Comparing Sitebeam with Silktide

Silktide is the successor to Sitebeam. We rethought everything, and wrote Silktide from scratch to be vastly more useful.

There are a lot of changes. This page will talk you through the key ones.

Two different products

Depending on your needs, you’ll be using one of the following two variations of Silktide:

• Snapshot – our fast e-commerce option, most similar to Sitebeam
• Monitor – our high-powered enterprise option

See issues on your pages

When an error appears on part of a page – say a spelling error – Silktide can show you that page, as it appeared at the time it was tested, and show you where the error appears.

Ignore and approve issues

Silktide allows you to ignore or approve specific issues. For example, you can ignore the alternative text for a given image, or ignore all spelling mistakes on specific pages.

Mobile testing

All versions of Silktide include mobile tests. Silktide Monitor includes comprehensive layout and accessibility tests for every page in mobile devices.

Track measures over time

Monitor reports break down changes to your website over time, including broken links, spelling, SEO, and more.

See results faster

Silktide is much faster at testing websites, even though it is now performing far more checks. PDFs now take seconds to export instead of minutes.

With Sitebeam, you had to wait for a report to fully run before you could see anything. Silktide starts to show you some results almost immediately, and updates them as they are discovered. This means you can see some information – like search engine ranking – in seconds, and other tests – like spelling – will display results progressively, as more pages are downloaded.

Retest individual pages

Silktide Monitor allows you to re-test individual pages at any time, without using up a report. Typically it takes 10 – 15 seconds to retest a single page.

Scheduled reports

Silktide Monitor was designed to test and improve websites continuously. By default Monitor will retest your websites automatically every 5 days, and email selected users about any changes.

New and improved tests

Every test has been rewritten, with many tests being renamed, expanded, merged or removed.

Users of Silktide Monitor gain support for Accessibility testing (WCAG 2.1 A, AA and AAA), custom Surveys, GDPR testing, and much more.

You can learn more from Silktide’ support website and compare with Sitebeam’s support website.