Features

DeltaWatch is a web change detection platform built for teams who need reliable, configurable monitoring without the complexity.

Content extraction

Target exactly the content you care about:

• CSS selectors — monitor a specific element on the page.
• XPath — precise DOM targeting for complex page structures.
• JSONPath — extract values from JSON API responses.
• Regex — pattern matching for fine-grained content filtering.

These can be combined to narrow your monitoring down to exactly what matters.

JSON API monitoring — JSON responses (application/json) are automatically detected and formatted with sorted keys, so changes in key ordering never trigger false alerts. Works with any capture mode.

Additional content processing options:

• Page chrome stripping — remove navigation, headers, footers, and sidebars to focus on main content.
• Hidden element stripping — remove elements with hidden, aria-hidden, display: none, or visibility: hidden.
• Global subtractive selectors — workspace-level CSS selectors that remove matching elements before any other processing.
• Blank-line filtering — changes that consist only of blank lines are automatically ignored as non-substantive.

Sites — domain discovery and network graphs

DeltaWatch can model an entire domain as a connected site rather than a flat list of URLs. Sites is available on the Sentinel tier.

• Site crawler — BFS crawl of any root URL with robots.txt support, rate limiting, checkpointing, configurable edge cap, and parallel fetching (1–5 concurrent pages, default 3). The root URL is the crawl starting point, not the scope boundary — the whole hostname is in scope. Every crawl reuses the same SSRF and redirect validation path as regular watch checks.
• Network graph — visualise pages as nodes and edges. Layout is pre-computed and stable across sessions, with importance-based labels that prioritise watched and error nodes at every zoom level. Edges are atmospheric at overview zoom and strengthen as you zoom in.
• Table view — sortable, paginated list of discovered pages with inbound link count, depth, and last seen. Table is the default; graph is a toggle. Table and graph load independently.
• Node titles and statuses — every node carries a normalised URL, a status (discovered, reviewed, watched, ignored, blocked, or error), and a title resolved in priority order: linked watch title → crawled page <title> → normalised path. Custom watch titles stay authoritative after promotion.
• Promote to watch — promote any discovered node (or bulk-promote many) into a full watch. Promotion reuses the standard watch creation flow, so duplicate detection, plan limits, interval enforcement, and initial queueing all still apply.
• Auto-watch on discovery — optional per-site setting that automatically creates watches for newly discovered pages as the crawler finds them.
• Associated domains — external links are aggregated while crawling and can be promoted into new sites in bulk directly from the Sites UI.
• Crawl notifications — when a crawl completes, DeltaWatch sends a summary with pages crawled, new pages discovered, and up to 10 newly discovered URLs. Notifications route through workspace-level and per-site notification channels.
• Hybrid recrawl scheduling — a site is automatically re-crawled when one of its watches detects a change (debounced at 12 hours site-wide to avoid storms), and as a fallback every site gets a scheduled jittered full recrawl roughly every 7 days (±40%) so abandoned-but-monitored sites still stay current.
• Automatic adoption — existing workspace watches on the same domain are adopted into the site’s graph automatically.

Notification channels

Get alerted wherever your team works:

• Email — built-in, no configuration required beyond adding your address.
• Slack — via incoming webhook URL.
• Discord — via webhook URL.
• Telegram — via bot token and chat ID.
• Microsoft Teams — via incoming webhook.
• Webhooks — send change data to any HTTP endpoint.

Each channel can be configured per watch or at the workspace level.

User-Agent control

Set a custom User-Agent at the workspace level to avoid bot detection:

• Preset browser profiles — Chrome (Windows, macOS, Linux, Android), Safari (macOS, iOS), Firefox.
• Custom string — any freeform User-Agent value.
• Per-watch override — watches can set their own User-Agent via custom headers.

Conditions engine

Filter out noise with intelligent alerting:

• 8 comparison operators (contains, does not contain, equals, greater than, less than, regex match, and more).
• AND/OR logic — combine multiple conditions.
• Change percentage thresholds — only alert when the page changes by more than a set percentage.

PDF monitoring

Upload or link to any PDF up to 20 MB. DeltaWatch automatically extracts text and monitors for changes — no extra configuration needed.

Diff viewer

Review changes with precision:

• Inline view — changes highlighted in context.
• Side-by-side view — old and new content compared directly.
• Word-level diffs — see exactly which words changed.
• Change navigation — jump between changes with Previous/Next buttons. Scrolling is contained within the diff panel and the navigation bar stays pinned.
• Line stats — additions, removals, and unchanged lines at a glance.
• Full history — browse every snapshot ever captured.

Bulk operations

Manage multiple watches at once from the dashboard:

• Recheck — trigger an immediate check on all selected watches.
• Pause / Resume — toggle scheduled checks in bulk.
• Notification settings — overwrite email, mute, and webhook preferences for all selected watches.
• Check interval — set the check frequency across selected watches with plan-aware gating. Intervals below the plan minimum are disabled and enforced server-side.
• Mark viewed — clear unviewed indicators on all selected watches.
• Delete — remove selected watches and their history with a confirmation step.

When search or status filters are active, “Select all” only selects watches matching the current filters.

Multi-workspace

Organise your monitoring by team, client, or project:

• Each workspace has its own Watchlist and plan.
• Separate billing per workspace.
• Invite collaborators to specific workspaces.
• Workspace deletion runs as a background job with phased progress and retry on failure.

Workspace backup

Generate a full ZIP backup of your workspace in the background:

• Background export — watches, tags, settings, and snapshot history are collected and archived without blocking the UI.
• Browser-assembled download — the finished artifact is assembled and downloaded in your browser.
• Notification on completion — if workspace notification URLs are configured, DeltaWatch alerts you when the backup is ready.
• One-hour expiry — download links expire after one hour for security.

Operations

Track long-running tasks from one place:

• Watch check queue — pending, queued, running, and failed watch checks with per-watch context (title, URL) and dismiss actions.
• Workspace deletion jobs — live progress through billing cancellation, snapshot deletion, watch cleanup, and finalisation.
• Import jobs — per-watch progress for background imports with dismiss and cancellation support.
• Export jobs — background workspace export progress with preparing and building phases.
• Smart polling — refreshes every 2 seconds while jobs are active, every 30 seconds when idle.
• Retry — failed deletion jobs can be retried from where they left off.
• Platform visibility — platform owners see system-initiated deletion jobs alongside their own.

API access

Full programmatic control via a comprehensive REST API:

• Interactive OpenAPI documentation.
• API key authentication.
• Manage watches, snapshots, notifications, and workspaces.
• Available on Pulse and Sentinel plans.

See the API guide for details.

Security

Security is not an afterthought:

• SSRF protection — server-side request forgery prevention on all URL fetches.
• CSRF tokens — cross-site request forgery protection.
• Encryption — data encrypted at rest.
• Audit logging — track actions across your workspace.
• Rate limiting — built-in protection against abuse.

Import from anywhere

DeltaWatch supports six import formats, so you can bring your data from wherever you are:

• changedetection.io — upload your backup ZIP with watches, tags, snapshots, and settings.
• DeltaWatch backup — full-fidelity restore from a DeltaWatch export.
• CSV — bulk-create watches from a spreadsheet with URL, title, interval, and method columns.
• JSON — array of watch objects with full field mapping.
• Distill.io — structured JSON export from Distill.io.
• URL list — plain text, one URL per line.

All imports show a preview before committing and enforce billing limits automatically.

See the import guide for step-by-step instructions.