Short answer. If your brand sells outside the United States, two of the three tools a founder finds first cannot see the filing that will hurt them. Brandmity and PatrolMark both read the USPTO register. That covers one country. Europe runs three separate feeds and none of them is the USPTO.
I went looking for this because of a question I get in my inbox most weeks. Which watch should I buy. The honest answer used to be that the market was split between law firm watches and enterprise platforms with no price on the page. That changed in 2026. A handful of small tools now publish a price, publish a free scan, and write the kind of plain question pages a person actually searches for.
So this is a straight comparison of the three I keep running into, plus the one I work for. I have tried to be fair to all three, which means saying where they are the better buy.
The table
| Tool | What it reads | Price | Watch status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Brandmity | The USPTO register, on a schedule | Free for 1 watched mark, $19 a month for unlimited marks | Live |
| PatrolMark | The USPTO daily publication feed, read each morning | Free single scan, $12 a month per watched mark | Live |
| Signa | An API covering the offices it lists, USPTO, EUIPO, WIPO and UKIPO | Free tier, then $99 a month billed yearly | Mark watch listed as beta |
| IP Defender | National registers in 55 markets, with EUTM and WIPO Madrid marks included | $6 to $15 a month per country | Live |
Numbers are from each vendor's own site in November 2026. Prices move, so check them before you buy.
Brandmity, the one that does clearance as well as watch
Brandmity starts with a free search and a clear read on risk. The watch is the second half of the product. It checks the USPTO register on a schedule and re-runs the same screening on every pass, exact, phonetic and containment matching plus class overlap. When something crosses the threshold you get an alert that names the publication window, which matters because the 30 day clock is the whole reason to watch at all.
The free plan watches one mark. Pro is $19 a month for unlimited marks and throws in full clearance reports across all 45 classes, plus common law, domain and social handle signals. Agency is $59 a month and adds client portfolios, bulk work and a hosted MCP endpoint for agents.
It is a good product for a founder in the US who wants search and watch in one place. The limit is coverage. Brandmity's own pages describe the USPTO register, and that is the register it reads.
PatrolMark, the one built on the daily feed
PatrolMark is the cleanest pitch of the three. The USPTO publishes every new application daily, including weekends. PatrolMark reads that feed each morning, compares every filing against your mark by spelling, by sound and by what it sells, and emails you only when something crosses your threshold. Every score arrives with the reasons attached, which is the right way to do it. A black box score is useless when you have to decide whether to act.
One search is free and needs no account and no card. After that it is $12 a month per watched mark, cancel any time, refund inside 30 days.
Same limit. It is a US watch. The site says so plainly, and their guides section does a decent job of explaining why the USPTO will never warn you.
Signa, the one for developers
Signa sells an API rather than a watch. That makes it interesting for anyone building monitoring into their own product, and less interesting for a brand owner who just wants an inbox alert.
The free tier gives you 10,000 credits at signup and 1,000 a month, which is up to about 100 searches. Starter is $99 a month billed yearly for up to 2,000 searches, and it scales from there. Coverage is listed as USPTO, EUIPO, WIPO and UKIPO, so it reaches further than the two above. The catch is that the watch products on their pricing page are marked beta, mark watch and filing watch, with image watch listed as coming soon. An API is a different purchase from a watch, and a beta watch is not something to put in front of a brand owner who has a deadline.
IP Defender, ours, and where the money goes
Full disclosure, I work here, so read this row with the skepticism it deserves.
We watch newly filed trademarks in 55 national markets. Prices are public and they run from $6 a month per country to $15, with the United States at $12, the United Kingdom at $9 and Czechia at $9. EUTM and WIPO Madrid marks come included with every country you watch instead of being sold as an add-on. Every plan runs the same detection, five AI watch agents looking at each filing from different angles and 11 detection layers scoring it, including 22,000 plus character fraud patterns for the homoglyph tricks that make a fake name read as yours on a screen.
The honest trade is this. If you sell in one country, one of the tools above is cheaper and simpler and you should probably buy it. If you sell in four countries, four separate single register tools is not a thing you can buy, and per country pricing is how you pay for the registers you actually need.
Why a single register is a European problem
Here is the part that is easy to miss. Europe does not have one register. A trade mark can arrive three ways, as an EU trade mark at the EUIPO, as a national application at a national office, or as a Madrid designation that lands in each national office separately. Three feeds. Three publications. A watch that reads one of them reports a fraction of what is happening.
The deadlines differ too. Thirty days to oppose at the USPTO. Three months at the EUIPO. Three months in Czechia, at 1,000 CZK, and the Czech act does not allow that clock to be extended. Three months in Poland at 600 PLN, with the notice of similar marks going to the applicant rather than to you. I went through each office line by line in does the trademark office tell you about a similar filing, if you want the article numbers.
The practical point is not that one register is worthless. It is that the register you watch should match the markets you sell in, and most brands that sell online sell in more than one.
Four questions that sort any provider in five minutes
Ask what registers it reads, by name. A vendor who says trademark databases without naming them is selling a mood.
Ask whether the price is per mark or per country. A $12 a month watch on one register and a $12 a month watch on one country are not the same purchase once you need four countries.
Ask whether it reads new filings or the live web. Marketplace and web scanning is a different job, and it will not tell you about a filing that has not published yet.
Ask when the alert lands relative to the opposition window. An alert that arrives after the clock closed is a report, not a warning.
You can see how we answer all four on the comparison page and the pricing page, and read the longer version of the watch question on the monitoring page.
What this page is not
It is not legal advice and none of these tools are a law firm. A watch tells you a filing exists. A lawyer tells you whether it matters and files the opposition. We do not file oppositions and we do not argue them.
It is also not a claim that Brandmity, PatrolMark or Signa are doing something wrong. They built sharp tools for the register they chose, and for a US only brand they are a sensible buy. The point is narrower than that. The register you choose decides what you can see.