# How is Oh Dear different from open-source monitoring? Zabbix, Nagios, Prometheus and friends are powerful, but you host them, patch them, and bolt on every website check yourself. Oh Dear is the all-in-one, fully-hosted alternative: every check built in, nothing to maintain. [ Start monitoring ](https://ohdear.app/register) 10 day free trial No credit card required - Bitmovin - HBO Nordic - Obsidian - Laravel - Fathom Analytics - PHP 8 - Stanford University - Takeaway.com - IGN - VRT NWS - spatie the quick verdict **Choose Oh Dear** if you want uptime, SSL/TLS, DNS, full-site crawling, cron checks and Lighthouse in one place, with unlimited users and one predictable bill. **Choose Uptime Kuma** if you want free and open-source, and you are happy to host and maintain it yourself. **Choose Zabbix** if you need deep, customisable infrastructure and network monitoring and have the ops team to run and tune a Zabbix server. **Choose Nagios** if you want the battle-tested, plugin-driven classic and do not mind config files and manual upkeep. **Choose Icinga** if you like the Nagios plugin ecosystem but want a more modern core and web UI, and can self-host it. **Choose Prometheus** if you are building a metrics-driven stack with Prometheus, Blackbox Exporter, Alertmanager and Grafana and want probes in it. **Choose Checkmk** if you want a batteries-included self-hosted monitor with many built-in checks and will run the Raw edition yourself. Hosted, not homegrown ## Everything self-hosted monitors make you build ### 1. Hosted, zero maintenance We run the servers, probes, upgrades and global checking locations. There is nothing to install, patch, scale or babysit. ### 2. All-in-one, nothing to bolt on Uptime, SSL, DNS, full-site crawl, Lighthouse, cron and status pages, built in. No plugins, exporters or extra services to wire together. ### 3. Checks self-hosted tools lack Natural-language AI checks, whole-site broken-link and mixed-content crawling, real Lighthouse audits and domain expiry, none of them available out of the box in self-hosted monitors. ## Oh Dear compared with open-source monitoring One table. Honest, where a self-hosted tool genuinely fits better, we say so. | | oh dear | [ Uptime Kuma ](https://ohdear.app/oh-dear-vs-uptime-kuma) | [ Zabbix ](https://ohdear.app/oh-dear-vs-zabbix) | [ Nagios ](https://ohdear.app/oh-dear-vs-nagios) | [ Icinga ](https://ohdear.app/oh-dear-vs-icinga) | [ Prometheus ](https://ohdear.app/oh-dear-vs-prometheus) | [ Checkmk ](https://ohdear.app/oh-dear-vs-checkmk) | |---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---| | Uptime monitoring? | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | | Ping monitoring? | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | | TCP port monitoring? | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | | Performance monitoring? | Yes | Partial | Yes | Partial | Partial | Partial | Yes | | Lighthouse audits? | Yes | No | No | No | No | No | No | | Certificate health (SSL/TLS)? | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Partial | Yes | | Broken links & mixed content? | Yes | No | No | Partial | No | No | No | | Sitemap monitoring? | Yes | No | No | Partial | No | No | No | | DNS monitoring? | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | | DNS blocklist monitoring? | Yes | No | Partial | Partial | Partial | No | No | | Domain expiry monitoring? | Yes | Yes | Partial | Partial | Partial | No | Partial | | Scheduled-task / cron? | Yes | Yes | Partial | Partial | Partial | Partial | Partial | | Application health checks? | Yes | Partial | Yes | Partial | Partial | Partial | Partial | | Port scanning? | Yes | No | Partial | Partial | Partial | No | No | | AI-powered checks? | Yes | No | No | No | No | No | No | | Notifications & integrations? | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Partial | Yes | Yes | | Status pages? | Yes | Yes | Partial | No | No | No | No | | Single sign-on (SSO)? | Yes | No | Yes | No | Partial | No | No | | Hosted & managed for you? | Yes | No | No | No | No | No | No | | Zero setup & maintenance? | Yes | No | No | No | No | No | No | | All-in-one, nothing to bolt on? | Yes | Partial | No | No | No | No | No | | Entry price? | $17 | Free | Free | Free | Free | Free | Free | orange = leads this row green = has it grey = doesn't lead Sourced from each vendor's docs · June 2026 [ Try 10 days for free ](https://ohdear.app/register) Being honest ## When self-hosting is the better call If you have the team and the time, open-source can be the right answer. Here's when. Uptime Kuma ### Free & self-hosted Best if you want open-source and do not mind hosting and maintaining it yourself: fast intervals, but no on-call or full-site crawl. Zabbix ### Deep infrastructure monitoring Best if you need powerful, highly-customisable infrastructure, network and server monitoring and have the team to deploy, template and maintain it. Nagios ### Battle-tested & plugin-driven Best if you want the long-established standard with a huge plugin catalogue and are comfortable wiring it up and maintaining it via config files. Icinga ### Modern Nagios-compatible core Best if you want Nagios plugin compatibility with a more modern engine and web interface, and have the team to run it. Prometheus ### Metrics-first observability stack Best if you are standardising on Prometheus for metrics and alerting and will assemble Blackbox Exporter, Alertmanager and Grafana for uptime probes yourself. Checkmk ### Batteries-included self-hosted Best if you want a self-hosted monitor with many built-in checks out of the box and accept that SSO and scale features are commercial-only. And we mean it. We run Zabbix ourselves to keep an eye on Oh Dear's own infrastructure, so we know first-hand how powerful it is. That power just comes with the knowledge to set it up and the upkeep to keep it running. If that's not where you want your team spending its time, that's exactly where we come in. Why we built it this way ## One tool instead of five Every monitoring tool started by answering one question: is the site up? Then the questions kept coming. Is the SSL certificate about to expire? Did a DNS change break email? Did last night's deploy leave forty broken links? Did the nightly backup cron actually run? Is the homepage still fast? Most tools answer one of those and sell you an integration for the rest, or leave you running a second, third and fourth subscription. You become the integration layer, stitching alerts from five dashboards. Oh Dear watches your whole website from one place, so the thing that breaks at 2am is something you already had a check for. That's what the table really shows. It isn't that the others can't check uptime, everyone checks uptime. It's that everything *around* uptime is where sites actually break, and that's the part we refused to make you assemble yourself. Go deeper ## Compare Oh Dear head-to-head Pick the open-source tool you're actually weighing us against. [ vs Uptime Kuma Free, open-source uptime monitoring you host yourself. Compare → ](https://ohdear.app/oh-dear-vs-uptime-kuma) [ vs Zabbix Heavyweight open-source infrastructure monitoring. Compare → ](https://ohdear.app/oh-dear-vs-zabbix) [ vs Nagios The classic open-source monitoring veteran. Compare → ](https://ohdear.app/oh-dear-vs-nagios) [ vs Icinga A modern, Nagios-compatible open-source monitor. Compare → ](https://ohdear.app/oh-dear-vs-icinga) [ vs Prometheus Open-source metrics and alerting you assemble yourself. Compare → ](https://ohdear.app/oh-dear-vs-prometheus) [ vs Checkmk Open-source infrastructure monitoring with a free Raw edition. Compare → ](https://ohdear.app/oh-dear-vs-checkmk) ## Don't take our word for it We built an incredibly powerful website monitor we know you'll love. Don't just take our word for it, here's what our users think: > It took me 5 minutes to setup a status page for @FilmmusicDB and it just works. See for yourself: **Marcus Stöhr** Senior software developer > It's always the first tool that notifies me when something goes wrong. [ **Kevin Petit** Engineer ](https://www.g2.com/products/oh-dear/reviews/oh-dear-review-10735625) > Painless feature-rich website monitoring [ **Alexander Jank** Co-owner ](https://www.g2.com/products/oh-dear/reviews/oh-dear-review-10735605) > I love having all my site management in one place with a sleek interface. **Owen Voke** Engineer > Oh Dear makes monitoring a breeze. **Oliver Smith-Aichbichler** CEO > Perfect for 90% of monitoring needs. **Harrison Brown** CTO > DevOps is already a full-time job, and having Oh Dear monitor SSL is just one less thing to worry about. It's fast, detailed and easy to use. **Neo Ighodaro** CTO at Hotels.ng and organiser of Laravel Nigeria > Oh Dear is user-friendly, easy to set up and onboard users, and is accessible to non-techies. [ **Matt Puttick** Product Owner ](https://www.g2.com/products/oh-dear/reviews/oh-dear-review-10738456) > Full-featured site monitoring for a reasonable price. **Kevin Markam** Founder ## Frequently asked questions ### Isn't open-source monitoring free? The software is free, but you pay in servers, setup, configuration, security patching and the engineering time to run it, plus the risk that your monitoring goes down together with your own infrastructure. Oh Dear is fully hosted from €10/month with nothing to maintain. ### Can't I just self-host and get the same thing? Self-hosted monitors like Zabbix, Nagios, Icinga, Prometheus and Checkmk are powerful for infrastructure, but website-specific checks (full-site crawl, mixed content, sitemap, real Lighthouse, domain expiry, AI checks) usually need plugins, exporters or custom scripts, or simply aren't possible. Oh Dear includes them all out of the box. ### What about Uptime Kuma? Uptime Kuma is a lovely, simple open-source uptime monitor, but you still host and maintain it, and it doesn't crawl your whole site, run Lighthouse, monitor your sitemap or offer AI checks. Oh Dear gives you those without running anything yourself. ### Do I lose control by going hosted? You keep full control of what's monitored and how you're alerted; you just don't run the infrastructure. You also get checks from multiple global locations, independent of your own servers, so a problem with your stack doesn't take your monitoring down with it. [See all other FAQ items →](https://ohdear.app/docs/faq) ## Start monitoring instantly Start a no-strings-attached 10-day free trial. You're all set in less than a minute. (No credit card needed.) Not convinced yet? Need help? Get in touch via .