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 Information Security Officer
Information security officer at a mid-sized logistics company that falls under NIS2 and is working towards ISO 27001. Needs every outage recorded with detection time, response and resolution, in a form an auditor accepts. Reads the subprocessor list before the feature page, because the on-call staff's mobile numbers and the status page subscribers are personal data, and wants single sign-on and an audit log before anyone gets a login.
Oh Dear
This judge's pick
UptimeRobot
Criterion by criterion
Checks, locations & failure confirmation
Oh Dear
Uptime checks cover HTTP with required and forbidden strings plus JSON body assertions, TCP ports with expected-port lists, ICMP ping, DNS, domain expiry, certificate health and cron heartbeats, running every minute by default with failing monitors retried every minute, and a failure at the primary location is re-confirmed from a second location in a different city on a different provider before any downtime alert — confirmation logic this clearly documented is exactly what I want reproduced in an audit file. Fifteen probe cities are named across six continents and the probe addresses are published for allow-listing. We found no public information on multi-step transaction checks of a login or checkout, sub-minute intervals or private probe locations inside our own network, which keeps this below the top band.
UptimeRobot
Nine monitor types including HTTP, keyword, ping, port, TCP, DNS and heartbeat checks, intervals down to 15 seconds, selectable monitoring regions, and a documented re-check from a different data center in the same region before alerting are all described. JSON assertions, SSL and domain expiry checks, custom timeouts up to 60 seconds and maintenance windows are evidenced. We found no public information on browser or transaction checks, private locations inside the customer network, or probe locations listed by city, which is where an auditor would start.
Alerting, escalation & on-call
Oh Dear
Twelve channels including email, SMS via the customer's own Vonage account, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Telegram, PagerDuty, Opsgenie, Pushover and ntfy, with routing at team, site, tag and tag-group level, acknowledgement windows, hourly reminders until recovery, throttled repeats, business-hours routing and maintenance periods that mute notifications. We found no public information on voice-call alerting, escalation policies with timeouts, or on-call schedules and rotations, so for serious on-call I would keep PagerDuty or Opsgenie in front of it.
UptimeRobot
Email, SMS, voice calls, mobile push, Slack, Microsoft Teams and webhooks are documented, with forwarding to PagerDuty and on-call routing through ilert, Zenduty and PagerTree, and SMS and voice costs published as credit packs with one voice call equal to two credits and a per-country breakdown in a blog post. Maintenance windows and a 3-of-5 consecutive-request threshold before response-time alerts mute noise. We found no public information on escalation policies with timeouts, on-call schedules and rotations inside the product, or acknowledge and resolve from the app, which is what I need to evidence response times under NIS2.
Status pages & incident communication
Oh Dear
Status pages are unlimited on every plan, on our own domain with automatic SSL, self-updating from connected monitors, with incident updates at five severities stacking into one timeline, scheduled maintenance notices, saved templates, automatic subscriber notification, twenty-five languages and per-page branding, and pages can be shared per client with guest access limited to selected monitors. Subscribers can choose email, Slack or RSS and a status badge is embeddable. Page access is public or behind a secret URL — the vendor itself notes that secret is not a login — and we found no public information on private pages with single sign-on or IP restriction, or on SMS and webhook subscribers.
UptimeRobot
Public status pages with custom subdomains, automatic Let's Encrypt certificates, components fed by monitors, incident and maintenance timelines, email subscribers, password protection, white-labeling, eleven languages and embeddable badges are documented with per-plan page counts. We found no public information on SMS, RSS or webhook subscribers, single sign-on or IP restriction for private pages, component groups, or how the page hosting stays up if the main service is down.
API, monitoring as code & team administration
Oh Dear
A documented REST API with bearer-token authentication covers monitors, checks, tags and monthly-report recipients, status-page updates can be posted from a deploy pipeline, and a Terraform provider (MIT licensed, maintained by Articulate) plus JSON template payloads kept in version control give real monitoring-as-code. SAML 2.0 single sign-on is on every plan and can be enforced for everyone except the team owner, alongside two-factor, roles and unlimited users — the SSO enforcement matters to me. We found no public information on SCIM provisioning, audit logs or CSV bulk import, and client reports carry a small "powered by Oh Dear" mark.
