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 E-Commerce Operations Manager
Runs operations for an online shop selling garden furniture in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, with half the year's revenue between March and June. The homepage once answered 200 while the checkout threw an error for six hours. Wants the checkout and the payment page checked, not only the homepage, an SMS or call to whoever is on duty that night, and a report that shows the agency what the downtime cost.
Oh Dear
UptimeRobot
This judge calls it a tie.
Criterion by criterion
Checks, locations & failure confirmation
Oh Dear
Checks run every minute by default, a failing monitor is retried every minute, and a failure at the primary location is confirmed from a second city on a different provider before anyone is paged, with status-code, required and forbidden keyword, JSON body assertion, ping, TCP port, SSL, DNS, domain expiry and cron heartbeat checks I can aim straight at the checkout and payment URLs. Probe cities are named, including Frankfurt, Paris, London and Stockholm, and maintenance periods stop notifications during planned work. We found no public information on browser or transaction checks that walk a full checkout, and the shortest documented interval is one minute.
UptimeRobot
Nine monitor types are documented — website, keyword, ping, port, TCP, UDP, DNS, cron/heartbeat and third-party services — with checks as often as every 15 seconds, a failed check re-confirmed from a different data center in the same region before any alert goes out, custom timeouts up to a minute, response-time limits with alerting, and maintenance windows; JSON body assertions exist on API checks. What I found no public information on is a browser or transaction check that walks a login or checkout flow — the exact blind spot that once let our homepage answer 200 while the payment page errored for six hours — or probe locations named by city, or private probes inside our own network.
Alerting, escalation & on-call
Oh Dear
Twelve channels including SMS, routing per team, site, tag and tag group, acknowledgement that stops the hourly reminders, recovery notifications, snooze, maintenance periods that mute alerts, and forwarding to PagerDuty and Opsgenie with automatic resolve. For my night shift the catch is that SMS goes through your own Vonage account, and we found no public information on phone call alerts, built-in on-call schedules and rotations, or escalation to a different person after a timeout, so paging would come through the PagerDuty or Opsgenie integration instead.
UptimeRobot
Alerts reach people by email, SMS, phone call, mobile push, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Telegram and webhooks — up to sixteen ways — with per-monitor contacts, a delay rule before slow-response alerts (only after 3 of 5 consecutive requests), and maintenance windows that mute alerts. SMS and voice calls work on every plan via prepaid credits, from "$3 for 10 SMS or voice call credits" up to "$100 for 1000 SMS or voice call credits", one voice call alert equals two credits, and SMS cost varies by country — so waking whoever is on duty that night in peak season is covered. On-call rotations and escalation appear through integrations (PagerDuty, ilert, Zenduty, PagerTree); we found no public information on the product's own escalation policies with timeouts, schedules, or acknowledging and resolving from the app itself.
Status pages & incident communication
Oh Dear
Status pages on my own domain with the certificate issued for me, downtime and recovery posted automatically from connected monitors unless the team approves every post, incident severities stacking into a timeline, scheduled maintenance announced in advance, and email, Slack and RSS subscribers notified automatically, with branding, 25 languages and unlimited pages so I can run one page per shop. Access is public or behind a secret URL, which the documentation itself describes as not a login, and we found no public information on password-protected pages, single sign-on for status pages, or SMS and webhook subscribers.
UptimeRobot
Status pages exist on every plan: monitors appear as components, incidents and planned maintenance get timeline updates, subscribers receive automated email, and a page can sit on our own subdomain via CNAME with automatic Let's Encrypt SSL, password protection, white-label, eleven languages including German and French, Google Analytics and embeddable badges in iframe, Markdown or HTML form. Paid tiers add custom design and up to 100 or unlimited pages. We found no public information on SMS, RSS or webhook subscribers, per-component subscription choices, single-sign-on or IP-restricted private pages, or any statement of how the page itself stays online if the monitoring service goes down.
API, monitoring as code & team administration
Oh Dear
A documented REST API over monitors and status page updates, signed webhooks, a Terraform provider that keeps monitored sites in versioned config, SAML single sign-on enforceable for everyone except the team owner, user roles, unlimited users, client grouping with read-only per-site access, guest logins and a reseller account running every client from one subscription. The branded client reports keep a small powered-by mark, and we found no public information on SCIM provisioning, audit logs or checks triggered from a deployment pipeline.
