You want a warning that reaches you before a client's domain registration runs out, from a tool that reads the public record so you need no registrar login. Six tools can send one, and they differ in how often they read the record, which changes they report, which registries they read and what they cost.
How we compared them
The facts below come from each vendor's own pricing and documentation pages as they stood on the date above. We ran no hands-on tests, and a tool can behave differently on a registry we didn't try, so add one client's domain in a trial first. Our judgment sets the leader calls, and OctoPing is one of the six tools. A feature counts for a tool when any of its plans includes it, a free plan counts only where the vendor's label allows commercial use, and price is judged in the price row alone.
Criteria and who leads
| Criterion | Leads | What decides it |
|---|---|---|
| How often the record is read as expiry nears | Oh Dear | Oh Dear reads it every 4 hours inside 30 days. Hyperping reads it once a day inside 45 days and once a week otherwise. StatusCake reads it every 7, 5 or 3 days by plan, then once a day in the last days before expiry. Little Warden reads it every day. UptimeRobot has no interval in its help article. OctoPing reads every week by default and can read daily. |
| Reminder dates and schedule | No tool stands out | You choose the dates at Little Warden, which has default reminders from 30 days out, with the dates configurable, and at StatusCake, which offers custom reminders, with no day count on its feature page. Oh Dear offers a lead time you can set per site up to 90 days, Hyperping a first reminder up to 90 days out and UptimeRobot a first alert 30 days out. OctoPing sets a window per site and repeats on every lookup. |
| Alerts for a change in registrar, owner or status flags | OctoPing and StatusCake | Every tool can alert on a name server change, as the entries show. OctoPing alerts on a change of registrar, registrant or status flags in the registration record, and no other page we read lists a registrar or owner alert. StatusCake has a Transfer Lock setting for .com, .net and .org domains that reminds you when the lock is switched off, a status flag. |
| Registries that publish no expiry date | StatusCake | StatusCake takes a date you enter by hand. Hyperping and OctoPing send no warning for such registries, .de among them, and Oh Dear lists some extensions as unsupported. UptimeRobot says it supports most, and Little Warden names no limit. |
| Price for 20 domains | OctoPing | OctoPing's Starter plan is the lowest paid plan on monthly and annual billing, and the check comes with the site price. StatusCake counts domains as a separate allowance. Hyperping's free plan is labelled for personal projects and UptimeRobot's free plan leaves out domain expiry, so neither counts. |
The totals set the order below. OctoPing leads 2 of 4 criteria and shares first place with StatusCake. Tools on one total share a place, listed alphabetically. The leader calls are our reading of the vendors' pages.
| Place | Tool | Criteria led |
|---|---|---|
| 1= | OctoPing | 2 of 4 |
| 1= | StatusCake | 2 of 4 |
| 3 | Oh Dear | 1 of 4 |
| 4= | Hyperping | 0 of 4 |
| 4= | Little Warden | 0 of 4 |
| 4= | UptimeRobot | 0 of 4 |
The tools at a glance
| Tool | Plan for 20 domains | Monthly billing | Per domain |
|---|---|---|---|
| OctoPing | Starter, 20 sites | $19 | $0.95 |
| StatusCake | Superior, 50 domain monitors | $24.49 | $1.22 |
| Hyperping | Essentials, 50 monitors | $29 | $1.45 |
| Little Warden | Freelancer, 20 URLs | £24.99 | £1.25 |
| Oh Dear | Studio, 25 sites | $109 | $5.45 |
| UptimeRobot | Solo, 50 monitors | $22 | $1.10 |
Each domain is one site or monitor, and per-domain figures are the monthly price divided by 20. Hyperping's row is Essentials because its Free plan is labelled for personal projects, and StatusCake's Free plan holds 1 domain monitor, so the table uses Superior. UptimeRobot prices by country, but Solo read $22 monthly and $19 annual in both views of its page on Nov 7, 2026. Little Warden bills in pounds and the others in dollars.
The tools in our order
1= OctoPing
- Best for. Agencies that want an alert when a client's registrar, registrant or status flags change in the registration record, and a warning before it expires.
- Covers. OctoPing reads the public registration record of the domain behind each site, over RDAP with a WHOIS lookup as the fallback. You set the warning window per site, from 1 to 365 days, and it starts at 30. The warning repeats on every lookup until the domain is renewed. Lookups run every week by default and can run every day. A change in the registrar, registrant, name servers or status flags sends a change alert.
- Price. The domain check is part of the site price. Starter covers 20 sites at $19 a month on monthly billing or $15.83 a month billed annually, and Agency covers 60 at $49 monthly or $40.83 a month annual. A 14-day trial needs no card.
- Limits. Some registries, Germany's .de among them, publish no expiry date, so no warning can come for those domains. Change alerts cover a domain that stays registered. A domain you add becomes a site with an uptime check and counts toward your plan. Several sites on one domain each send their own warning. A wider warning window repeats the alert on every lookup, weekly at the default.
1= StatusCake
- Best for. Portfolios that need domains counted apart from uptime checks, DNS record rules and a hand-entered date for registries it can't read.
- Covers. Its feature page offers custom reminders before a domain expires, and an alert if it does expire. It also offers rules for DNS records to follow, with an alert when a record breaks them, and a Transfer Lock setting for .com, .net and .org domains that reminds you when the lock is switched off.
- Price. Superior costs $24.49 a month billed monthly or $20.41 a month billed annually and holds 50 domain monitors. Business costs $79.99 monthly or $66.66 annual for 120. Its pricing page says it counts uptime, SSL and domain monitors as separate allowances.
