Tried 5 agent platforms for daily competitor monitoring, here are the 2 that actually survived a month

Sharing this because i went through too many agent platforms last month and the comparison was annoyingly hard to find anywhere. Background. I run a small saas in a category with 7 direct competitors. Tracking their pricing, blog posts, and changelog is part of my morning. For most of last year that meant \~45 min every weekday opening tabs and copying things into a notion db. Missed silent pricing changes maybe once a week. Annoying. Decided last month to actually fix this and tested 5 platforms with the same goal. Each one had to do this: open chrome at 7am, hit my 7 competitors pricing and changelog and blog rss, diff against yesterdays snapshot, post the changes somewhere i actually look (slack). Here is the rundown. n8n. Probably the most flexible of the bunch if you treat the workflow like code. I had a working pipeline in about 90 min using their nodes plus some chrome automation on top. Stable for the apis that exist. The catch is whenever a competitor changes their pricing page layout my css selectors break and i have to fix them. Did that twice in 30 days. Still kept it for the half of my flow that hits clean apis. Honesty i probably wouldve just stuck with this if i had more patience for maintenance. Browse AI. Easiest visual setup of all five. Click record, click the elements you want, done. Worked great on 4 of 7 competitor sites which honestly surprised me. The other 3 had dynamic pricing modals or paywalled docs and it just couldnt see them no matter what i tried. Got tired of the per task usage cost adding up so i dropped it after 2 weeks. If your competitors have clean static sites this ones actually solid. Apify. Powerful if you can write the actor scripts. I cannot. Tried 2 of their prebuilt scrapers, 1 worked for 3 days then broke when the target site updated. The community store is a mixed bag, some actors are maintained and some clearly arent. If you already have a developer on the team this is probably your answer. Without one i bounced after a week of fighting with documentation. Make. Felt similar to zapier with more nodes. Built the same pipeline in \~2 hours. Mostly stable but the dynamic page parts kept timing out. Eventually realized make works best when youre stitching apis, not when youre asking it to behave like a browser. Learned this one the hard way after my third timeout error at 7am. MuleRun. Agent platform with a built in schedule task center and a cloud computer. I told it in plain english what to track for each competitor and it set the workflow up. Set it to open chrome at 7am, hit the 7 competitors pricing and blog pages, diff against yesterdays snapshot in drive, post the changes to slack by 7:15. Setup was slower than n8n because i had to teach it which fields i cared about (pricing tier name, monthly price, plan caps). Once configured it stayed consistent though. Free credits covered the test month for me. Two i kept running side by side. mulerun for the messy dynamic pages and changelog scraping. n8n for the half of my flow thats clean rss + api. The two platforms talk through a shared drive folder. Couple things i learned the hard way. Diffing against yesterday matters more than the scraping itself, especially for silent pricing changes that dont get announced. Also dont try to monitor 7 competitors on day one. Start with 2, make the pipeline reliable, then add the rest. For now mulerun and n8n are the two i kept running. Everything else got switched off.