Visualping Reviews 23

Been using the free version of visualping for a while now to monitor a couple websites for software updates of various devices and it works great!

Had a Business 20k subscription to Visual Ping for the last 18 months.

The personal plans are not as feature rich as the business plans. Cheaper personal plans lack some of the key features such as bulk import, export and reporting.

Overall the service is very reliable and it's fairly easy to use with three different methods of monitoring technology ranging from "Visual" which monitors any visual changes on a page through to "Text" which monitors text addition and removal and also "Element" which enables you to select a frame or part of a page and just monitor that.

The technology enables you to monitor for a percentage difference to a monitored area and also has a false alert reduction mechanism so that subsequent alerts don't trigger.

Very degrees of checking frequency available depending on the plan selected. Checks are carried out reliably and the interval does not appear to "creep" as time progresses.

Various notification options from SMS through to other third party integrations but notably no PushOver. Also a scheduling facility so that pages can be checked at certain times of the day or days of the week etc.

Customer support is fairly good however they are based on the West Coast of Canada and as such they are many hours behind GMT so if you report something on a Saturday morning in the UK you're unlikely to get a reply much before the early hours of Tuesday morning.

The biggest drawback is their refund procedure if you wish to exit partway through a year.

If you are paying monthly then there is no problem, you can just cancel and don't pay for future months. But the monthly premiums are price hiked and work out much more expensive than paying annually.

If you attempt to cancel an annual premium halfway through the year then the number of months that you have used is determined by the monthly cost for each month and then deducted from what you have paid.

So for example if you paid £500 for a package annually but the monthly rate for the same package is £75 a month if you cancel after 6 months they would deduct £75 x 6 = £450 from £500 and £50 would be your refund after 6 months. So if you are unsure weather this is for you make sure that you request a refund fairly quickly into the year or pay monthly for a few months and see how you get on.

The accounting team were open to some negotiation on discounts for some of the higher end packages but don't expect too much in terms of giveaways.

They have been promising new AI related features for some time now and I opted to be part of the Beta program for this but was told that my usage pattern didn't match what they were looking for despite my package costing $1000 a year which is very disappointing.

Having looked to other page monitoring services in terms of ease of use and features this was by far the best but it comes at a cost particularly in relation to their inflexible refund procedure and their reluctance to let all users have access to new features.

Lots of promises for the future but whether those promises will ever be delivered is another thing.

Overall for me it's an average mainly because of the refund procedure, the promises that have been promised for so long but not yet delivered.

In the 18 months that I've been a member there have been very few updates to the platform and for a tech company you would expect more, much more.