What is Oh Dear?
Oh Dear is an all-in-one website monitoring tool from the Laravel community. It covers uptime, SSL certificate and domain expiry, broken links, scheduled (cron) tasks, DNS, and hosted status pages. Every paid plan includes every feature; plans differ only by the number of sites you monitor. It is polished, developer-friendly, and popular with PHP and Laravel teams.
When Oh Dear is the right pick
Choose Oh Dear when your priority is broad website hygiene for a set of sites: broken-link crawling, DNS and domain-expiry checks, scheduled-task heartbeats, and a clean status page, all under one flat per-sites price. It is an excellent fit for agencies and Laravel shops that want one tidy dashboard for availability and content health.
Where Oh Dear leaves gaps
Oh Dear is a website-monitoring product, not a performance-testing platform. It has no real load testing, so it cannot tell you how your site behaves under thousands of concurrent users. Its performance checks are not Lighthouse Core Web Vitals, and its API checks are single-request rather than multi-step assertion flows. There is also no free tier, only a 10-day trial.
LoadFocus vs Oh Dear: comparison
| Feature | LoadFocus | Oh Dear |
|---|---|---|
| Uptime monitoring | Yes. 1-minute checks | Yes |
| SSL certificate monitoring | Yes. every plan including free (14/7/3-day warnings) | Yes (paid plans, from EUR 15/mo) |
| Real load testing | Yes. JMeter, k6, up to 12,500 VUs | No |
| Page-speed / Core Web Vitals | Yes. Lighthouse LCP, CLS, TTFB + real-user INP | Performance checks, not Lighthouse CWV |
| Multi-step API monitoring | Yes. multi-step, assertions, JSON path (paid plans) | Limited (HTTP checks) |
| Broken-link / DNS / scheduled-task checks | Uptime + API + speed focus | Yes (its strength) |
| Test locations | 25+ AWS regions | Multiple regions |
| Alert channels | Email, Slack, Teams, webhooks + per-channel routing | Email, Slack, webhooks, integrations |
| Free tier | Forever free: 10 checks, 10,000 runs a month | No (10-day trial) |
| Pricing entry | $0, then ~$19/mo | From EUR 15/mo (by sites) |
When LoadFocus is the right pick
Pick LoadFocus when you need more than availability: cloud load testing with JMeter and k6 up to 12,500 virtual users, Lighthouse-based Core Web Vitals monitoring, and assertion-based multi-step API checks from 25+ AWS regions. SSL certificate expiry monitoring is included on every plan, including the free one, with warnings 14, 7 and 3 days out.
Migrating from Oh Dear
Recreate your Oh Dear uptime and SSL checks as LoadFocus API monitors in minutes: paste each URL, pick locations and a 1-minute frequency, and connect Slack, Teams or a webhook. Start on the free tier to run both side by side before you switch.
FAQ: LoadFocus vs Oh Dear
Does LoadFocus monitor SSL certificates like Oh Dear?
Yes. Every HTTPS check monitors the certificate and warns you 14, 7 and 3 days before expiry, on every plan including free.
Does Oh Dear do load testing?
No. Oh Dear focuses on website monitoring. LoadFocus adds JMeter and k6 cloud load testing up to 12,500 virtual users.
Is there a free LoadFocus plan?
Yes. The free tier includes up to 10 checks and 10,000 check runs a month, with SSL monitoring and alerts by email, Slack, Microsoft Teams and webhooks (PagerDuty, Opsgenie and Discord are on paid plans). Oh Dear has no free tier.
Get started with LoadFocus
Replace Oh Dear's uptime and SSL checks and gain load testing, Core Web Vitals and API monitoring on one platform. Start free, no credit card required.
