Published 2026-08-12
Oh Dear alternative for agencies
Most comparison pages pick an easy opponent. This one does not.
Oh Dear made the same core decision we did — a site is the unit, not a monitor — and it checks a good deal more than whether a URL answers. If you are reading this expecting to be told it is a thin uptime pinger, it is not, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.
So this page is narrow on purpose: where the two genuinely differ, and where they do not.
Everything below about our own product is ours to assert. For theirs, read their own pages — features move, and a comparison written in August is a claim about August.
Where they overlap
Both price by site rather than by endpoint. Both take the position that a hostname carries more than its uptime, and that an agency thinking in clients should not be billed in rows. Both watch certificates. Both send you somewhere useful when something breaks.
If that is the whole of what you need, the honest answer is that either will serve you, and you should pick on feel and price.
Where we go further
The contact form is actually submitted. Not requested, not parsed for a
<form> tag — submitted. A real POST from a marked address, on a schedule, so
a form that has quietly stopped delivering leads is caught in hours. This is the
failure that costs an agency a client without ever showing up as downtime, and
it is the check we built the product around.
Mail authentication in depth. SPF with the DNS lookups counted through every include, because passing ten is a permanent failure that leaves the record looking entirely reasonable. DMARC policy, DKIM selectors, and MTA-STS checked against the live MX records rather than assumed.
Domain registration read from the registry. Expiry, registrar, the transfer lock coming off, DNSSEC — over RDAP rather than scraped from WHOIS. A domain lapsing is slow, expensive and occasionally impossible to undo, and the warning signs are visible days ahead to anyone reading the registry.
Readiness for AI agents. Whether an agent arriving at the site can find what it needs, and whether you have said anything at all about AI crawlers. Allowing and refusing are both decisions; neither is reported as a fault. This is new enough that most of the category has not looked at it yet.
One status link per client
Both products publish status pages. The shape here is built for an agency holding thirty client relationships: one link per client showing the sites you look after for them and nothing else, on an unguessable URL, and your name on the footer instead of ours on any plan at no cost.
Those pages also carry no analytics of any kind — not ours, not Google's — which is a deliberate line. The people opening a page you sent your client are your client's visitors, not our data.
When Oh Dear is the right answer
If you want broken-link crawling and mixed-content scanning across a large content site, that is squarely their territory and not something we do. If your team already lives in their workflow and the four things above are not failures you have been bitten by, switching tools to acquire them is not obviously worth your afternoon.
The case for moving is specific: you have been burned by a silent form, a lapsed domain, or mail that stopped being delivered, and you want the tool to be watching that on its own.