Quick verdict
In our view, Oh Dear is the broader tool. Its pricing page says every feature is on every plan and the number of sites and servers is the only difference between plans. OctoPing runs fewer kinds of check at a lower price per site. Its hosting alert names the network or CDN a site moved to. It alerts on any robots.txt change and on a noindex with no pattern to set, and sends client contacts alerts and a monthly summary.
Choose Oh Dear if
- You need crawls and speed checks. The table lists the crawl, speed and sitemap checks Oh Dear runs, and OctoPing has none of them.
- Reports carry your logo. Oh Dear offers a monthly report per site with your team logo and accent color, sent to up to five recipients per monitor. Reports carry a small powered by Oh Dear mark and are not fully white-labeled. OctoPing's monthly summary shows the OctoPing logo and ends with a line naming OctoPing.
- You resell or keep data in the EU. Oh Dear has a reseller program for running clients' monitoring under your own name, and lists monitoring data stored in Belgium, with a signable data processing agreement.
Choose OctoPing if
- You answer for marketing sites. No dedicated robots.txt, noindex, page text change or hosting check appears in its list of checks, though its string, header, DNS and Lighthouse checks reach parts of the same ground. OctoPing alerts on any robots.txt change and on a noindex with no pattern to set.
- Per-site price matters. On monthly billing, Starter costs $0.95 a site against $4.36 for Oh Dear's Studio plan.
- Alerts and the summary share one list. A status page's contacts get alerts for its sites and a monthly summary, with no login and no seat, and contacts and subscribers share an allowance of 500, 5,000 or 25,000 by plan. Oh Dear also reaches clients, since each site routes an outage to its own people on the channels that team already uses.
What each tool checks
| Capability | Oh Dear | OctoPing |
|---|---|---|
| Uptime | Every minute by default, set per site from 1 to 60 minutes. A failure is confirmed from a second location before an alert goes out, and you choose the primary of 16 locations. | Every 5 minutes by default, down to every minute on every plan. Probes in the US, Europe and Asia confirm or contradict a failure. |
| Page text | Required strings, forbidden strings, JSON body assertions and response header checks. | A diff of the page's main text, on its own schedule. Navigation, buttons and footers can fall out of the extracted text, and so can headlines and prices on some page builders. It has no ignore rules. |
| Domain and SSL expiry | A certificate check every 30 minutes that also reports a broken chain. Expiry dates read over RDAP, with an alert 10 days before expiry by default. | Both, warning 30 days ahead by default. Some registries, Germany's .de among them, publish no expiry date. |
| DNS and hosting | Alerts when the content of a DNS record changes, such as an IP address, a CNAME target or an MX server. Behind Cloudflare nameservers it ignores A and AAAA records when it looks for changes. | Nameserver and mail records only. A hosting alert names the old and new network (ASN) or CDN when a site moves. A move to a new address inside the same network, or behind a CDN that stays in place, sends nothing. |
| robots.txt and noindex | Its docs describe a response header condition that can catch an accidental noindex in the X-Robots-Tag header. A daily Lighthouse run that scores SEO and can alert on score thresholds you set. Lighthouse's own SEO audits include a page blocked from indexing and a robots.txt that isn't valid, so a threshold can catch both. | Alerts on any robots.txt change and flags a Disallow: / block. A noindex check reads the monitored URL's meta robots tag and X-Robots-Tag header, twice before it alerts. It reads that one URL and doesn't crawl the site. |
| Crawls and speed | A crawl of the whole site once a day for broken links, missing images and mixed content. Daily Lighthouse reports for performance, accessibility, best practices and SEO, kept for six months. A daily read of the sitemap that checks the file is valid and every address in it works. | Not offered |
| Servers and jobs | Ping, TCP port, open port and application health checks. Cron and scheduled task monitoring. | Heartbeats for scheduled jobs. No server, ping or port checks. |
| Status pages | Unlimited status pages with a custom domain, logo, favicon and colors. Visitors can subscribe by email, Slack or RSS, with 500 confirmed email subscribers per team by default. | Unlimited white-label pages with incidents, email subscribers and feeds. Custom domains on paid plans. |
Oh Dear column read from: ohdear.app/features/website-uptime-monitoring, ohdear.app/docs/features/dns-monitoring, ohdear.app/docs/features/domain-name-monitoring, ohdear.app/docs/features/lighthouse-monitoring, ohdear.app/features/status-pages, ohdear.app/docs.
Pricing at equal site counts
Both columns are dollars per month on monthly billing, and each offers 2 months free on annual billing. Oh Dear shows prices in the visitor's currency, excluding VAT, so a euro view shows different amounts. Each row uses its smallest plan that holds the same count of sites and servers. Prices are from ohdear.app/pricing.
| Size | OctoPing | Oh Dear |
|---|---|---|
| 20 | Starter: $19 for 20 sites ($0.95 a site) | Studio: $109 for 25 sites and servers ($4.36 a site) |
| 60 | Agency: $49 for 60 sites ($0.82 a site) | Agency Plus: $219 for 75 sites and servers ($2.92 a site) |
| 200 | Scale: $129 for 200 sites ($0.65 a site) | Scale: $439 for 200 sites and servers ($2.20 a site) |
Oh Dear's pricing FAQ says “Per site, we're not the cheapest option” and argues that one price bundles every check, so matching it elsewhere means paying for several tools separately. If you'd use none of its crawl, Lighthouse or server checks, OctoPing's price per site is lower at every size in the table.
Where Oh Dear does more
- More kinds of check. The crawl, Lighthouse, sitemap and server checks in the table have no OctoPing equivalent, and neither do Oh Dear's AI checks, which are plain-English checks that an AI runs in a real browser.
- Client logins. Clients can be invited as guests who can look at their own sites and status pages and change nothing. OctoPing's Viewer logins see every workspace site, so clients get a status page instead.
- People and alerts. Oh Dear offers unlimited users on every plan, against 2 seats on Starter, 8 on Agency and unlimited on Scale, and lists 12 channels, including Slack, email, SMS, Teams, PagerDuty and webhooks. OctoPing has no SMS yet, and the roadmap list names "SMS and phone alerts".
Moving from Oh Dear to OctoPing
Each Oh Dear site becomes one OctoPing site. Server, port and ping monitors have no OctoPing counterpart, so only web addresses and scheduled tasks move.
Add each site
Follow add your first site. Domain and SSL monitoring start switched on.
Switch on the marketing checks
DNS, hosting, robots.txt and content checks start switched off. See hosting change detection, robots.txt monitoring and website change detection.
Move scheduled tasks to heartbeats
Rebuild each client page
Build a white-label status page and add the client as a contact.
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
Each site gets all eight checks on every plan, along with unlimited white-label status pages and client contacts. 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 site to see it working.
Last reviewed
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