In the ever-evolving digital landscape, website archiving has become a crucial practice for businesses of all sizes. With stringent compliance regulations and the need for accurate historical records, archiving web content and social media profiles is no longer just a matter of convenience—it's necessary. Safeguarding your online presence ensures you stay on the right side of the law while preserving your digital legacy.
Archiving your website and social media profiles can also serve as a valuable resource for understanding the evolution of your online presence, analyzing trends, and maintaining a consistent brand image.
As your business grows and evolves, this digital record can provide invaluable insights into your past strategies and the effectiveness of various campaigns. Furthermore, archiving can protect you from potential legal disputes, as archived content may serve as evidence to support your claims or refute false accusations.
But choosing the right archiving tool can be intimidating, considering the vast array of options available.
In this article, we'll explore five MirrorWeb alternatives for website archiving: Urlbox.io, Stillio, PageFreezer, Wayback Machine, and Archive.today. We'll take a look at their key features, reviews, pricing and how they work.
What is MirrorWeb
MirrorWeb is a powerful web archiving platform designed to help businesses preserve and manage their digital presence by creating web archives. This cloud-based platform captures and stores snapshots of websites, social media profiles, and other digital content, ensuring compliance with regulations and providing a reliable historical record of a business's online activity.
Key Features
- Comprehensive web crawling: MirrorWeb's advanced web crawler captures and archives websites, including all HTML, images, videos, and other media files.
- Social media archiving: MirrorWeb supports archiving social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, providing a complete record of a business's social media presence.
- Real-time archiving: MirrorWeb allows for on-demand or scheduled archiving, ensuring that the most recent content is always captured and stored.
- Compliance with regulatory standards: MirrorWeb ensures compliance with GDPR, MiFID II, and FINRA by securely capturing and storing digital records.
Pros & Cons of Using MirrorWeb
As with every other tool, MirrorWeb comes with its pros and cons:
Pros
- Comprehensive and accurate web and social media archiving.
- User-friendly interface with powerful search capabilities.
- Ensures compliance with various regulatory standards.
- Customizable archiving frequency and scheduling.
Cons
- Pricing may be higher compared to some alternatives.
- It may require more storage space for archiving large websites or extensive social media content.
Urlbox.io
G2 rating: 4.8 out of 5 stars
Key features:
- Full Page Screenshots: Users can take full page screenshots to capture the entire web page.
- Input & Output Formats: Urlbox.io supports various input and output formats, including PDF, JPEG, SVG, PNG, WEBP, and more.
- Powerful Blocking Toolset: Urlbox.io offers various tools to block ads and popups, bypass captchas, and auto-accept cookies for cleaner screenshots and archives.
- Geolocation-Based Screenshots: You can archive all versions of your website in all languages by specifying the location from where it will be loaded.
Urlbox.io is a comprehensive screenshot service API that helps businesses capture snapshots of any URL. It offers three different render modes—Viewport, Element, and Full Page—allowing you to capture screenshots and generate an archive tailored to your needs.
For example, the Full Page render mode works great for webpages featuring extensive information, like the Terms and Conditions page. On the other hand, the Element render mode is better used to capture a social media post or the comments section.
There are various ways you can leverage Urlbox to create a web archive:
- Via API: You can integrate Urlbox into your existing app or website regardless of your tech stack or simply use the REST API capabilities to automatically generate screenshots of any website with a single request URL.
- Using no-code tools: Urlbox provides a Zapier connector allowing you to set up advanced workflows without writing a single line of code.
- Manually via Dashboard: You can try Urlbox by generating a screenshot directly from your Dashboard. Even if this is a manual process, you can use a spreadsheet tool, like Excel or Google Sheets, to generate Request URLs in bulk and then save the screenshots to your local machine archive.
You can try Urlbox for free for seven days, regardless of your chosen plan. After that, you can upgrade to a paid plan with pricing starting at $19 per month. This includes up to 2,000 screenshots per month and allows you to make up to 30 requests per minute, which means you can capture a screenshot every 2 seconds.
