Tenium vs Oh Dear

What Oh Dear is, and who adores it

Oh Dear bundles uptime, certificate and domain checks, scheduled-job monitoring, broken-link and mixed-content crawls, and performance checks into a price per site. It is built by people from the Laravel community and has a first-party package, so a PHP shop gets very good value from it. Their model assumes one site is one thing worth looking after properly, and in that model it works well.

When per-site pricing stops fitting

An agency does not usually look after a handful of important sites. It looks after thirty or fifty modest ones, each needing an uptime check, a certificate check, a keyword on the home page and perhaps a checkout path. Per-site pricing counts each as a full site, even if you do not use the crawler for it. Tenium prices by monitor instead, so a site that needs five checks takes five monitors from a pool.

We treat a site as roughly five monitors, matching the usual WordPress set of five checks (home page, keyword, certificate and domain checks, plus one more). On that assumption 300 monitors is about 60 sites on Pro, and 1000 on Agency is about 200. Dollar prices are compared as published. Euro prices are shown as published and converted at about EUR 1 = USD 1.08 for the percentages.

• 20 monitors, 3 people: Tenium Pro at $29. For Oh Dear: 4 sites, a tier between $17 (2 sites) and $165 (50 sites); see their pricing page.
• 100 monitors, 3 people: Tenium Pro at $29. For Oh Dear: 20 sites, a tier between $17 (2 sites) and $165 (50 sites); see their pricing page.
• 400 monitors, 3 people: Tenium Agency at $59. For Oh Dear: no public price we can verify for this size, so ask Oh Dear for a quote.

How to read those lines

We hold only two Oh Dear data points, $17 for 2 sites and $165 for 50, so for in-between counts we print the range and send you to their pricing page rather than interpolate. The Tenium side is computed exactly. Whatever Oh Dear charges for your site count, add up what their crawlers and Lighthouse runs are worth to you, because that is the part you would be giving up.

What you give up

Be honest about which Oh Dear checks you really use:

• Broken-link crawling. Tenium does not crawl sites.
• Mixed-content and SEO checks. Not offered.
• Lighthouse performance runs. Tenium measures response time, not rendering.
• The Laravel package and integrations for that ecosystem. Tenium has a REST API and heartbeat URLs you can call from any language.

What you get in exchange

A larger pool of monitors for the money, 30-second checks on Pro, a branded PDF report for each client on Agency ($59), and client workspaces so a client can log in and see only their own sites. Tenium confirms outages from all two regions before alerting, so a single probe misreading a slow response should not wake anybody.

A migration that keeps your site list tidy

If your list of sites is the thing you maintain carefully, the import is a good chance to clean it.

• Fetch your sites from the Oh Dear API, or paste the URLs into the import box. Each URL becomes an HTTP monitor; crawler settings and notification contacts are not imported, so re-add the contacts by hand.
• For WordPress sites, add the keyword, certificate and domain checks afterwards (or as extra rows in the CSV). There is no one-click WordPress template.
• If you used a client label per site, on Agency create a workspace per client and move that client’s monitors into it after the import.
• Point custom status-page domains at the Tenium CNAME target after you build the new pages. Oh Dear subscribers do not transfer.
• Keep the crawler running in Oh Dear for a month if you value it, and remove uptime checks there only when Tenium has proven itself.

Stay with Oh Dear if

You monitor fewer than ten important sites, you use the crawlers weekly, or your team is deeply invested in Laravel. The per-site price then buys you a lot of checks that Tenium does not run, and the monitor-count advantage does not apply.