Wayback Machine alternatives that still work in 2026

The best Wayback Machine alternative depends on whether you need the past or the future. For a page that has already changed or disappeared, try archive.today first, then Arquivo.pt and Ghostarchive. None comes close to the Wayback Machine's breadth, so treat them as second chances rather than replacements. For pages you will want to look back on later, start your own record now with a screenshot archiver or a change monitor.

We checked every service below on 4 October 2026, because the list of archives people recommend includes several that no longer work.

Two different jobs

Finding the past. Someone else must have captured the page. Your options are public archives, and you get what they happened to save.

Recording the future. You choose the pages and the schedule, so nothing is missing, but your history only starts today. For competitor research this is usually the more valuable job, because the pages that matter (pricing, the homepage, product pages) change without notice.

Wayback Machine alternatives at a glance

Prices on this page were read from each vendor's own pricing page on 4 October 2026.

Archives of the past

archive.today

archive.today saves "a text and a graphical copy" of any page someone submits, and keeps it, in its own words, "virtually forever". It does not crawl the web on its own, so it only has pages somebody chose to save.

Its URL patterns make it quick to search. Add a page's address after archive.ph/newest/ or archive.ph/oldest/ for the latest or earliest copy, or put a domain after archive.ph/ to list every saved page from it, with *. in front of the domain to include subdomains.

Best at: pages that were newsworthy or controversial, which is when people archive them, and sites whose robots.txt keeps crawlers out. Its FAQ says it does not obey robots.txt because it saves one page at a time on behalf of the person asking.

Limits: no video, unreliable PDFs, and nothing that nobody thought to save.

Arquivo.pt

Arquivo.pt is Portugal's national web archive, a research service holding files archived from the web since 1996. Unlike the Wayback Machine, it lets you search the text of archived pages rather than only look up a known address, and its ArchivePageNow feature saves a page on request.

Best at: Portuguese sites, and any search where you know a phrase but not the URL.

Limits: it is built around Portuguese web content, so coverage of other countries' small business sites is thin.

Ghostarchive

Ghostarchive archives pages "for scholarly or research purposes" and lets you search saved pages by URL, with wildcards for whole domains.

Best at: a third place to look when the Wayback Machine and archive.today both come up empty.

Limits: small, and like archive.today it only holds what people submitted.

Library of Congress Web Archives

The Library of Congress collects websites "selected by subject specialists to represent web-based information on a designated topic", such as elections and major events, with tens of thousands of archived sites online. Its site currently warns of ongoing upgrades that may cause intermittent outages.

Best at: government, political and public-interest sites in its collections.

Limits: it is curated, not a crawl of the web. A typical company website will not be there.

Gone or unavailable

Google cache. For years, Google's cached copy was the quickest way to see a page that had just changed. Google removed the cache: operator from its documentation on 24 September 2024 because it "no longer works in Google Search" (Google's documentation changelog).

UK Web Archive. The British Library's web archive says it is "currently unavailable" following the cyber-attack on the library, while it continues to archive UK websites under legal deposit (UK Web Archive).

Memento Time Travel. This service searched several archives at once. Its address did not resolve when we checked, so do not count on it.

Recording the future

If you will want to know what a competitor's pricing page said in six months, the only reliable archive is one you start yourself.

Stillio, scheduled screenshots

Stillio takes screenshots of the pages you choose on a schedule and keeps them for 36 months while you subscribe. Snap Shot is $29 a month for up to 5 pages captured daily, weekly or monthly; Hot Shot is $79 for 25 pages. The trial is 14 days with no card.

Best at: a visual record you can show someone, which matters for pricing pages, legal evidence and ad landing pages.

Limits: it captures what pages looked like, but it does not tell you what changed.

Visualping, change history

Visualping's free plan watches 5 pages with 150 checks a month. Personal plans start at $14 a month, or $10 billed annually. Its FAQ says change history is kept for three months by default, extendable to a year on Business plans, and to five or seven years on request.

Best at: being alerted to a change and seeing it highlighted.

Limits: three months of history by default is short if your goal is a long record.

Distill, change history in your browser

Distill's free plan includes 25 monitors, 5 of them in the cloud, with 1,000 cloud checks a month. Starter is $15 a month, or $12 billed annually. Its pricing table shows version history of 10 changes per monitor on Starter and 20 on Professional.

Best at: pages behind a login, because its browser extension can check them using your own session.

Limits: a small number of saved versions per monitor, so it is an alert tool more than an archive.

ChangeTower is similar, with history of 30 days on its $12 Lite plan rising to six months on Business. All of the change monitors are compared in the website change monitoring tools roundup.

Figo, a weekly record of competitors

Ours, so judge accordingly. Figo is not an archive of how pages looked. Once a week it reads each tracked competitor's sitemap, pages and pricing page and records what changed: new pages, changed pages, new blog posts, and changes to published prices and offers. Each Monday briefing lists them alongside the competitor's ads, rankings, social posts and reviews, so over months you build a dated log of what every rival changed. Plans start at $49 a month for 3 competitors.

Do not pick Figo if you need screenshots for evidence, or history for sites that are not competitors. Stillio or the free archives fit those jobs.

Using archives for competitor research

The Wayback Machine is still the first place to look, and the Wayback Machine competitor research guide covers how to pull a price history out of it. If you only need a date, see how to check when a website was last updated, which is often faster than any archive.

Which to use

• A page that changed recently: the Wayback Machine, then archive.today.
• You know a phrase, not the URL: Arquivo.pt's text search.
• Government or public-interest sites: the Library of Congress collections.
• A visual record of pages you care about from now on: Stillio.
• Alerts with some history: Visualping or Distill, free to start.
• A running log of what competitors change, without picking pages one by one: Figo.