Urlbox also provides plans suited for enterprises. For example, the Ultra Plan starts at $99 for 15K screenshots and scales to $3,500 if you need to capture 10,000,000 screenshots per month. You will also get all features and enjoy early access to new features.
Stillio
G2 rating: 4.9 out of 5 stars
Key features:
- Automated screenshot capturing: Schedule regular, automated screenshots of websites and web pages to track changes and create web archives.
- Downloadable screenshots: Easily download screenshots for printing or save archive data to Dropbox as needed.
- Customizable screenshot titles: Automatically create readable and easily accessible titles for your screenshots.
Stillio is a web archiving tool designed to help businesses create web archives through automated screenshots. It is beneficial for monitoring competitors, tracking search engine rankings, and maintaining a visual history of a website's appearance.
The platform's user-friendly interface helps you quickly set up the archiving process and makes navigating and managing archives a breeze.
Even so, there are a few limitations to consider before choosing Stillio. As it primarily focuses on screenshot-based archiving, it may not provide comprehensive archiving solutions for businesses with more extensive needs. The platform also lacks built-in support for social media archiving, which could be a crucial feature for some users.
Stillio offers a 14-day free trial, after which you must upgrade to a paid plan with pricing starting at $29 per month. The Snap Shot plan allows you to screenshot up to 5 webpages daily.
The Top Shot plan starts at $299 and allows you to screenshot any number of web pages every 5 minutes.
PageFreezer
G2 rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars
Key features:
- Automated website archiving: PageFreezer's crawling technology takes snapshots of your website, automatically capturing new web pages and changes to existing ones.
- Defensible legal evidence: Provides trusted, non-refutable evidence complete with metadata, timestamped with an SHA-256 digital signature, and exportable in PDF and native formats.
- Advanced capture capabilities: Supports archiving client-side generated webpages using Javascript/Ajax frameworks, web form flows, and content displayed after user events.
PageFreezer is a robust web archiving solution designed to help businesses create and maintain web archives for compliance, legal, or historical purposes. With its automated archiving, advanced capture capabilities, and powerful search functions, PageFreezer is a valuable tool for organizations requiring comprehensive and reliable website archiving.
However, PageFreezer is more complex and feature-rich than most businesses need. If that's your case, you might be better off with another MirrorWeb alternative.
Wayback Machine
G2 rating: N/A
Key features:
- Existing archive: Wayback Machine provides access to historical records of billions of web pages.
- Website change tracking: Monitor changes to a website's structure and creatives, including CSS, HTML, and JavaScript.
- No setup needed: Wayback Machine works by itself, so you don't have to set up anything. However, this can also mean it might not archive your website.
Wayback Machine is a digital archive of the World Wide Web, allowing users to access historical records of web pages. Businesses can utilize the Wayback Machine to keep track of competitors, back up website content, monitor website changes, and mitigate link rot and broken links.
The biggest downside of Wayback Machine is that you can’t configure its frequency. This means you cannot rely on it to capture daily screenshots of your website.
In addition, it can not archive social media posts, so if that's something you need, you must go with a different MirrorWeb alternative.
Wayback Machine is free to use and publicly available to anyone.
Archive.today
G2 rating: N/A
Key features:
- Request-based archive: Archive.today can capture individual web pages upon user request, providing a snapshot of content at a specific time.
- Archive code: Archive.today preserves HTML class names within the old-class attribute.
- It does not rely on robots.txt: Archive.today enables archiving of web pages unavailable on other free services like the Wayback Machine.
Archive.today is a web archiving service that allows users to capture individual web pages. Its advanced keyword search functionality, including wildcard character support, makes finding specific content in archived pages easy and efficient.
Remember that this tool does not capture non-static content such as XML, RTF, and spreadsheets, which may be an essential requirement for some businesses. There is no built-in support for social media archiving, which can be a crucial aspect of web archiving for many organizations.
Archive.today is free to use, making it an excellent choice for small businesses looking to keep a simple archive of their website.
Try Urlbox.io to create web archives
Monitor your competitors, track your online presence, capture your website's historical records, or generate archives of virtually any webpage with Urlbox.
Sign up for a 7-day free trial and discover how Urlbox can help you improve your web archiving process.
