day and you will not have paid for it.