11 Best Wayback Machine Alternatives for Savvy Researchers

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The Wayback Machine is a digital archive of the internet. It is free to use and enables the user to view how current and long-defunct web pages looked in the past. It’s the most popular internet archive.

Yet it’s not the only Wayback Machine. There are some great Wayback Machine alternatives.

This guide will review some of the best Wayback machine alternatives. We’ll look at paid and free options that you could use. Let’s jump into the guide.

What is the Wayback Machine & How Does it Work?

The Wayback Machine is a web archiving tool. It stores a cache of web pages over time.

For instance, you can check how Amazon or any other website looked back in 1998 when the service launched. And, you can see how it has evolved up to now. Pretty cool, right?

Wayback Machine has archived over 580 billion pages of content. It is the largest collection of website screenshots on the net. It provides a history of how the world wide web has evolved.

What Should You Look For In a Wayback Machine Alternative? 

Before looking at great Wayback Machine alternatives, let’s look at some of the factors you should consider when choosing a platform for viewing archived web pages. Here’s a snapshot of the key features to consider.

Large and Expanding Archive Of Sites

Ideally, the platform should have a large index of websites and pages. The index should be easy to search. Especially, reviewing a page over a period of time.

Capacity to Archive Complete Websites

A good alternative to Wayback Machine should be able to archive websites and not just web pages. Some archiving websites will also allow you to archive data from a site map for your convenience. 

Decide When to Take Screenshots

You want to be able to select how frequently a page is cached. For example, once a week, once a month, every few hours.

Additional Archive Functionality

Access to additional functionalities like capturing screenshots of social media accounts, communication platforms like Slack or Trello, and even cloud utility apps like G Suite and Office 365. Although these features mostly come with a paid subscription. 

Best Wayback Machine Alternative

Now you know what you’re looking for, here is a list of the 11 Wayback Machine alternatives. The best Wayback Machine alternative is listed first.

1. Stillio

Stillio is probably the best Wayback Machine alternative for any business looking for competitive research or compliance management. Here’s a quick summary of the features.

Features

  • Set the frequency to capture web pages. That could be every hour, every day, every week, or once a month. You can also set your desired interval if you want. If you want to take hourly or less than an hour of screenshots, you’ll have to go with a paid plan.
  • Add multiple URLs at once and even your complete sitemap. The feature is only available for paid users.

Pricing

Stillio has four pricing options that are subscription-based. The good thing is they also offer a 14-day free trial without requiring your credit card details on their website.

The SnapShot plan starts at $29 per month, while the most expensive option is the Top Shot plan that starts at $299 per month. The Top Shot plan lets you do screenshot captures every five minutes. 

2. Pagefreezer

The next best Wayback Machine alternative is PageFreezer. With PageFreezer, you can take screenshots of web pages or cache all the web pages.

The PageFreezer website offers many functionalities, including an archiving feature for social media, mobile text, enterprise collaboration, network archiving, Slack archiving, SalesForce Chatter archiving, and Microsoft Yammer archiving. In comparison, the traditional Wayback Machine website lacks these features.

Features

  • Ability to archive web pages, a website, or multiple websites.
  • Create a website history of all the tools you use (for example, Slack channel chats)
  • Archive the social channels of competitors. Great for research.

Pricing

The PageFreezer website offers subscription plans at $99 per month. You’ll need to schedule a demo with their sales team to get more information about the service.

3. Archive.today

Archive.today, also accessible through archive.is, is another excellent alternative to the Wayback Machine. Unlike Wayback Machine, Archive.today supports heavy javascript and websites that have a lot of images. It even archives social platforms sites like Twitter & FB.

Here’s a quick overview of some of the best features of this service.

Features

  • Archive.today has a simple and easy-to-navigate interface.
  • Archive.today has a huge database of archived sites. 
  • It uses Google and Yandex crawlers to index sites.
  • You can access more image-heavy sites with Archive.today.

Pricing

Archive.today is a free-to-use internet archive. Like the Archive.org website, it relies on donations from the public to support its work. Access the site by clicking the link below.

4. WebCite

WebCite from webcitation.org is another alternative to the Wayback Machine internet archive service. It has a large database of cached content. You can’t request a page or website for indexing. You can review any indexed content in their archives.

Features

  • Detailed snapshots, unlike Wayback Machine. This will allow you to perform competitive analysis more efficiently. 
  • WebCite stores content in many formats. It archives CSS web pages, HTML pages, images, and PDF files.

Pricing

Like Wayback Machine, it is a free-to-use archive website.

5. Resurrect Pages

Resurrect Pages is a Firefox compatible tool, and you can only use it from your Firefox browser. 

