Who each tool is for
Oh Dear
Developers, agencies and hosting providers who want website, certificate, DNS and scheduled-task monitoring with broken-link and performance checks, unlimited users and branded client reports.
Beamfar
Web agencies and freelancers who want incidents explained by what changed just before, SEO regressions caught, and one monthly report per client. Individuals in the EU can buy it for their own sites too; individual plans are available in the EU for now.
Side by side
The Beamfar column describes what is built today. The Oh Dear column is what its own pages say, copied as published.
| Topic | Beamfar | Oh Dear | Source (Oh Dear) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Price | Prices, from €19 to €249 a month, excluding VAT. Nothing can be bought yet. Plan limits: 10, 40, 100 or 200 client sites; 1 on the Free plan a trial ends into. | Per month in EUR excluding VAT, billed monthly: 2 sites 15, 5 sites 29, 10 sites 49, 25 sites 99, 50 sites 149, 75 sites 199, 100 sites 249, 150 sites 329, 200 sites 399. Billed annually, a year costs ten monthly payments (“Get 2 months free”). Read from the EU on 2026-11-02; the USD view was not read again. | Oh Dear pricing |
| Trial | 14 days, no card, one per organisation. | 10 days, no card; a 30-day money-back guarantee for new customers. | Oh Dear pricing |
| Check interval | Every minute on the paid plans; every 30 seconds possible on Team and up (a choice per check); every 5 minutes on the Free plan; always from every enabled region. | Its documentation says uptime checks happen every minute from the primary location (read 2026-10-28). | Oh Dear docs: uptime and performance monitoring |
| How a site is called down | Two regions must agree. One region failing is a regional issue with no alert. Each alert lists what each region saw. | A failure at the primary location is re-checked from a second, randomly chosen location. Both must report down for an incident; otherwise it is logged as a warning. In its documentation’s example the notification fires after 2 consecutive minutes of confirmed downtime; the number can be changed. | Oh Dear docs: uptime and performance monitoring |
| What changed before an incident | DNS records, the certificate, the final redirect URL and SEO signals are recorded on a timeline and marked when an incident follows within the next hour. | DNS records, certificate health and domain expiration are monitored. We did not find a timeline that attaches changes to an incident on the pages we read. | Oh Dear pricing |
| SEO-risk alerts | Alert when a page becomes noindex, robots.txt starts blocking it, or its canonical moves to another host. | Sitemap monitoring and broken-link checks are listed. Noindex and robots.txt alerts are not listed on the pricing page (read 2026-11-02). Its Lighthouse SEO check runs once a day by default and never more often than once a day, and the words noindex, canonical and robots.txt do not appear on that page. | Oh Dear pricing Oh Dear Lighthouse SEO monitoring |
| Other checks | A plan-limited daily or weekly crawl of the site: broken pages and outbound links, redirect loops, mixed content and sitemap monitoring. Also built: TCP port, ping (TCP reachability, not ICMP), DNS blocklist and heartbeat (cron) monitors. Not built: Lighthouse or browser performance audits. | Broken links and mixed content, performance and Lighthouse, ping, TCP port, scheduled tasks (cron) and DNS blocklist checks. The pricing page also lists a port scanner, application health and checks run with AI; we did not read what the AI checks cover (read 2026-11-02). | Oh Dear pricing |
| Why it went down | The incident page shows the likely cause with its confidence and evidence, or says unknown, and drafts the note to the client in three lengths. Rules decide it, not an AI model. Every plan. | Not listed on the pricing page (read 2026-11-02). | Oh Dear pricing |
| Risks across all clients | The Client Risk Radar: one list across all clients of what could hurt a site next, each risk with its evidence; a check that could not be made is never an all-clear. Every plan. | Its pricing page shows a dashboard that lists every monitored site with performance and detected issues (read 2026-11-02). | Oh Dear pricing |
| Site security and SEO integrity | Each site is read from outside for new script hosts, hidden links and text, spam vocabulary, redirects away and missing security headers; after a DNS proof of control also as Googlebot, as a visitor from a search result and as four AI crawlers, and for files that should never be public. Findings are possible problems with evidence, not verdicts. Tested on test pages; not yet run on customers’ sites. | Its pricing page lists Lighthouse checks and checks run with AI. Checks for hidden links or text, or for what AI crawlers are served, are not listed there (read 2026-11-02). | Oh Dear pricing |