UptimeRobot
A REST API covers monitors, alert contacts, maintenance windows and status pages with JSON responses and published rate limits, alongside a CLI, MCP, bulk operations and community Terraform and Ansible tooling; team members get read, write and notify-only roles with two-factor authentication, and 2FA is required for privileged administrative access under the data processing agreement. We found no public information on single sign-on (SAML), SCIM provisioning, customer-facing audit logs or client sub-accounts, which for my ISO 27001 scope is the gap.
Uptime reports, data & the vendor's own reliability
Oh Dear
Each incident records start, end and duration with the response code and seeing location per run, uptime percentage is kept for seven days, twelve months and all-time, monitoring data is retained typically one to two years and exportable via API, and opt-in logo-branded monthly reports with selectable sections go to up to five recipients and stay archived on links that need no account. Response-time breakdowns cover DNS, connect, TLS and first byte, and the probe addresses are published in HTML, JSON and CSV. The vendor states it offers no formal SLA with credits (a 99.9 percent target only), and we found no public information on the vendor's own public status page, incident history or response-time percentiles.
UptimeRobot
The SLA feature states its calculation method (average of monitor uptimes to three decimals, maintenance windows excluded), emails monthly or quarterly reports with downtime budget, verdict, MTBF and average incident duration, and states retention of 12 to 24 months by plan; response-time summaries include average, minimum, maximum and peaks above 1000 ms. We found no public information on percentiles or per-phase breakdowns, a raw export of check results, the probe IP addresses for allow-listing, or the vendor's own public status page and incident history.
European sovereignty
Oh Dear
Immutable VOF of Berlaar, Belgium is the contracting entity, primary account and monitoring data sit with Combell in Belgium on ISO 27001-certified infrastructure, and performance metrics sit in ClickHouse Cloud's EU region. The subprocessor list is public with regions and certifications — including US providers for probes, backups and check reports — transfers outside the EU rely on Standard Contractual Clauses (Decision 2021/914) under Belgian law with Antwerp courts, and a GDPR data processing agreement with 48-hour breach notification is published. The vendor candidly states it holds no ISO 27001 or SOC 2 itself (the certificates belong to its hosting chain) and does not claim immunity from the US CLOUD Act, and we found no public information on a self-hosted edition.
UptimeRobot
The contracting entity is UptimeRobot s. r. o. of Bratislava under Slovak law, with a published data processing agreement (version 2.2) carrying SCC Modules Two and Three, a subprocessor list with purposes (Hetzner, AWS, Digital Ocean, Limestone Networks, Cloudflare, Plivo, SendGrid, Stripe, Intercom and others), 30-day change notice and deletion certification within 90 days — a chain I can put in front of an auditor. Processing is stated as primarily in the European Union with a secondary United States location for the infrastructure providers, the individual subprocessors' own seats are not stated per company, and the vendor's own certification is SOC 2 Type I while the ISO 27001 certificates belong to its providers.
Pricing transparency
Oh Dear
Ten named tiers from €15/month for two sites up to €399/month for 200, scaling only by monitored sites, with single sign-on, two-factor, unlimited users, unlimited status pages and all checks on every plan, no setup fees, monthly or annual billing in advance, cancel anytime, a 30-day money-back guarantee, 30 days' notice of price rises, EU payment methods, and SMS priced through the customer's own Vonage account rather than per message. The Enterprise tier above 200 sites is quoted on request, and there is a 10-day trial without credit card but we found no public information on a permanent free tier. The pricing page states prices in EUR excluding VAT while the terms state prices include applicable Belgian VAT where required — the captured pages give different figures for VAT treatment, so a buyer should confirm which applies before signing.
UptimeRobot
All tiers are public with monitor counts, intervals, seats and status pages (Free €0, Solo starts at €108/y, Team €360/y, Scale starts at €660/y, Enterprise by quote), extra login seats cost $15 or $19 a month, credit packs run from $3 for 10 to $100 for 1000 with auto-refill behavior documented, and cancellation carries a 14-day withdrawal period. The per-country SMS cost list sits in a blog post rather than the pricing page, and we found no public information on VAT treatment or the price of extra monitors and shorter intervals as standalone upgrades.
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.