Oh Dear is a well-built all-rounder — uptime, scheduled tasks, certificates, broken links and mixed content, with a genuinely pleasant interface. It is also priced per site, which is where the comparison gets interesting if you look after a lot of them.
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Is MonitoringDaddy a real Oh Dear alternative?
For uptime, cron and certificate monitoring across many sites, yes, and considerably cheaper at volume. Oh Dear is the better tool if you want broken-link crawling, mixed-content detection or its DNS monitoring — three things we do not do at all.
Oh Dear charges by the site. Looking after thirty client sites makes that a very different bill from a plan that counts monitors.
It will tell you a page is broken. It will not tell you the wording changed, which is a separate and common need.
Broken-link checking and mixed-content scanning are excellent features that many teams never switch on.
Green marks the stronger option on that row. Third-party pricing and limits change without notice — treat the Oh Dear column as a starting point and confirm current figures on their site before you decide.
| Feature | Oh Dear | MonitoringDaddy |
|---|---|---|
| Uptime monitoring | Yes, with good incident handling | Yes, on every plan |
| Cron / scheduled task monitoring | Yes | Yes — 1 on free, 25 on the $5 plan, 100 on Pro |
| Broken link checking | Yes — crawls the whole site | No |
| Mixed content detection | Yes | No |
| DNS monitoring | Yes | No — we watch domain expiry, not DNS records |
| Certificate health and expiry | Yes, thorough | Yes — expiry warnings attached to a monitor |
| Website change detection | No | Yes, with word-level diffs and before/after images |
| Hosted status page | Yes | Yes, included on every plan |
| Pricing model | Per site — verify current rates | Per monitor: 25 of each type for $5/mo |
| Free plan | Trial rather than a free tier — verify | Free forever: 1 monitor, 1 watch, 1 heartbeat |
Every comparison page on the internet claims the author's product wins on everything. Here is where it does not.
If any of those are load-bearing for your team, staying put is the correct decision and this page has done its job. Monitoring you actually trust beats monitoring that is marginally cheaper.
Six monitor types and one dashboard. No add-on products, no separate SKUs for the features you assumed were included.
HTTP checks from external infrastructure, as often as every 60 seconds, with downtime and recovery alerts. See the uptime setup guide.
A dedicated monitor type with configurable advance warnings, so a certificate never lapses because nobody owned the renewal. See SSL expiry monitoring.
Registration expiry tracked as its own monitor, warning you months ahead. The outage nobody has a runbook for. See domain expiration monitoring.
Alert when a phrase appears or disappears on a page — defacement, stock changes, silent policy edits. See website change detection.
Watch a competitor or supplier price string and get told the moment it moves. See the price monitoring guide.
Public status pages included on every plan, hosted independently of your infrastructure so they stay up when you do not. See hosted status pages.
Alerts from any of these can be routed to email, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Discord, Telegram, Flock or a generic webhook, and a single monitor can carry several channels at once. Everything is available through the REST API on paid plans, so monitors can be created and torn down programmatically rather than clicked through a form.
Flat monthly tiers. No per-seat charges, no credit top-ups, no usage meters — the number below is the whole bill.
| Plan | Monitors | Fastest interval | Alert channels | API | Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | 1 | Every 30 minutes | — | $0 | |
| Founding Member first 20 only | 25 | Every 5 minutes | Email + webhook & chat | Yes | $5/mo |
| Basic | 10 | Every 10 minutes | Email + webhook & chat | Yes | $8/mo |
| Growth | 50 | Every 5 minutes | Email + webhook & chat | Yes | $19/mo |
| Pro | 100 | Every 60 seconds | Email + webhook & chat | Yes | $34/mo |
Annual billing is cheaper on every paid tier. The pricing page is the authoritative list.
There is no automated importer — monitors are re-created by hand, or scripted through the API on paid plans. Budget about a minute per monitor.
List every active check: URL, interval, condition and alert recipients. Most teams find monitors nobody needs any more.
Start with revenue-critical URLs. Set the interval, add the condition, attach the channels your team already watches.
Keep Oh Dear live while the new monitors settle. Compare alerts and confirm nothing is missing.
Move any public status page across, confirm a clean week of overlap, then cancel the old subscription.
This page is written by the team that builds MonitoringDaddy, so treat it as an informed argument rather than a neutral audit. What we can promise is that the claims about our own product are checked against what the software actually does, and the rows where Oh Dear is stronger are marked as such rather than quietly omitted.
Details about Oh Dear come from their public pricing and documentation at the time of writing. Monitoring vendors change plan limits and prices frequently and without announcement, so every third-party figure here carries a "verify on their site" caveat and you should take it seriously before making a decision on cost.
One thing worth stating plainly, because most comparison pages fudge it: MonitoringDaddy checks run from our own infrastructure, which is external to yours, but from a single origin rather than a global probe network. That is enough to catch outages and content changes independently of your stack. It is not enough to tell you a site is down in Frankfurt but up in Ohio. If regional verification is a hard requirement, a larger platform will serve you better and we would rather you knew that now.
Found something out of date or wrong? Tell us and we will correct it.
Every recorded change is compared word by word and kept with a before-and-after image. This is the real output, shown with worked example data.
Price fell from $49 to $39, and an annual discount was added.
The item is available again and the basket button returned.
A new subprocessor was added in another jurisdiction.
The free plan sends to one email address. Every paid plan adds the chat and webhook channels below, with 2 to 10 destinations depending on the plan. However many alerts you receive, the price does not change — nothing here is metered or charged per alert.
There are no voice calls and no SMS. If a phone call at 3am is a hard requirement, say so before you subscribe — we would rather tell you now than refund you later.
Broken-link crawling, mixed-content detection and DNS monitoring, plus deeper certificate health checks. All four are real gaps on our side and we would rather name them.
Website change detection — watching a page for wording changes with word-level diffs and before/after images. Oh Dear checks whether pages work, not whether they changed.
Oh Dear charges per site; we charge per monitor. For one or two sites the difference is small. For an agency with thirty client sites, 50 monitors on our $19 Growth plan is a very different number.
No. We watch domain expiry — the registration lapsing — not the records themselves. If a changed A record is what you need to catch, Oh Dear does that and we do not.
Yes. Both use the check-in model: your job calls a URL when it finishes and you are alerted when the call stops arriving.
Ours is free forever with one monitor, one watched page and one heartbeat. Oh Dear runs a trial rather than a permanent free tier — verify current terms on their site.
Both include them. Oh Dear's are well designed; ours are included on every plan with branding and a custom domain on paid tiers. Judge on appearance rather than capability.
Some agencies do — Oh Dear for deep site health on flagship sites, and a cheaper per-monitor plan for breadth across the rest.
Last updated August 4, 2026 · Written by Amit Gupta, founder of MonitoringDaddy
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