As of 2 Nov 2026, the panel rates Oh Dear 3.5/5 and UptimeRobot 3/5 in Uptime Monitoring & Status Pages. Weighted by what each judge cares about, 4 of the 6 judges pick Oh Dear and 1 picks UptimeRobot, 1 calls it a tie. Oh Dear scores higher on 5 of 7 criteria (Pricing transparency, API, monitoring as code & team administration, European sovereignty, plus 2 more). UptimeRobot scores higher on 2 of 7 criteria (Checks, locations & failure confirmation and Status pages & incident communication). Provenance — Oh Dear: EU-Made; UptimeRobot: EU-Made. Ratings are the AI panel’s opinion, formed from public evidence: how scores are made.
The six-judge bench splits along the criteria. Oh Dear is ahead on pricing transparency (7.8 versus 6.8, five judges lean Oh Dear), automation and teams (6.8 versus 6.0, five lean Oh Dear) and sovereignty (7.5 versus 7.2, four lean Oh Dear, two UptimeRobot) — Oh Dear's verdict cites primary data with Combell in Belgium, while UptimeRobot's cites a Slovak contracting entity and primary processing in the European Union. UptimeRobot's means are ahead on checks and locations (6.8 versus 6.7; two lean UptimeRobot, one Oh Dear, three tie) and status pages (6.3 versus 6.2; two lean UptimeRobot, one Oh Dear, three tie). Alerting and on-call (6.0 versus 5.8) and reports and reliability (6.0 versus 5.8) each lean Oh Dear with one judge and five ties. On weighted totals, Oh Dear is ahead for four judges and UptimeRobot for the SaaS platform engineer (6.5 versus 6.3); the e-commerce judge is tied at 6.5.
Choose Oh Dear if
You budget monthly by site count: five judges lean Oh Dear on pricing transparency (7.8 versus 6.8), with published tiers from Solo at €15/mo for 2 sites to Scale at €399/mo for 200 sites.
Your team grows without per-seat fees: five judges lean Oh Dear on automation and teams (6.8 versus 6.0), and the verdict lists sign-on, unlimited users and status pages on every plan.
Your data-protection review weighs primary storage in Belgium: sovereignty leans Oh Dear four judges to two (7.5 versus 7.2), and the verdict cites primary data with Combell in Belgium and a published data processing agreement with the EU's 2021/914 Standard Contractual Clauses.
Your security review matches the panel's security officer: the weighted total there is 6.9 for Oh Dear against 6.1 for UptimeRobot, and the skeptic's is 6.7 to 6.1.
You want alert channels documented by the vendor: alerting and on-call leans Oh Dear (6.0 versus 5.8, one judge, five ties), with twelve channels documented, while UptimeRobot's verdict describes rotations and escalation policies reached through third-party integrations.
Choose UptimeRobot if
You need monitor variety and fast checks: two judges lean UptimeRobot on checks and locations (6.8 versus 6.7), and the verdict lists nine monitor types with intervals as low as 15 seconds.
You want a failing check confirmed from a second location before an alert fires: the verdict documents re-checks from a different data center before alerting, under checks and locations.
Status pages are your deciding criterion: UptimeRobot's mean is 6.3 to 6.2, with two judges leaning its way and three tying.
Your team mirrors the panel's SaaS platform engineer: the weighted total there is 6.5 for UptimeRobot against 6.3 for Oh Dear.
Read this comparison as one judge. Each weighs the same scores by what they care about.
The Agency Developer
Runs hosting and maintenance at a fifteen-person web agency with sixty client sites on WordPress, TYPO3 and Shopware. Has learned about an expired certificate from a client's angry phone call once and does not want a second time. Wants HTTP, keyword, SSL and domain expiry checks set up in bulk, client groups with their own status pages and monthly uptime reports, and a price per monitor that still works at two hundred monitors.
Oh Dear
This judge's pick
UptimeRobot
Criterion by criterion
Checks, locations & failure confirmation
Oh Dear
HTTP with keyword, JSON-body and header assertions, ping, TCP ports, DNS records, domain expiry, certificate health and cron heartbeats are all documented, checked every minute by default with the failure re-run from a second city on a different provider before any alert goes out — exactly the confirmation logic I want before a client calls me about a certificate. What holds it back: we found no public information on multi-step scripted flows, browser transaction checks of a login or checkout, sub-minute intervals or private probes inside a client's own network, and the TCP check documentation itself says it is not a synthetic checkout.
