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 SaaS Platform Engineer
Platform engineer at a forty-person B2B SaaS in Berlin, one of four people on the on-call rotation. Wants multi-step API checks with assertions, kept in Terraform next to the services they test, failures confirmed from a second location before anyone is woken, phone calls and escalation when an alert is not acknowledged, and a status page that updates without someone logging in at 3 a.m.
Oh Dear
UptimeRobot
This judge's pick
Criterion by criterion
Checks, locations & failure confirmation
Oh Dear
The documented set covers HTTP(S) with keyword and forbidden-string matching, JSON body assertions (up to ten, on values and response headers), custom verbs and payloads, TCP with send-string, ICMP ping, full SSL chain validation, DNS records, domain expiry and cron heartbeats with grace periods — checked every minute by default from named cities on six continents, and a failure at the primary location is re-confirmed from a second location in a different city on a different provider before anyone is alerted, which is exactly the confirmation logic I want written down. It sits below the top band because the documented assertions evaluate a single endpoint: we found no public information on multi-step request chains or scripted browser transactions of a login or checkout (Lighthouse audits on desktop and mobile from three continents are the closest documented browser-based check), the shortest documented interval is one minute, and checks are strictly outside-in with nothing installed on the monitored machine — we found no public information on private probe locations inside our own network.
UptimeRobot
Nine monitor types including HTTP, keyword, ping, port, DNS, TCP and heartbeat cron checks, SSL and domain expiry alerts, 15-second intervals, selectable monitoring regions, and failed checks re-checked from a different data center in the same region before an alert goes out — that confirmation logic is exactly what I want before anyone is woken. API monitoring validates JSON with all-or-any assertion logic and custom timeouts up to a minute, but we found no public information on multi-step chained checks, browser or transaction checks of a user flow, or private locations for internal services, which keeps it short of the top band.
Alerting, escalation & on-call
Oh Dear
Twelve channels are documented — email, Slack, Teams, Discord, Google Chat, Telegram, SMS, Pushover and ntfy with configurable priorities, webhooks, plus forwarding to PagerDuty and Opsgenie that auto-resolve on recovery — with acknowledge carrying fixed durations, hourly reminders while a monitor stays down, routing at team, site, tag and tag-group level, business-hours filtering per destination, and maintenance periods and snooze that mute alerts. For my four-person rotation the ceiling is real: SMS runs through our own Vonage account, and we found no public information on phone-call alerts, on-call schedules and rotations, escalation that hands an unacknowledged alert to a different person, or internal incident timelines showing who did what.
UptimeRobot
Email, SMS, phone calls, mobile push, Slack, Teams, Telegram and webhooks plus forwarding to PagerDuty, ilert, Zenduty and PagerTree, with SMS and voice costs published in credit packs at two credits per voice call and country variation documented. But we found no public information on escalation policies when an alert is not acknowledged, on-call schedules and rotations, or acknowledging and resolving from the app in UptimeRobot's own product — the scheduling the pages mention lives in the partner tools — so it is not a replacement for a dedicated on-call setup.
Status pages & incident communication
Oh Dear
Unlimited pages on every plan, custom domain with a certificate Oh Dear issues, our logo, colours and favicon, 25 languages, saved templates, an embeddable badge, email, Slack and RSS subscribers plus JSON and XML feeds — and the part I care about, the page posts automatically when a connected monitor goes down and recovers unless we switch to manual approval, with a Scheduled severity for planned work and updates stacking into a timeline. Access control is the weak point: the only documented non-public option is a secret URL, which the documentation itself says is not a login and not per-user access control, and we found no public information on component groups, per-component subscriptions, or SMS and webhook subscribers.
UptimeRobot
Public pages on a custom subdomain with automatic Let's Encrypt SSL, components fed by monitors, incident and maintenance announcements with a timeline, email subscribers, eleven languages, password protection, white-label and embeddable badges in iframe, Markdown or HTML. We found no public information on subscriber channels beyond email, single sign-on or IP restriction for private pages, or incident templates; the privacy page names Hetzner as hosting the status pages, but the captured pages do not document how the page stays up if the main service goes down.
