PageFreezer Alternatives for Website and Social Media Archiving

PageFreezer is a compliance archiving service for websites, social media and text messages, plus WebPreserver, a browser tool for collecting online evidence. It is alive: the home page claims more than 1,800 organisations as users, and it lists digital signatures, WORM storage, legal hold and support for FINRA, SEC and FOIA rules. Its pricing page starts at $1,500 a year, with the final price depending on what you capture, how often, and how long you keep it. There is no free trial, only a consultation.

People look for an alternative for a few reasons. A broker-dealer may want websites, email and mobile messages in one archive. A city may only need social media records for public records requests. A library or researcher may want open WARC files instead of a managed service. The picks below start with regulated-industry archives, move to government and legal tools, and end with lighter capture services.

Prices below are as of November 6, 2026. Our method is on How we review tools.

Quick comparison

Smarsh

Smarsh archives more than 80 communication channels and sells mainly to financial firms. Its Web Archive product records dynamic content on a daily, weekly or custom schedule, lets you compare two dates side by side, and exports screenshots or source code. The Web Archive page ties it to FINRA Rule 2210 and SEC Rule 206(4)-1, the advertising rules that make firms keep copies of their sites.

For a firm that already keeps email and texts in Smarsh, adding the website means one archive and one search for an examiner. Smarsh can also import existing archives, which helps if you are moving years of PageFreezer captures.

Best for: Broker-dealers and advisers who want website records in the same archive as email and messages.

Pricing:

• No public price; contact sales
• Web Archive sold in the Small and Mid-Sized Firms range

Watch out for:

• A December 2024 review on Software Advice calls search on the main hosting site difficult and inaccurate at times.
• An October 2020 review on the same page describes a one-year contract that had to be renewed two months before it ended. Read the notice period before signing.

Official site: Smarsh.

Red Oak (MirrorWeb)

MirrorWeb was PageFreezer's most direct rival, and it now sits inside Red Oak. The two companies announced their combination on July 28, 2026, and mirrorweb.com now redirects to Red Oak. Our MirrorWeb alternatives guide covers that change in detail.

The Red Oak archiving page describes full website captures, including dynamic content, on your schedule, stored as ISO 28500 WARC files on WORM storage. The same archive takes LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, X, TikTok, YouTube and Vimeo, SMS and iMessage, Teams, Slack and Bloomberg, and generative AI tools such as ChatGPT and Claude, with SEC 17a-4 named as the target rule.

Best for: Regulated financial firms that want WARC website archives next to messaging and AI tool records.

Pricing:

• No public price; contact Red Oak or book a demo

Watch out for:

• A merger is under way. MirrorWeb logins now sign into Red Oak Supervision, so ask how contracts, support and product names will change.
• The archiving page is written for SEC-regulated firms. Government or education buyers may find features built around rules they do not face.

Official site: Red Oak (MirrorWeb).

Global Relay

Global Relay covers the messaging channels that PageFreezer's text archive does not: WhatsApp, Signal, WeChat, Telegram, LINE and iMessage, among 70+ connectors. Its Website Archive runs alongside them, so a compliance officer can search a marketing page and the chat about it in one place.

Website capture is done by Global Relay's own crawler, which visits your owned pages on a schedule you agree with the vendor. Its user agent is GlobalRelayWebArchiveBot/1.0, which you will see in your server logs.

Best for: Firms with traders or advisers on many chat apps who also need website records.

Pricing:

• No public price; get in touch with sales
• The 28-day free trial on the homepage is for GRIP Premium, a different product

Watch out for:

• You must allowlist the crawler's IP addresses, which come from support, per the bot documentation. Sites behind a WAF need that set up first.
• There is no published price for the archive, so budgeting starts with a sales call.

Official site: Global Relay.

CivicPlus Social Media Archiving

PageFreezer's own testimonials include a US federal agency and the Fort Worth Police Department, buyers who archive social accounts for public records law. CivicPlus Social Media Archiving, formerly ArchiveSocial, is built only for that buyer. It uses the platforms' APIs to preserve posts and comments from Facebook, Instagram, X, Nextdoor, TikTok, YouTube, LinkedIn, Flickr, Pinterest and Vimeo into a searchable database.

The FOIA angle is clear in the feature set. Open Archive gives the public a portal to browse records, and CivicPlus also sells NextRequest for managing records requests. The product page offers a free trial, which PageFreezer does not. Existing ArchiveSocial customers keep their logins.

Best for: Cities, counties, schools and police departments that need social media records for public records requests.