UptimeRobot
Nine monitor types including keyword, ping, port, DNS and cron-job heartbeats, plus SSL and domain-expiry alerts with warning days I can set, is exactly the set I need for sixty client domains. Checks run as often as every fifteen seconds from regions I can choose per monitor, and a failed check is re-run from a different data center in the same region before anyone's phone rings — that alone would have saved me the angry certificate call. We found no public information on browser or transaction checks of a login or checkout flow, private probes inside a client's own network, or probe locations listed by city.
Alerting, escalation & on-call
Oh Dear
Twelve channels including SMS, Telegram, PagerDuty and Opsgenie, routed per team, per site, per tag or tag group with business-hours filtering, acknowledgement with hourly reminders, and recovery notifications that auto-resolve PagerDuty and Opsgenie incidents — enough to send each client's 3 AM outage to the one person who owns the fix. We found no public information on phone call alerts, escalation policies with timeouts or on-call schedules and rotations; SMS runs through the customer's own Vonage account, so its cost never appears in an Oh Dear plan.
UptimeRobot
Email, SMS, phone call, mobile push and Slack with webhooks cover the channels an on-call duty rotation needs, contacts can be assigned to monitors individually or in bulk, and message pricing is published: one voice call equals two credits, with a country-by-country list for SMS. Thresholds, a three-of-five consecutive-request rule for slow responses and a configurable timeout dampen false alarms, and alerts forward to PagerDuty, PagerTree, iLert or Zenduty. We found no public information on native escalation policies, on-call schedules and rotations, or acknowledging and resolving from the app — the captured pages point to those integrations for the on-call side.
Status pages & incident communication
Oh Dear
Unlimited status pages on a custom domain with automatic SSL, own logo, favicon and colours, in 25 languages, fed automatically by connected monitors, with scheduled-maintenance posts, saved templates, a severity timeline and email, Slack and RSS subscribers — a workable separate page for each of my client groups. Access is the weak point: a page can sit behind a secret URL, but the vendor itself notes that secret is not a login and not per-user access control, and we found no public information on component groups, per-component subscriptions or private pages with single sign-on or IP restriction.
UptimeRobot
Each client can get its own page: from three pages on Solo up to a hundred white-label pages on Team and unlimited on Scale, hosted on a custom subdomain with a certificate issued automatically via Let's Encrypt. Pages carry components fed by monitors, incident and maintenance announcements on a timeline, email subscribers, password protection, eleven languages and embeddable status badges — the agency model is well served. We found no public information on SMS, RSS or webhook subscribers, per-component subscriptions, or single sign-on for private audience pages.
API, monitoring as code & team administration
Oh Dear
A documented REST API where one JSON payload template kept in version control creates every new client monitor with only URL, name and tags changed, a Terraform provider, SAML single sign-on that can be required for everyone except the team owner, user roles, guest access limited to a client's own monitors and status pages, and a reseller program billing every client through my own subscription. We found no public information on SCIM provisioning, audit logs or checks triggered from CI/CD before a deploy.
UptimeRobot
A v3 REST API on every plan including Free covers monitors, alert contacts, maintenance windows and public status pages, with bulk operations, published rate limits, a CLI and even an MCP interface, and Ansible or Terraform can onboard hundreds of monitors as code — that is how I would set up two hundred monitors once. Teammates get read, write, notify-only and admin roles, two-factor is available and required for privileged admins, and monitors group by client so each client can have its own SLA policy. We found no public information on SAML single sign-on, SCIM, audit logs, or per-client sub-accounts with their own logins.
Uptime reports, data & the vendor's own reliability
Oh Dear
Monthly client reports carry my logo and accent colour (a small "powered by Oh Dear" mark remains), with sections chosen per site, emailed on the first of the month to up to five recipients with a browser link the client opens without an account, and every past report kept; monitoring data is retained one to two years per plan and exportable via the API, response times break down into DNS, TCP, TLS and first byte, and the probe IP addresses are published in JSON and CSV. Against that, the vendor states it offers no formal SLA with credits, and we found no public information on its own status page, incident history or post-mortems.