API, monitoring as code & team administration
Oh Dear
A documented REST API covers creating and reading monitors with per-check settings, status-page updates can be posted from the API for deploy-pipeline automation, and there is a Terraform provider (community-maintained, MIT-licensed) declaring sites in versioned config, plus a documented workflow of keeping a default payload as a JSON file in version control — monitoring as code is genuinely usable here, not a marketing slide. SAML 2.0 SSO is on every plan and can be required for everyone except the team owner, alongside roles and permissions, unlimited users, two-factor, guest access limited to chosen monitors and status pages, and a reseller mode where clients never need their own login. We found no public information on SCIM provisioning, audit logs, or checks run from CI/CD before a deploy.
UptimeRobot
A v3 REST API covering monitor create/edit/delete, alert contacts, maintenance windows and public status pages, plus a CLI, MCP, bulk operations, OAuth 2.0 and key rotation, and Ansible/Terraform mentioned on the API page for onboarding monitors as infrastructure code — that is most of my wishlist. Team roles (read, write, notify-only), two-factor authentication and seat pricing are documented, but we found no public information on SAML single sign-on, SCIM provisioning, audit logs, or client sub-accounts with their own logins.
Uptime reports, data & the vendor's own reliability
Oh Dear
Monthly client reports are branded with our logo and accent colour, emailed on the first of the month with configurable sections, and every past report stays on a browser link the recipient opens without an account; uptime history shows 7 days, 12 months and all-time, performance breaks down DNS, TCP, TLS, server processing and download per check, monitoring data is kept typically one to two years by plan, everything exports via API, and the probe addresses are published in HTML, JSON and CSV. The ceiling is the vendor's own trust record: the terms state plainly that no formal SLA with credits is offered and Oh Dear itself holds neither ISO 27001 nor SOC 2, and we found no public information on response-time percentiles or the vendor's own public status page and incident history.
UptimeRobot
Uptime percentage per monitor over 24 hours to 30 days, response time charts with a region selector, and a genuinely documented SLA report: a policy's uptime is the average of its monitors shown to three decimals, maintenance windows are excluded, results are emailed monthly or quarterly, and MTBF is available per monitor and account. The captured pages give different figures for data retention (12 and 24 months on the pricing page, up to 365 days in the help article), and we found no public information on response time percentiles, published probe IP addresses, or the vendor's own status page and incident history.
European sovereignty
Oh Dear
The chain is documented on the vendor's own pages: Immutable VOF in Berlaar is the contracting entity under Belgian law, primary data sits with Combell in Belgium, the data processing agreement is published and signable on every plan with EU standard contractual clauses for transfers, and a public subprocessor list names each processor with its region and certifications. It stops short of a fully European chain: the same list shows backups and check reports stored on AWS Global and notifications sent through Cloudflare Global — processing that relies on the clauses rather than EU regions — and the certifications listed are the providers', with Oh Dear holding none itself.
UptimeRobot
Slovak contracting entity and governing law, a published DPA with Standard Contractual Clauses modules two and three, primary processing in the European Union on named infrastructure, subprocessors listed with their purposes and 30 days' notice of changes, and SOC 2 Type I held by UptimeRobot itself. The chain still runs partly through the United States — named as secondary processing — and through US providers such as Plivo, Sendgrid, Amazon SES, Stripe and Intercom with the SCCs as the stated safeguard, and we found no public information on an ISO 27001 certification for UptimeRobot itself.
Pricing transparency
Oh Dear
Ten public tiers from Solo at two sites for €15/mo to Scale at 200 sites for €399/mo scale by exactly one dimension, the number of monitored sites, and SSO, two-factor, unlimited users, unlimited status pages with custom domains, every notification channel, monthly reports and the DPA are on every plan — so there is almost nothing to price separately, with Enterprise above 200 sites quoted as custom. Billing monthly or annually in advance, prorated plan changes at any time, a 10-day trial without a credit card, a 30-day money-back guarantee and 30 days' notice on price rises are all published; SMS is not billed by Oh Dear because it runs through the customer's own Vonage account, and the captured pages give different statements on VAT — prices shown ex. VAT on the pricing page, with the terms saying Belgian VAT is included where required.
UptimeRobot
Tiers are public down to the interval, monitor count, seats, status page limits and retention, SMS and voice credits are priced in five packs with two credits per voice call and country variation documented, extra seats carry a monthly price, and annual billing saves roughly 15 percent. The Solo and Scale prices are marked as starting prices without a full per-monitor scaling rule, auto-refill silently switches off if the card charge fails, and we found no public information on VAT treatment — so a buyer cannot yet compute the exact final invoice.
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.