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 Customer Support Lead
Leads a support team of nine at a software company whose customers are tax advisers and payroll offices. During the last outage the team answered three hundred tickets that all asked the same question. Wants a status page on the company's own domain with components customers recognise, incident templates, subscribers notified by email, a private page for the largest accounts, and an uptime history they can point to in a contract renewal.
Oh Dear
This judge's pick
UptimeRobot
Criterion by criterion
Checks, locations & failure confirmation
Oh Dear
Checks run every minute by default from fourteen named cities, and a failure at the primary location is re-checked from a second one in a different city on a different provider before anyone is alerted — that confirmation logic is documented in detail, which is what keeps false alarms off my rota on a payroll deadline night. JSON body assertions, header verification, DNS, domain expiry, SSL, cron heartbeats, ping and TCP ports are all evidenced; we found no public information on sub-minute intervals or probes inside a customer's own network, and the captured pages state the check is not a synthetic checkout.
UptimeRobot
Nine monitor types are documented, from HTTP(S) and keyword checks through ping, port, TCP, UDP, DNS and cron heartbeats, with SSL and domain-expiry alerts, JSON assertions on response bodies, response-time limits and a 15-second interval on the top plan. Failed checks are re-checked from a different data centre in the same region before an alert goes out, and monitoring regions can be chosen per monitor, which is the confirmation logic I want before my team answers three hundred identical tickets. We found no public information on browser-level transaction checks or private probe agents inside a customer's own network.
Alerting, escalation & on-call
Oh Dear
Twelve channels including SMS, push through Pushover and ntfy, PagerDuty and Opsgenie forwarding, acknowledgement with a chosen duration, hourly reminders until recovery, business-hours routing and maintenance periods that mute — most of what a support team needs to stop duplicate tickets. We found no public information on phone call alerts, on-call schedules or rotations with overrides, and SMS runs through the customer's own Vonage account rather than a per-message price.
UptimeRobot
Email, SMS, phone calls, mobile push, Slack, Microsoft Teams and webhooks are documented, with forwards to PagerDuty and on-call partners like ilert and Zenduty, per-monitor contact assignment, recurrence settings and maintenance windows that halt monitoring. SMS and voice credits are priced in packs, one voice call equals two credits, and a country-by-country breakdown is referenced. We found no public information on native escalation policies with timeouts, on-call rotations inside the product, acknowledge-and-resolve from the app or chat, or alert grouping.
Status pages & incident communication
Oh Dear
The pieces I fought for last outage are evidenced: a page on our own domain with automatic SSL, monitors feeding it automatically, saved incident templates, updates with severities stacking into one timeline, scheduled maintenance posts in advance, subscribers notified by email, Slack and RSS, 25 languages and unlimited pages on every plan. The privacy option is a secret URL — the captured pages state plainly that this is not a login and not per-user access control, so it will not satisfy a largest-account requirement — and we found no public information on component groups or per-component subscriptions.
UptimeRobot
The page runs on our own subdomain with an automatic Let's Encrypt certificate, lists components customers recognise (websites, servers, ports, cron jobs) with uptime bars and percentages, publishes incident and maintenance announcements on a timeline, notifies email subscribers, supports eleven languages, separate pages per audience and password protection for a single account, plus embeddable badges and whitelabel pages. We found no public information on incident templates, subscriber channels beyond email such as RSS or SMS, or single sign-on and IP restriction for private pages.
API, monitoring as code & team administration
Oh Dear
A documented REST API covering monitors, status page updates and badges, a Terraform provider with sites declared in versioned config, SAML single sign-on that can be enforced for everyone but the team owner, two-factor, unlimited users with roles and permissions, guest access limited to chosen monitors and pages, and a reseller flow where clients need no account of their own. We found no public information on SCIM provisioning, audit logs, or checks run from a deployment pipeline before a release.
UptimeRobot
A version-3 REST API covers creating, editing and deleting monitors, alert contacts, maintenance windows and public status pages, with published rate limits, OAuth 2.0 and key rotation, bulk operations, an official CLI and MCP, and Terraform and Ansible recipes for monitors as code. Team members come in read, write and notify-only roles with two-factor authentication. We found no public information on single sign-on via SAML, SCIM provisioning, audit logs, or sub-accounts where clients get their own logins.
Uptime reports, data & the vendor's own reliability
Oh Dear
For a contract renewal I can point to uptime over the past 7 days, 12 months and all-time per monitor, monthly client reports branded with our logo and accent colour that open from a browser link without an account, monitoring data retention of typically 1-2 years, API export of all monitoring data, and probe IP addresses published in HTML, JSON and CSV. The captured pages state there is no formal SLA and no service credits, and we found no public information on the vendor's own status page, its incident history, or response-time percentiles.
UptimeRobot
SLA policies calculate uptime against a target with the method stated — the average of monitor uptimes to three decimal places, maintenance windows and paused monitors excluded — and email a monthly or quarterly report with the downtime budget used, MTBF, longest incident and every monitor that had downtime, which is exactly the artefact I can put in front of a contract renewal. Retention is stated per plan at three, twelve and twenty-four months. We found no public information on response-time percentiles, published probe IP addresses, a raw export of check results, or the vendor's own public status page and incident history.
European sovereignty
Oh Dear
The chain is named end to end: a Belgian company under Belgian law and the Antwerp courts, monitoring data stored in Belgium with Combell, performance metrics in ClickHouse Cloud's EU region, a published data processing agreement with the EU standard contractual clauses, and a public subprocessor list with each provider's location and certifications. The same pages are candid that Oh Dear itself holds no ISO or SOC 2 certificate, that Combell's certificates cover hosting only, and that probe nodes, backups and check reports run on US providers under those clauses — a stated safeguard, not a silent one.
UptimeRobot
The contracting entity is UptimeRobot s. r. o. of Bratislava under Slovak law, a data processing agreement is published with Standard Contractual Clauses, and processing is stated as primarily in the European Union with the United States as secondary. The subprocessor list names Hetzner for hosting, AWS, Digital Ocean and Limestone Networks for monitoring requests, Cloudflare, Plivo for SMS and voice, Sendgrid and Amazon SES for email, Stripe, 2Checkout, PayPal and Airwallex for payments, and Intercom for support; deletion within ninety days of termination, backup erasure within one hundred eighty days and written deletion certification are documented. The vendor itself holds SOC 2 Type I while its infrastructure providers hold SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001.
Pricing transparency
Oh Dear
Ten tiers are priced publicly from €15/mo for 2 sites to €399/mo for 200, scaling only by monitored site count, with every feature — status pages, custom domains, single sign-on, two-factor, unlimited users and unlimited notification destinations — included on every plan and no feature tiers, so the real annual cost is derivable from the page alone. SMS runs through the customer's own Vonage account and we found no public information on overage handling; the captured pages also give different figures for VAT treatment, one showing prices ex. VAT and another stating they include applicable Belgian VAT where required.
UptimeRobot
Tier prices are public — €0 for fifty monitors at five-minute intervals, Solo starting at €108/y, Team at €360/y and Scale starting at €660/y — with each tier's interval, status page count, seats, retention and included SMS or voice credits listed, annual billing saving roughly fifteen percent, extra login seats at $15/19 a month, and credit packs from $3 for 10 SMS or voice call credits with per-country variation referenced and the auto-refill behaviour, including what happens when a refill fails, documented. We found no public information on VAT treatment or the price of extra monitors beyond a tier, and Enterprise pricing is a custom quote.
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.