Oh Dear Alternative: Velprove vs Oh Dear (2026 Comparison)

The honest take: Oh Dear is a polished Belgian uptime monitor with 99% positive Capterra sentiment and flat all-features pricing starting at EUR 15/mo. Velprove is the better Oh Dear alternative when you need a free browser login monitor, configurable 30-second intervals, or per-monitor instead of per-site pricing.

Oh Dear vs Velprove at a glance

Oh Dear pricing vs Velprove pricing

Oh Dear charges per number of sites and runs in EUR. The pricing page uses a slider, so the discrete tiers below come from Capterra's published tier list. We confirmed the entry tier (5 sites for EUR 15/mo) on 2026-05-04. USD figures are conversions at roughly 1.08 USD per EUR, not Oh Dear's own quotes.

Every Oh Dear plan includes every feature. Annual billing offers a "modest" discount per their public material, though the exact percentage is not on the pricing page as of this writing.

Velprove pricing:

Two pricing differences worth naming.

First, Velprove has a free plan. Oh Dear does not. Their words: a paid subscription is the entry point, with a 10-day no-card trial and a 30-day money-back guarantee. That's customer-friendly, but it isn't free.

Second, Oh Dear's per-site model rewards customers with one site per domain and penalizes customers with many URLs on the same domain. If you monitor 30 API URLs across two domains, Oh Dear counts that as roughly 30 sites and lands you on the EUR 80/mo tier. Velprove counts monitors, not domains, and 25 of those URLs fit in Starter at $19. The web-alert.io 2026 review of Oh Dear flags this exact friction point.

Where Oh Dear is genuinely strong

Oh Dear is not a weak product. Treat this section as honest, not throat-clearing.

DNS change monitoring is native

"Receive a notification whenever your DNS records are modified, intentionally or maliciously." That's their copy and it's a real feature. If detecting unauthorized DNS edits is a top-three requirement for you, Oh Dear has a built-in answer that Velprove does not currently match.

Mixed-content scanning and broken links

Oh Dear crawls your site looking for HTTP assets on HTTPS pages and broken internal links. It's bundled with their site-crawl product. Useful if you run content-heavy sites with editors making frequent changes.

14 monitor regions

From their docs: Cape Town, Bangalore, Seoul, Singapore, Tokyo, Sydney, Toronto, Frankfurt, London, Paris, Stockholm, Sao Paulo, New York, Dallas, Los Angeles, San Francisco. Velprove runs from 5 regions today (North America, Europe, United Kingdom, Asia, Oceania). If you specifically need African or South American check origin points, Oh Dear has them.

All features on every plan

Oh Dear's pricing page says "Every plan has access to all our features." That includes SSO across all tiers (generally available since 2026-04-27), unlimited team members, status pages, and DNS blocklist monitoring. If you hate feature-gated tiers on principle, the model is clean.

Customer reception

Capterra reviews include "Easy to implement, and I had great feedback from their helpdesk. They even added a new feature based on my feedback" and "Great Tools beside the default monitoring service. Customer support is good. Nice User Interface." Their public sentiment is strong and earned.

Where Velprove is the better fit

Free browser login monitor on day zero

This is the headline. We include 1 browser login monitor on the free plan, running every 15 minutes. Oh Dear positions their browser-flow story as "AI Monitoring": "Use natural language to verify anything on your pages. Check if login forms work, verify content exists, or validate complex page states." That's a different product. More on the distinction in the next section.

Real configurable intervals

Velprove Free runs HTTP checks every 5 minutes, Starter every 1 minute, Pro every 30 seconds. Oh Dear runs uptime checks at a fixed 1-minute cadence with no published way to slow it down for non-production sites or speed it up below 60 seconds. A Capterra reviewer asked for "the ability to change uptime check frequency, especially for non-production sites" as an open wish.

Per-monitor pricing, not per-site

If your 25 monitors live across 3 domains, Velprove Starter at $19 covers them. The closest Oh Dear tier (25 sites, EUR 50) is roughly 3x the price for the same monitor count.

Failure screenshots when something breaks

When a browser login monitor fails, Velprove captures a screenshot of the page at the moment of failure and stores it for retention. Free retains 1 screenshot per failing monitor, Starter retains 5, Pro retains 30. You see exactly what the user saw at the broken step. A login form that rendered without the submit button, a CAPTCHA that appeared mid-flow, an error toast you didn't know existed. Oh Dear's mixed-content scanner finds HTTP assets on HTTPS pages, which is a different problem class. The screenshot artifact is what you actually open at 2 a.m. when an alert fires.

A free tier exists at all

For a developer kicking the tires, a freelancer with 4 client sites, or a side-project owner, "free with one browser login monitor" is qualitatively different from "10-day trial then card on file." The audiences sort themselves.

What a browser login monitor actually does

A browser login monitor opens a real headless browser (Chromium-class), navigates to your login page, fills the form, clicks the button, waits for the post-login state, and asserts that the dashboard or post-login page rendered correctly. It catches the things a 200-OK HTTP probe never sees: a JavaScript bundle that fails to hydrate, a session cookie that fails to set on login, a CAPTCHA that started blocking real users, an OAuth callback that times out, a billing-required interstitial that hijacked the redirect.

