Top 6 Pagepeeker Alternatives to Keep Track of Competitors

Keeping track of your competition is essential for business and marketing success. But how?

Companies must track multiple competitors’ pricing strategies, latest offers, product launches, product reviews, social media activities, website changes, and more to know what’s happening in the market and make informed decisions to stay ahead of the curve.

Taking screenshots is a great way to keep your fingers on the pulse. You can see the big-picture trend and analyze how a competitor’s messaging and strategy evolves to gain insights to improve your content, messaging, and product selection.

Sounds easy? Think again.

Let’s say you’ve identified ten competitors with 75 web pages you want to track. If you take a screenshot of all these pages twice a week, we’re talking 1,500 screenshots per week or 6,000 screenshots per month!

That’s a full-time job.

The good news is that you don’t have to take screenshots manually. A screenshot API like Pagepeeker can help you automate the workflow to track competitors cost-effectively. But Pagepeeker has limited features and other drawbacks. Let’s explore some top alternatives to help you choose the right option for your business.

What Is Pagepeeker?

Pagepeeker is an automatic website thumbnail generator that captures webpage previews through API calls. You can quickly generate multiple screenshots of numerous web pages in different formats for various purposes.

Save final screenshots in 5 predefined image sizes, from 90x69 to 480x360 pixels.
The screenshots are cached for up to 7 days.
The custom-priced premium plan generates thumbnails in under 5 seconds.

Pagepeeker Pros

Starting at $5.99 per month, Pagepeeker is a low-cost thumbnail API tool.
It can generate many thumbnails quickly and reliably.
The API is easy to use — you only need to enter a web page’s URL and image size. You don’t have to worry about cropping or image manipulation.

Pagepeeker Cons

It doesn’t offer a free plan, so you can’t try it before you subscribe.
It has limited functionalities and isn’t an all-in-one screenshot tool.
It can take 10 to 20 seconds to generate screenshots if you don’t have the Premium plan.
You can’t specify custom viewport dimensions.
Only the custom-priced Premium plan allows users to capture full-page and mobile screenshots.

Top 6 Pagepeeker Alternatives For Keeping Track of Competitors

Here are 6 Pagepeeker alternatives, an overview of their features, and how they measure up.

1. Urlbox

G2 rating: 4.8 out of 5 stars

Urlbox is an all-around website thumbnail API that helps you automate website screenshot capture. It comes with many more features and options than Pagepeeker to help you generate high-quality webpage thumbnails for tracking your competition and other purposes:

Export the final images in multiple formats, including PNG, JPG, WEBP, SVG, etc.
Capture hard-to-screenshot elements like SVG images, animation, and programmatically generated graphics and charts.
Scroll or click on a selector before taking a screenshot.
Tunnel a request through a proxy.
Change the viewport size to capture content at the right proportion to avoid distortion.
Block ads and pop-ups, bypass captchas, and auto-accept cookies to get clean screenshots.

Urlbox caches screenshots for up to 30 days (compared with Pagepeeker’s 7-day limit). The cost-effective Lo-Fi plan, priced at $19 per month, provides up to 2,000 monthly renders.

2. Stillio

G2 rating: 4.9 out of 5 stars

With Stillio, you can capture, store, and share screenshots and automate workflows. The software is easy to set up, and allows you to:

Schedule screen captures at specific intervals (e.g., hourly, daily, weekly, etc.)
Integrate the software with third-party services like Google Drive, Dropbox, etc., to share or store images.
Add multiple URLs simultaneously and filter screenshots by domain to find specific competitors.
Customize the width and height of your screenshots to get the correct aspect ratio if you use the tool to capture images for social media sharing.

While Stillio has more robust functionalities than Pagepeeker, it’s more expensive — the lowest-cost plan starts at $29 per month. But it may be worth the investment if you want to do more than capturing website thumbnails for competitor tracking.