| Real-user speed | Core Web Vitals that real Chrome visitors measured over 28 days, from Google’s Chrome UX Report, with no script on the site; a site with too few visits says so. Every plan. | Performance and Lighthouse checks are listed (read 2026-11-02). Lighthouse is a lab test, not real visitors’ data. | Oh Dear pricing |
| Acknowledge and escalate | Anyone who may change checks acknowledges an incident in the app, through the API or with the signed link in an alert (every plan). On Team, Agency and Agency Plus an incident nobody acknowledged within 5 to 120 minutes tells a second channel once. No on-call schedules. | Its documentation describes acknowledging a problem (read 2026-10-29). Escalation to a second channel was not on the pages we read. | Oh Dear docs: maintenance periods |
| Client reports | One monthly report per client, printable to PDF; your brand on it on the Agency and Agency Plus plans. | Monthly email reports on every plan; the home page says reports are sent with your name on them and cover uptime, performance, broken links and SSL health. | Oh Dear home page |
| Status pages | 1, 10, 30 or 60 per plan (Solo, Team, Agency, Agency Plus; 1 on Free). Only confirmed incidents show (two regions for page checks, the ping receiver for scheduled tasks). Visitors subscribe by e-mail with a double opt-in and get each confirmed incident, its resolution and the updates you post (Investigating, Identified, Monitoring, Resolved). The client’s own domain is built (a host name you verify with a DNS record, with a certificate) but not yet tested against real DNS and TLS. | Public status pages and subscriber notifications on every plan. Visitors can subscribe by email, Slack or RSS, with 500 confirmed email subscribers per team by default. By default it posts when a connected monitor goes down and when it recovers; you publish updates from the dashboard or the API. A custom domain gets its certificate automatically (read 2026-10-29). | Oh Dear pricing Oh Dear status pages |
| Maintenance windows | Owners, admins and members schedule a window for the organisation, a client or a site, once or every week in a time zone. Checks keep running; alerts are held back, no incident opens, and the time is left out of uptime and the monthly report. A public window shows on the status page as planned maintenance. | Maintenance periods silence problem and recovery notifications while the checks keep running, and downtime during one is not recorded. They can be scheduled ahead of time, one-off or recurring. The page does not say whether a status page shows them (read 2026-10-29). | Oh Dear docs: maintenance periods |
| DNS records | A and AAAA records on every check, from two public resolvers. Name servers, MX, SPF, DMARC and CAA about every 15 minutes; a change counts when two regions see it (or one region twice), and the alert lists the records added and removed. | It checks every name server and every record every two hours by default (A, AAAA, CNAME and MX among others; DMARC is read from _dmarc) and alerts when the content of a record changes and when the name servers are out of sync (read 2026-10-29). | Oh Dear docs: how DNS monitoring works |
| Agency features | Sites grouped by client from the Solo plan and a monthly report per client; your name, logo and colour on reports and status pages on the Agency and Agency Plus plans. A read-only client portal on Team (10 client contacts), Agency and Agency Plus (1,000 each): a contact sees only that client’s sites, incidents, status pages and reports, and takes no seat. No reseller billing. The client’s own domain for a status page is built but not yet tested against real DNS and TLS. | Its pricing page describes grouping each client’s sites with their own monthly reports, read-only access to just the sites that are theirs, a reseller account billed through your own subscription, and a status page on your own domain such as status.yourcompany.com with automatic SSL. It says no feature is locked behind a higher tier. | Oh Dear pricing |
| People | 1, 2, 10, 25 or 50 per plan (Free, Solo, Team, Agency, Agency Plus). | Unlimited users on every plan, with roles and permissions and single sign-on. | Oh Dear pricing |
Where Oh Dear is better
- Lighthouse audits and real ICMP ping. Beamfar watches the page, certificate, DNS, redirects, SEO signals, domain expiry, TCP ports, TCP ping, DNS blocklists and cron heartbeats, and crawls the site for broken links, mixed content and the sitemap.