UptimeRobot
The v3 REST API is documented to create, edit and delete monitors, alert contacts, maintenance windows and public status pages, returning JSON, JSON-P or XML with published rate limits (10 requests per minute on the free plan, up to 5000 on paid) and bulk operations; teammates get admin, read, write and notify-only access with two-factor authentication, and an SLA policy can be created per client on paid plans. A CLI and MCP are listed alongside the API, with Ansible and Terraform shown as community tools for onboarding monitors. We found no public information on single sign-on (SAML), SCIM provisioning, audit logs, or client sub-accounts with their own logins.
Uptime reports, data & the vendor's own reliability
Oh Dear
Uptime over 7 days, 12 months and all time, every incident with its start, end and duration, response times split into DNS, connect, TLS and first byte, monitoring data kept one to two years by plan with API export, probe addresses published for allow-listing, and a branded monthly report per client site emailed on the first of the month with a browser link the agency can open without an account. The vendor states it offers no formal SLA, only a 99.9 percent target, and we found no public information on SLA reports, response time percentiles, or the vendor's own status page and post-mortems.
UptimeRobot
This is what I would hand the agency after a bad night: a monthly or quarterly email report with overall uptime, incident count, total downtime, average duration, mean time between failures per monitor and for the whole account, a response-time summary including peaks above 1,000 ms, and every monitor with daily status bars; SLA policies measure uptime against a target I set (99.9% equals 43m 12s over 30 days) and email the verdict with the downtime budget used, and paid plans keep 12 or 24 months of history with an export function in the services. We found no public information on response-time percentiles or DNS/TLS breakdowns, published probe IP addresses for allow-listing, or the vendor's own status page and incident history.
European sovereignty
Oh Dear
Immutable VOF in Berlaar, Belgium is the contracting entity under Belgian law and the Antwerp courts, primary data sits with Combell in Belgium, performance metrics in ClickHouse Cloud's EU region, a data processing agreement with 2021/914 SCCs is published, and the subprocessor list is public with each provider's location. The chain does run through non-EU names, AWS Global for backups and check reports, Cloudflare for sending notifications and Stripe for payments, with SCC safeguards stated, and the vendor states it holds no ISO or SOC certificate itself, with Combell's ISO 27001 covering the hosting.
UptimeRobot
The contracting entity is UptimeRobot s. r. o. of Bratislava with published registration and VAT numbers, Slovak law and the courts of Bratislava, and a published data processing agreement carrying the Standard Contractual Clauses, security-incident notification within 72 hours, and deletion within 90 days of termination. The subprocessor list is public: Hetzner hosts the monitoring infrastructure, API services and status pages with primary processing in the European Union, Plivo sends SMS and voice, Sendgrid and Amazon SES the emails, Stripe and PayPal take payments, Intercom and User.com run support — while check data is secondarily stored in United States data centers run by AWS, Digital Ocean and Limestone Networks. UptimeRobot itself holds SOC 2 Type I, with SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 held by its infrastructure providers — a workable chain for our German, Austrian and Swiss shop, though the American data centers and US SaaS links keep it short of an end-to-end European chain.
Pricing transparency
Oh Dear
Every tier is public from Solo, two sites at €15/mo, up to Scale, 200 sites at €399/mo, scaling only by number of monitored sites, with status pages, all notification channels, single sign-on, two-factor and unlimited users on every plan, no setup fees, cancel anytime, monthly or annual billing in advance, a ten-day trial without credit card, and VAT treatment stated on both the pricing page and the terms. What I cannot compute from these pages is SMS, which runs through my own Vonage account, and we found no public information on overage handling beyond prorated plan changes.
UptimeRobot
Tiers are public with their scaling: Free at €0 with 50 monitors and 5-minute checks, Solo starting at €108 per year with 60-second checks, 3 status pages and 12-month retention, Team at €360 per year with 30-second checks, 3 seats and 100 status pages, and Scale starting at €660 per year with 15-second checks, 200 or 500 monitors and 5 seats; extra login seats cost $15 or $19 per month, SMS and voice credits run from "$3 for 10 SMS or voice call credits" to "$100 for 1000 SMS or voice call credits", and auto-refill triggers once the balance reaches 25 credits. We found no public information on monthly prices per tier, the monitor count on Solo, VAT treatment, or per-country SMS rates on the pricing page itself — the credit consumption by country sits in a separate blog post — and Enterprise 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.