- Limits. StatusCake names .de, .eu, .ch and .gr as examples it cannot read automatically, and lets you enter the expiry date by hand and update it after each renewal.
3. Oh Dear
- Best for. Existing Oh Dear customers who want expiry dates read from the registry over RDAP in the same account.
- Covers. Its docs describe expiry dates read over RDAP, with an alert 10 days before expiry by default. Its DNS monitor reads NS records among the DNS records on the monitored domain every two hours from every authoritative nameserver, and sends a records changed alert when something changed.
- Price. The 25-site Studio plan costs $109 a month on monthly billing. Paying yearly gets 2 months free. DNS monitoring is included on every plan.
- Limits. Its docs say .be and .de aren't supported yet, though .de appears in the page's list of supported extensions, so test a .de domain in the trial. It shows a domain's status codes, such as clientTransferProhibited, on the domain report, and a change in them sends no notification.
4= Hyperping
- Best for. Teams with a small portfolio that want a ladder of reminders and one warning per domain.
- Covers. Hyperping reads the expiry date from the registry over RDAP, and uses WHOIS for extensions without RDAP whose WHOIS still publishes an expiry date, such as .io, .co and .me. Its docs describe a first reminder 7, 14, 30, 60 or 90 days before the registration ends, then a reminder at each step below it (60, 30, 15, 7, 3 and 1 days), or no reminders at all. Ten monitors on the same domain in a project send one reminder, not ten.
- Price. The Free plan covers 20 monitors and is labelled “For personal projects and trying out Hyperping.” Essentials costs $29 a month billed monthly or $24 a month billed yearly, for 50 monitors.
- Limits. Domains under .de, .eu, .ch, .be and .nl show "not published by this registry" and get no reminders, because those registries publish no expiry dates. No alert for a change of registrar or owner appears in its domain expiry docs, which describe reminders and a renewed notice. Its separate DNS monitors can check an NS record against the answer you set, on the Essentials, Pro and Business plans.
4= Little Warden
- Best for. Teams that value a long run of reminders, nameserver change alerts and a renewal report they can import into a calendar.
- Covers. Its docs list default reminders 30, 20, 15, 10, 5, 3, 2 and 1 day before the domain expires, with the dates and their severity configurable. It also has a renewal report of upcoming domain and SSL renewals that can be imported into a calendar. Its docs say it notifies you every time the nameservers change, by default.
- Price. Freelancer covers 20 URLs at £24.99 a month on monthly billing. Paying annually gets 2 months free.
- Limits. Neither its domain expiry docs nor its feature page names a registry or TLD limit, so test a client's domain in the trial.
4= UptimeRobot
- Best for. Existing UptimeRobot customers on a paid plan who want four reminders for each domain.
- Covers. UptimeRobot's help center lists alerts 30, 14, 7 and 0 days before the domain expires, with the last on the day it expires. It reads expiry dates from WHOIS records, for HTTP(S) and keyword monitors.
- Price. The feature is a service for paid plans, switched on by default when a monitor is created. Solo's 50-monitor tier costs $22 a month billed monthly or $19 billed annually.
- Limits. Its help center says it supports most domain extensions, though some may not be covered because of their WHOIS server rules. Its Free plan has no DNS, SSL, domain expiry and heartbeat monitoring. No alert for a change of registrar or owner appears on its domain expiry pages, which describe alerts before the expiry date. Its separate DNS monitors can check NS records against values you set, on paid plans.
Pages read for this list: hyperping.com/docs/monitoring/domain-expiry, docs.littlewarden.com/docs/checks/expiration/domain-name-expiration, www.statuscake.com/features/domain, ohdear.app/docs/features/domain-name-monitoring, help.uptimerobot.com domain expiration article.
Where OctoPing does less
Hyperping sends a ladder of reminders and one reminder for many monitors on a domain, where OctoPing repeats a single warning on every lookup and each site on a shared domain warns separately. StatusCake accepts a date entered by hand and Little Warden syncs renewals to a calendar. Hyperping and UptimeRobot can check an NS record against a value you set, where OctoPing compares each lookup with the last one. OctoPing has no domain-only mode, so a parked campaign domain costs a site, and no free plan, which Hyperping offers for 20 monitors.
Where OctoPing fits
OctoPing reads the registration record beside the site's uptime, certificate, name server and hosting checks. A client added as a contact on a status page gets the expiry warning too, at most once every 3 days. See domain expiry monitoring for what each lookup stores, the guide to client domain expiry alerts for the setup, and campaign microsite monitoring for domains that outlive their campaign.
Who builds OctoPing
OctoPing is built by Axiolo, which uses it to watch its clients' marketing websites and landing pages. The checks, the client status pages and the monthly summaries are the ones Axiolo relies on for that work.
How it fits the price
Domain monitoring is one of the eight checks every plan includes on every site, so a client's domain warning doesn't change the price. Plans start at $19 a month for 20 sites. See pricing for the full list.
Every account starts with a 14-day free trial. No card required. Start your 14-day trial and add one client's domain to see it working.
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- FeatureDomain expiry monitoring and alerts for every client siteGet an alert before a client's domain expires, and when its registrar, name servers or lock flags change. On by default for every site you add.
- GuideGet alerts before a client's domain expiresWatch a client's domain registration from its public record, with no registrar login, and get a warning in time to renew.
- Use caseCampaign microsite monitoring and domain expiryKeep watch over a campaign, event or launch site and the domain bought for it, from launch day until nothing printed or linked still points there.
- AlternativeStatusCake alternative with one price per siteCompare OctoPing with StatusCake at the same site counts: separate SSL and domain allowances against one price per site, page speed, and how to move over.