UptimeRobot
The monthly uptime report is what I would bill clients against: overall uptime, incident counts, mean time between failures, month-over-month comparison, a response-time summary with peaks above 1,000 ms, and every monitor with daily status bars — plus per-client SLA policies that email a verdict at month or quarter end with the calculation method spelled out. The captured pages give different figures for how far back history reaches, so I checked both the plan table and the reporting article before relying on it. We found no public information on response-time percentiles, probe IP addresses for allow-listing, the vendor's own status page and incident history, or a published SLA with credits.
European sovereignty
Oh Dear
Immutable VOF in Berlaar, Belgium under Belgian law with Antwerp courts, primary data on Combell in Belgium, performance metrics in ClickHouse's EU region, a published and signable DPA with the 2021/914 Standard Contractual Clauses, and a public subprocessor list naming each provider with its location and certifications. Check reports and backups sit on AWS and probe nodes run on AWS, DigitalOcean and Vultr outside Europe under those SCCs, and the vendor itself states it holds no ISO 27001 or SOC 2 certificate of its own — only its hosting providers do.
UptimeRobot
The contract sits with UptimeRobot s. r. o. in Bratislava under Slovak law and the exclusive jurisdiction of the Bratislava courts, with a published data processing agreement carrying the standard contractual clauses, and processing is stated as primarily in the European Union on named infrastructure with Hetzner hosting the monitoring stack and status pages. The full sub-processor list is public — Plivo for SMS and voice, Sendgrid and Amazon SES for mail, Stripe and others for payment — with thirty days' notice of any change and deletion within ninety days of termination. The vendor's own attestation is SOC 2 Type I while the ISO 27001 certificates belong to its infrastructure providers, so I stay at this level rather than higher.
Pricing transparency
Oh Dear
A public ladder from fifteen euros a month for two sites up to three hundred ninety-nine euros for two hundred, scaling only by monitored sites with every feature — unlimited users, unlimited status pages, SSO, DPA — on every plan, no setup fees and cancel anytime, so the annual cost at my two hundred monitors is computable from the pricing page alone. The gaps: above two hundred sites the Enterprise tier is priced on request, overage handling is not described, SMS costs sit in the customer's own Vonage account, and the captured pages give different figures for VAT — the pricing page shows EUR ex. VAT while the terms say Belgian VAT is included where required.
UptimeRobot
I can plan the money from public pages: the free tier's fifty monitors at five-minute intervals are stated, Scale lists 200 or 500 monitors and "Starts at €660 /y" with a fifteen-second interval, and SMS and voice alerts are priced in credit packs from $3 for 10 credits with a per-country list for SMS. Login seats add for $15/19 / mo and the included credit volume per plan is published. The Team plan's monitor count is not shown on the captured pricing page, extra monitors are sold as an upgrade without a captured unit price, and we found no public information on VAT treatment.
Sovereignty, side by side
Dimension
Oh Dear
UptimeRobot
Legal entity
Not determined
Not determined
Hosting location
Not determined
Not determined
Hosting options
Not determined
Not determined
Open source
Not determined
Not determined
Data processing agreement
Not determined
Not determined
Transfer impact assessment
Not determined
Not determined
Facts, side by side
Only facts both products carry under the same definition — anything else would not be a fair row.
As of 2 Nov 2026, the panel rates Oh Dear higher: 3.5/5 against 3/5. Weighted by what each judge cares about, 4 of the 6 judges pick Oh Dear and 1 picks UptimeRobot, 1 calls it a tie. Which one fits depends on the criteria that matter to you; the table on this page shows both side by side, and each judge’s reading has its own page. Both were scored by the same AI bench under the same rubric, from public evidence only, as the methodology describes.
Is Oh Dear or UptimeRobot European?
Oh Dear is European (EU-Made). UptimeRobot is European (EU-Made). Provenance is read from each company’s own legal pages: who builds it and who owns it.
Where do Oh Dear and UptimeRobot store customer data?
Per the vendors’ own pages as captured — Oh Dear: Default not stated; pages mention Belgium. UptimeRobot: its pages as captured do not say.
Do Oh Dear and UptimeRobot have a free plan?
As of 2 Nov 2026, UptimeRobot’s own pages state a free plan; Oh Dear’s pages as captured do not. Each product page links the pricing page it was read from.