It matters because login is where most SaaS revenue actually lives. If signed-in users can't reach their dashboard, your uptime monitor's green light is misleading.

Velprove's free plan includes 1 browser login monitor at a 15-minute interval. Starter raises that to 3 monitors at 10-minute intervals. Pro takes it to 10 monitors at 5-minute intervals. The flow is configured as a multi-step script with real assertions on post-login state.

Oh Dear's adjacent feature is called "AI Monitoring" and is described as "Use natural language to verify anything on your pages. Check if login forms work, verify content exists, or validate complex page states." That is a different category. We could not find public evidence on ohdear.app that AI Monitoring runs a real headless browser session for sustained logged-in flows the way a browser login monitor does. Natural-language assertion is useful, but it isn't the same shape as a configured login script with deterministic step assertions. Pick the right tool for the question you're asking.

How to switch from Oh Dear to Velprove

Moving from Oh Dear to Velprove is straightforward for the common cases. A few things to think about:

• Export your monitor list. Oh Dear has a REST API with recent improvements for AI-agent consumption. Pull the list of sites and their settings to use as a checklist. Velprove doesn't have a bulk import today, so plan for the time to recreate each monitor in the new-monitor wizard (roughly a minute per HTTP monitor, longer for browser login or multi-step flows).
• Re-create alert routing. Both products handle Slack, Discord, Microsoft Teams, and webhooks. Velprove adds PagerDuty on Pro.
• Plan for the per-monitor count. If you were paying for the 50-site or 100-site Oh Dear tier mostly because of URLs on one domain, you may consolidate into Velprove Pro at $49 instead.
• Check region coverage. If you actively rely on Cape Town, Sao Paulo, Toronto, or Stockholm origin points, confirm that Velprove's 5-region map (North America, Europe, United Kingdom, Asia, Oceania) is acceptable before switching.
• Status pages. Velprove Free includes 1 Velprove-branded status page, Starter includes 1 unbranded, Pro includes 3 with custom domain support.

When Oh Dear is the right choice

There are real cases where Oh Dear wins. Don't switch out of brand loyalty to a comparison page.

• You actively need DNS change monitoringand want it from the same tool that does uptime. Oh Dear has it. We don't, today.
• You want flat all-features pricingon principle. Oh Dear's "every plan has every feature" is a clean model.
• You're already happy and the price works. The Capterra sentiment is 99% positive for a reason. Switching to save $20/mo is rarely worth the migration tax if the current product solves your problem.
• You need African or South American origin points. Cape Town and Sao Paulo are not in our 5-region map.
• You want mixed-content scanning bundled in. Oh Dear's site-crawl product covers it natively.

FAQ

Does Oh Dear have a free plan?

No. Oh Dear's entry point is a paid plan starting at EUR 15/mo for 5 sites, with a 10-day no-card trial and a 30-day money-back guarantee. Velprove does have a free plan, which is why this comparison exists: 10 monitors at a 5-minute interval, 1 browser login monitor at a 15-minute interval, multi-step API monitors with up to 3 steps each, email alerts, and monitoring from 5 global regions. No credit card.

How is Velprove's browser login monitor different from Oh Dear's AI Monitoring?

Velprove runs a configured multi-step browser flow in a real headless browser, with deterministic assertions at each step (form fill, click, wait for selector, verify post-login state). Oh Dear's AI Monitoring is a natural-language assertion layer pitched as "Check if login forms work, verify content exists, or validate complex page states." We could not find public evidence that AI Monitoring runs a sustained headless browser session for logged-in flows. They solve overlapping but different problems.

Does Velprove monitor DNS changes like Oh Dear?

Oh Dear wins on DNS today. They have native DNS-change notifications and DNS blocklist monitoring on every plan. Velprove's current plans focus on HTTP, browser login, and multi-step API monitors. If DNS change detection is a primary requirement, Oh Dear is the better fit.

When should I pick Velprove vs Oh Dear?

Pick Velprove if you want a free browser login monitor, configurable check intervals down to 30 seconds, per-monitor pricing instead of per-site math, or a real free tier to start on. Pick Oh Dear if you need native DNS change monitoring, prefer flat all-features pricing, want check origins in Africa or South America, or are already happy and not looking to move.

How hard is it to switch from Oh Dear to Velprove?

For accounts with up to about 25 monitors, an afternoon. There's no bulk import today, so plan for roughly a minute per HTTP monitor in the new-monitor wizard and longer for browser login or multi-step flows that need step-level configuration. Pull your monitor list from Oh Dear's REST API to use as a checklist, re-create each one in Velprove, point your alert integrations (Slack, Discord, Teams, webhooks, PagerDuty on Pro) at the new account, and run both in parallel for a week before turning Oh Dear off. The migration tax is mostly in re-creating any custom assertions and re-pointing status pages.

Try Velprove free

Start free with 10 monitors, a real browser login monitor, and 5 monitor regions. No credit card. If you outgrow the free plan, Starter at $19/mo and Pro at $49/mo add 1-minute and 30-second intervals plus more browser login monitors.

For more comparisons, see our Pingdom alternative, Better Stack alternative, and Checkly alternative write-ups.