3. Screenshotlayer

G2 rating: 5 out of 5 stars

The Screenshotlayer API offers fast, scalable, and extensible features for generating high-resolution website screenshots. Compared with Pagepeeker, Screenshotlayer offers more integration opportunities to create custom applications. You can:

Integrate the simple API into any application, framework, or programming language.
Upload files directly to your AWS S3 Bucket to work with your existing tech stack.
Set custom sizes and capture high-quality screenshots in real-time.

A free plan is available with a 100 snapshot limit per month. The basic plan costs $19.99 per month, and the enterprise plan is $149.99 per month. While the pricing is higher than Pagepeeker, the flexible API gives you more options to integrate the app seamlessly into your workflows.

4. ScreenshotOne

G2 rating: N/A

This scalable platform renders websites or HTML files to PDF and various image formats. It offers more options for customizing website screenshots than Pagepeeker and enables you to:

Remove banners and block cookie consent forms that may prevent you from capturing all the content on a web page.
Render in dark mode, add custom JavaScript and CSS, hide selectors, and capture animated elements.
Set custom screen size, define outputs by device, render for Apple's Retina Display, and take full-page screenshots with rendered lazy-loaded images.

A free plan includes 100 screenshots per month and 20 requests per minute. Paid plans go from $14 per month to $148 per month. While they’re more expensive than Pagepeeker, the wide range of rendering options gives you more flexibility.

5. Screenshot Machine

G2 rating: N/A

This screenshot API works with different programming languages (e.g., Bash. C#, Java, Perl, PHP, etc.) and has a website-to-PDF API. You can:

Customize screenshot dimensions, take full-page images, and choose the device type for your screen captures.
Use the hot-linking feature to simplify workflows.
Cache website screenshots for 14 days (compared with Pagepeeker’s 7-day limit) — loading a cached screenshot won’t count toward your monthly screenshot quota.

The starter plan is free and includes 100 fresh screenshots per month, while the basic one is €9 per month. The higher-level plans (€59 and €99 per month) include a 99.99% uptime service level agreement (SLA). Plus, you can pay for additional screenshots if the number you take exceeds what’s covered by your plan in a given month.

6. APIFlash

G2 rating: 5 out of 5 stars

APIFlash uses serverless Chromium technology to capture screenshots of any website. It’s built on top of AWS Lambda for stability under heavy workloads. It offers some advanced features to help you:

Scale up to handle millions of captures daily and capture all modern site features.
Enhance data security with HTTPS endpoints.
Specify viewport dimensions and capture full-page and mobile screenshots with all plans.
Automatically verify that a page is completely loaded before capturing a screenshot.
Block ads and hide cookie banners to produce clean images.

The free plan includes 100 screenshots per month. The Lite plan costs $7 per month, and the Large plan is $180 per month. All packages allow you to export the images to Amazon S3 for storage.

What is the Best Pagepeeker Alternative?

There are many Pagepeeker alternatives, so how to choose the right one for your business?

All of the options we discussed here offer features for tracking competitors. But if you want your screenshot API to do more for you — such as search engine results page (SERP) monitoring, website usage, performance tracking, website compliance monitoring, and social media archiving — you should look for a robust API to meet all the needs to streamline your tech stack.

Here are the key features that will allow you to take screenshots at scale for various purposes:

Different render modes for full screen, customized viewport, or individual elements.
Responsive viewports for multiple device types.
Options to choose output formats (e.g., PNG, JPG, PDF, SVG, WEBP, etc.)
The ability to render HTML code without first publishing the page.
The option to block ads, pop-ups, and cookie banners and bypass captchas.
Delay time to take screenshots at the right moment.
Advanced rendering options such as scrolling screenshots and GPU rendering.
No-code integration with the tools your team already uses and loves, such as Zapier, Bubble, Airtable, and more.

Not all screenshot APIs are created equal — choosing the right one can help you leverage screen captures to meet various tracking and monitoring needs. That’s why more businesses now trust Urlbox with its robust capabilities to cover a broad range of use cases for competitor tracking and more. See what’s possible and try us out for free.