Pricing:

• No public price; request pricing
• Free trial offered

Watch out for:

• It does not archive websites. Agencies that also need their own site captured will need a second tool.
• Capture runs through platform APIs, so a network that changes or closes its API can interrupt coverage.

Official site: CivicPlus Social Media Archiving.

Hanzo

Hanzo approaches archiving from the legal side. Its Chronicle product captures dynamic web, social and SaaS content for preservation, and Illuminate handles discovery and review of Slack, Teams and Google Workspace data. Both use its Spotlight AI for review. Customers are enterprise legal and compliance teams, with government, healthcare and corporate listed as industries.

For a PageFreezer customer, Hanzo makes the most sense when the archive feeds litigation and eDiscovery, not marketing review. A United Airlines case study describes archiving hundreds of dynamic web pages with it.

Best for: Corporate legal teams that need defensible captures of dynamic sites and collaboration tools.

Pricing:

• No public price; book a demo or contact sales

Watch out for:

• Hanzo's home page lists no price, trial or self-serve option, so it is a sales-led enterprise purchase.
• Text messages are not among the products listed, which PageFreezer's archive covers.

Official site: Hanzo.

Archive-It

Archive-It is the Internet Archive's subscription service for institutions, with more than 1,300 partners in over 40 countries. You set up collections, choose seeds and crawl schedules, and download your data as WARC files at any time. Hosting, software updates and new releases carry no extra fees.

Plans are sized by a yearly data budget, and the support FAQ says there is no overage penalty. A plan can start on the 1st or the 15th of any month.

Best for: Libraries, universities and archives that want long-term web collections in open formats.

Pricing:

• No public price; annual plans by data budget
• No extra fees for hosting or updates

Watch out for:

• It runs on Internet Archive infrastructure. After the October 2024 attacks, Archive-It resumed on October 17, 2024, so plan for outages you cannot control.
• WARC files you bring from other tools, such as a PageFreezer export, count against your data budget.

Official site: Archive-It.

Browsertrix

Webrecorder's Browsertrix crawls sites in a real browser, so pages built by JavaScript are captured as visitors see them. You can save logged-in browser profiles for sites behind a login, run quality checks on a crawl, and replay results in ReplayWeb.page. Output is WACZ, an open format, so you own the files.

It is the only pick with a self-serve price list for full crawls. The pricing page starts at $30 a month after a 7-day free trial, and the code is open source under AGPLv3 if you would rather host it on your own Kubernetes cluster.

Best for: Researchers, journalists and small teams who want to run their own crawls and keep open files.

Pricing:

• Starter: $30 a month, 180 execution minutes, 100 GB, 2,000 pages per crawl
• Standard: $60 a month, 360 minutes, 220 GB, 5,000 pages per crawl
• Plus: $120 a month, 720 minutes, 500 GB, 10,000 pages per crawl
• Pro and Enterprise: quote only, billed yearly

Watch out for:

• There is no legal hold, WORM storage or regulator reporting, so it does not meet the compliance jobs PageFreezer is bought for.
• Execution minutes cap monthly crawling, and 180 minutes on Starter goes quickly on a large site.

Official site: Browsertrix.

Stillio

Stillio takes scheduled screenshots of the pages you choose and keeps them in a timeline. For a marketing team that only needs proof of what a pricing page or disclaimer looked like on a given day, that may be all the archive required, at a fraction of a compliance contract.

Plans are priced by page count, from $29 a month for 5 pages to $199 for 100, with a 14-day trial and no card required. Screenshots are kept for 36 months.

Best for: Marketing and SEO teams that want a dated visual record of a handful of pages.

Pricing:

• Snap Shot: $29 a month, 5 pages
• Hot Shot: $79 a month, 25 pages
• Big Shot: $199 a month, 100 pages
• Top Shot: from $299 a month, unlimited pages
• 14-day free trial; VAT extra in Europe

Watch out for:

• The 36-month retention holds only while your subscription is active, per the pricing page.
• You get images, not crawled copies, so links, code and downloads are not preserved.

Official site: Stillio. Our listing: Stillio.

How to choose

When to stay with PageFreezer

Stay with PageFreezer if you need websites, social accounts and text messages captured by one vendor at a known starting price, and you serve both government and corporate rules. It pitches one product to government buyers under FOIA and to finance buyers under FINRA and SEC rules, which most picks here do not, and WebPreserver adds evidence collection on top. One Capterra review from July 2022 notes that social platform rule changes can interrupt capture, which is a risk every tool on this list shares.

Frequently asked questions