Comparison
Keel vs Oh Dear
This page is for people watching a handful of URLs who searched "Oh Dear alternative" and want to know whether the smaller tool does the job. Oh Dear and Keel actually agree on more than they differ — flat pricing, one product, no seat games — but they differ on how much each dollar buys, and we'd rather say where each wins.
The comparison
Oh Dear's figures below are from their pricing page as of October 2026 — USD, billed monthly. Keel's are from ours. Both will drift; the shape of the difference won't.
| What you get | Keel | Oh Dear |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Single-purpose uptime monitor. Nothing else, on purpose. | Website health monitor: uptime, SSL, DNS, broken links, performance and Lighthouse, cron jobs, domain expiry, status pages — every check on every plan. |
| Free tier | 3 monitors, 5-minute checks, webhook alerts, 30-day history. | None — a 10-day free trial with all features, no credit card, then paid only. |
| Paid pricing | £5/month flat — 50 monitors, 60-second checks. No seats, no add-ons, no usage tiers. | Flat per-site: Solo 2 sites $17/month, Solo Plus 5 sites $32, Freelance 10 sites $55, up to Scale 200 sites $439/month. Every feature on every plan; 2 months free billed annually. Unlimited users throughout. |
| Alerting | Webhooks only — down, up, or both, to any HTTPS endpoint, on every plan including Free. Payloads are plain JSON, so Slack, Discord, and curl work without adapters. Failed deliveries retry once. | Slack, email, Teams, PagerDuty, Opsgenie, and webhook, routed to whoever owns the site — on every plan. |
| Incident threshold | Two consecutive failures open an incident; one blip is ignored on purpose. The first passing check closes it and fires up. | Every alert is verified from a second location before it's sent — no false alarms by design. |
| Check types | HTTP and HEAD, against a status code you choose. Redirects are not followed — a 3xx counts as down unless you set it as the expected code. | Uptime, SSL certificates, DNS records, broken links and mixed content, performance and Lighthouse, cron/scheduled tasks, domain expiry, ping, TCP ports, application health, sitemap changes. |
| Status pages | Not offered. | Public status pages with subscriber notifications, white-label branding, and per-client views — on every plan. |
| History | 30 days of every check — status, status code, latency, error text. | Uptime history with monthly client-ready reports; per-check retention not published as a single number on the pages cited. |
When Keel is the better fit
When the URLs are few, the webhook is the point, and free-forever matters.
You want a free tier, not a trial
Keel's free plan is 3 monitors with 5-minute checks and webhook alerts, forever — Oh Dear's entry is a 10-day trial, then $17/month for 2 sites. If watching three URLs for nothing is the job, Keel does it indefinitely; Oh Dear doesn't have that mode.
Fifty monitors for the price of two sites
Keel's Pro plan is 50 monitors at 60-second checks for £5/month flat. Oh Dear's Solo plan is $17/month for 2 sites — beautiful software, every check included, but priced for agencies whose clients pay the bill. At hobby scale the arithmetic is lopsided, and we'd rather say so.
One blip shouldn't wake anyone
Keel opens an incident after two consecutive failures, deliberately: a single timeout is usually noise, and noise that wakes you is a cost. Oh Dear filters false alarms by verifying from a second location — a different, also-good answer to the same problem.
You'd rather not crawl a whole site
Oh Dear's broken-link crawler, Lighthouse runs, and mixed-content scans are genuinely useful — for the sites that need them. If the question is just "is this URL up," that machinery is overhead. Keel checks a status code and fires a webhook.
When Oh Dear is the better fit
For most people comparing the two honestly — and the reasons are structural.
You watch client sites for a living
Oh Dear is built for agencies: every client's sites grouped, branded status pages, monthly reports with your logo on them, read-only client access, unlimited users on every plan. Keel is single-user by design and has none of that machinery.
"Up" isn't the whole question
SSL certificates nearing expiry, broken links, mixed content, DNS changes on a Friday, cron jobs that silently stopped, Lighthouse scores — Oh Dear watches all of it. Keel does HTTP and HEAD against an expected status code, and nothing else.
You want alerts before they're confirmed real
Oh Dear checks every minute from multiple locations and verifies every alert from a second location before sending — genuinely strong false-alarm hygiene. Keel checks from one place, at 5 minutes free or 60 seconds on Pro, and leans on the two-failure threshold instead.
Status pages and reporting are the deliverable
If clients expect a branded status page and a monthly uptime report, Oh Dear includes both on every plan. Keel offers neither — its webhook is the entire output.
Pick the small one on purpose.
If you run client sites and need the whole health picture, use Oh Dear — it's a lovely tool for exactly that. If you need a handful of URLs watched and a webhook fired when they break, that's £5/month and about a minute of setup.
The webhook payload and public API are documented at keelmonitor.com/docs; the two-line price list lives at keelmonitor.com/#pricing.