This is just an Add-on. It doesn’t have a database. Instead, it’s fetching out the data from other archives sites, like the ones listed below: 

  1. Google Cache
  2. Archive.org
  3. Archive.is
  4. WebCite

Let’s see its features:

FEATURES

  • Easy to use as it sits in your browser.
  • Handy keyboard shortcut: Ctrl + Shift + U.
  • Only available with Firefox.

Pricing

Resurrect Pages is a free-to-use service. You can access it by downloading the Firefox extension. Click the link below to access the extension.

6. Alexa

Alexa is an Amazon company. It’s more famous for its SEO tool that offers Keyword research, Alexa Rankings, and competitive research. However, you might not know that it also has a website archiving feature.  

So, you can use Alexa for retrieving a website’s history and other important information for your analysis.

Features

  • With Alexa, you can do many things, like keyword research, backlink analysis, finding Alexa rankings and broken links, site audit, etc. These features aren’t there in the Wayback Machine archived web. This makes it an all-in-one tool for your competitive analysis.
  • You’ll have detailed insights into parameters like your customer’s previous visit, duration of visits, and frequency.

Pricing

Alexa pricing model is subscription-based. The subscription pricing for the Advanced plan is $149 per month. The Agency plan is $299 per month. They offer a 14-Free Trial. 

7. MirrorWeb

The archive website MirrorWeb allows you to stay compliant with all the records of your business communications. With this service, you get access to the following features:

Features

  • MirrorWeb offers an archive feature for Social Media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Vimeo. It also offers an archive feature for communications channels like Trello, Microsoft Teams, Bloomberg, and Salesforce. So, all your digital data will be in one place.
  • Do you want to download your data from the web and store it on a local PC? It’s easy. You can search and isolate an archive and download it in a PDF format.
  • MirrorWeb can capture data even for heavy apps that are built with React, Angular, and Vue. So, you’re never going to miss any data related to your websites and apps. 

Pricing

Subscription to the MirrorWeb internet archive starts at $200 per month.

8. ChangeTower

ChangeTower is another platform you can choose for real-time archiving of your webpages and social media records on the internet. Its  features include:

Features

  • The advantage of the ChangeTower over the Wayback Machine is that you’ll get an alert whenever a change happens, a feature missing in the Wayback Machine. And it’s not just you, but your whole team can be notified with their group-based notifications.
  • Not just websites, but you can archive social platforms too. And you can also use this web archive for shopping and price change alerts.

Pricing

Change Tower is a paid platform. Subscription of Change Tower starts at $299 per month.

9. Message Watcher

MessageWatcher is similar to Wayback Machine, but it also provides an archive for Emails and Social Media Accounts. However, it doesn’t capture the full version of a website, only screenshots of each web page. 

This Wayback Machine alternative offers the user the following features: 

Features

  • Create an archive for your utility cloud-based platforms G Suite and Office 365.
  • Clutter-free UI, making it an easy-to-use web app.

Pricing

Subscription to this online platform starts at $300 per month.

10. Yubnub

YubNub stands out in the crowd thanks to its simple-to-use interface. Enter the website URL or a query, and you’ll be presented with the web archive information.

Features

  • Simple interface which is similar to popular search engines.
  • You can develop and use commands with Yubnub. This feature of Yubnub differentiates it from the Wayback Machine internet archive.

Pricing

Yubnub is a free-to-use web archive.

11. iTools

iTools which is unlike Wayback Machine and all the other alternatives discussed earlier. Instead, it’s a repository of many tools in one place.

Hence, you’ll find many tools like web archive tools, Alexa as a competitor analysis tool, language tools, and even financial apps. 

Features

  • iTool acts like an online platform for different other utility platforms on the internet. So, you may bookmark the iTools web page so that you can easily access all tools inside it.
  • Its interface is simple, and it won’t take much time for you to get used to this web app.

Pricing

iTools is a free-to-use web app.

Wrapping Up

If you were looking to use the Wayback Machine to retrieve historical information on a website, well, now you also know about another 11 Wayback Machine alternatives that are even better than the Wayback Machine itself.

Which one to choose? It depends on your needs and your budget. If you have budgetary constraints and need to do a detailed analysis, you can use any of the free tools from this list.

If you want to do detailed competitor analysis or need to archive data for compliance purposes, then you have to go for a paid tool for that. Stillio is easily the best option.

About the author

Nicholas Prins

I'm the founder of Launch Space. We work with global companies helping them scale lead generation through SEO and content marketing. Head over to the homepage to find out more.

By Nicholas Prins