- Unlimited users on every plan, and single sign-on.
- Status page subscribers by Slack and RSS as well as e-mail.
- A reseller account billed through your own subscription, which Beamfar does not have. Both give a client read-only access to their own sites.
- A published price for every size, with every feature on every plan.
- Branded client reports and status pages are already available to everyone on its pages. White label is not a Beamfar advantage here.
- It is on sale today. Beamfar’s paid plans open soon.
Where Beamfar is better
- A what-changed timeline attached to each incident: DNS records, certificate, redirects and SEO signals.
- SEO-risk alerts for noindex, robots.txt blocking and a canonical moved to another host, after a second sighting.
- Plan limits sized for agency portfolios (10, 30, 100 client sites) with sites grouped by client.
- A likely cause with its evidence, and a drafted note for the client, with each incident; neither is listed on Oh Dear’s pricing page.
- Site security and SEO integrity checks, including what four AI crawlers are served (tried on test pages only), and real-user speed from Google’s Chrome UX Report; Oh Dear lists Lighthouse, a lab test.
- Beamfar’s paid plans are not on sale yet, so there is no price advantage to claim. We will not claim one.
When to choose which
Choose Oh Dear when
You want performance, cron, ping and port checks next to uptime, unlimited users, or you want to buy today. Oh Dear is the closer match to a full agency monitoring service right now.
Choose Beamfar when
You care most about explaining an incident by what changed just before it, and about catching SEO regressions such as noindex after a deploy. Beamfar’s paid plans open soon; the 14-day trial is free and needs no card.
Questions
How is Beamfar different from Oh Dear?
Both confirm downtime from a second location and offer client reports and status pages. Oh Dear also runs Lighthouse audits and real ICMP ping, which Beamfar does not. Both crawl a site for broken links, mixed content and the sitemap. Beamfar adds a what-changed timeline attached to each incident and SEO-risk alerts.
Does Oh Dear verify downtime from another location?
Yes. Its documentation says a failure at the primary location is re-checked from a second location, and both must report down for an incident.
Can I buy Beamfar today?
No. The 14-day trial is free and needs no card; paid plans open soon, and their prices may change before then.
More comparisons
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- Site24x7 alternative for agencies: a broad platform for websites, servers and networks.
- All website monitoring alternatives, from Pingdom and StatusCake to Uptime Kuma, and how to choose website monitoring for an agency.
How we checked
We read each page below on 2026-10-28, the pricing page again on 2026-11-02, and the pages marked (read 2026-10-29) again on 2026-10-29 for the status page, maintenance and DNS rows, and copied what they say. Prices change and can depend on region, so confirm on the vendor’s page before you decide. If you spot a mistake, tell us and we will fix it.
- Oh Dear pricing (read 2026-11-02) (https://ohdear.app/pricing)
- Oh Dear status pages (read 2026-10-29) (https://ohdear.app/features/status-pages)
- Oh Dear docs: snoozing, acknowledging and maintenance periods (read 2026-10-29) (https://ohdear.app/docs/faq/difference-between-snoozing-acknowledging-and-maintenance-periods)
- Oh Dear docs: how DNS monitoring works (read 2026-10-29) (https://ohdear.app/docs/features/dns-monitoring)
- Oh Dear home page (https://ohdear.app/)
- Oh Dear docs: uptime and performance monitoring (https://ohdear.app/docs/features/uptime-and-performance-monitoring)
- Oh Dear Lighthouse SEO monitoring (https://ohdear.app/features/lighthouse-seo-monitoring)