Hoppla vs Oh Dear: An Honest Take

Most "vs" articles are thinly disguised hit pieces. This one isn't. Before I wrote a word I went back through Oh Dear's current feature set so I wouldn't misrepresent it, and there's not much to misrepresent. It's good.

Oh Dear is built by the Spatie team, some of the best developers in the Laravel world. I've shipped their open-source packages in production for years. The design is clean, the docs are the kind you actually read, and the PHP SDK is a pleasure.

So no, I didn't build Hoppla because Oh Dear is bad. I built it because I needed something it doesn't do, reselling and white-labeling, and nobody else did it either.

What Oh Dear and Hoppla have in common

Straight up: the overlap is huge. Both cover the core of website monitoring properly:

• Uptime monitoring with multi-location verification (both check from a primary location and re-confirm from a second before alerting)
• SSL certificate monitoring with expiry warnings
• DNS record monitoring with change alerts
• Domain expiry tracking
• Broken link detection via site crawling
• Lighthouse audits for performance and SEO
• Cron/scheduled task monitoring
• Application health checks
• TCP port monitoring
• ICMP ping monitoring
• DNS blocklist monitoring
• Mixed content detection
• Sitemap monitoring
• Status pages with custom domains, logo, and colour customisation

That's most of the job, shared. Monitoring your own projects? Either one is a fine answer, and I won't pretend otherwise.

Where Oh Dear is genuinely better

I want to be specific here, because this is where the decision actually gets made.

Laravel integration. Oh Dear's laravel-health package is the best in its class, full stop. You define health checks inside your app (queue size, cache connectivity, database status, disk space) and Oh Dear watches them natively. Hoppla hits health endpoints over HTTP. That works with any framework, but it doesn't reach into Laravel's internals the way laravel-health does.

Notification ecosystem. Oh Dear ships more channels out of the box: Slack, Discord, Telegram, Microsoft Teams, Google Chat, SMS, Pushover, ntfy, PagerDuty, Opsgenie, and webhooks. Already running incident management through PagerDuty or Opsgenie? Oh Dear plugs straight in. Hoppla has its own on-call and escalation engine, but if your world already revolves around an existing PagerDuty setup, Oh Dear gets you there with less friction.

AI monitoring (coming soon). Oh Dear is building AI-powered browser testing. You describe in plain English what should work, and their AI clicks through the site like a real user. That's a different animal from Hoppla's GEO audit, which scores AI search readiness. If you want something to actually drive the browser and check a checkout flow, Oh Dear's direction is the interesting one.

Port scanning. Oh Dear has a dedicated port scanner that flags ports that shouldn't be open, the kind of thing that catches an internal service accidentally exposed to the world. Different from TCP port monitoring, which confirms a port that should be open is answering.

Maturity and ecosystem. Oh Dear has been around longer and the integration library is wider: Laravel Nova, a CLI, Laravel Pulse.

Where Hoppla goes further

The places I pushed Hoppla past Oh Dear all cluster around one thing: the agency and reseller use case.

On-call scheduling and escalation policies. This is the real operational gap. Run a team that babysits client sites and you need rotation schedules (who's on this week) and escalation chains: nobody acks in 15 minutes, the alert climbs to the next person. Oh Dear fires notifications at the channels you wire up, but the "who, when, in what order" logic lives in PagerDuty or Opsgenie, not in Oh Dear. In Hoppla it's built in.

White-labeling for resellers. This is the reason Hoppla exists at all. Oh Dear lets you brand a status page: logo, colours, custom domain. It stops short of full white-label reselling:

If you're an agency or host that wants to sell monitoring as your own product, alerts from your email domain, the dashboard on your domain, your name on everything, that's the exact problem Hoppla was built around. Oh Dear wasn't aimed at it. No fault there; it's just a different product.

GEO audits (AI search readiness). Hoppla scores how well a site is set up to be found and cited by AI search: structured data, AI crawler access, citability of the content, technical signals. As far as I can tell no other monitoring platform ships this yet. Worth repeating: Oh Dear's upcoming AI work is browser-interaction testing, a completely separate thing.

Server agent monitoring. A lightweight agent reports CPU, memory, and disk. If you run servers and not just websites, you see the box's health sitting next to its website checks. Oh Dear's application health checks stay at the application layer, over HTTP.

Security header scoring. Hoppla grades HSTS, CSP, X-Frame-Options and the rest. Oh Dear has no dedicated security-header check, though its mixed-content detection covers a sliver of the same ground.

Pricing built for reselling. Less a feature than a business model. Oh Dear prices for direct customers: per site, and fair for what you get. But pricing per site makes it hard to put a margin on top when you're reselling to clients. Hoppla's per-monitor pricing exists specifically so an agency can fold monitoring into a hosting package and still come out ahead.

When to choose Oh Dear

Pick Oh Dear if:

• You're a developer monitoring your own projects (especially Laravel)
• You want the best-in-class Laravel health check integration
• You already use PagerDuty or Opsgenie and want direct integration
• You prefer a mature, focused tool with a broad integration ecosystem
• You don't need to resell monitoring under your own brand

When to choose Hoppla

Pick Hoppla if:

• You manage client websites and want to sell monitoring as a service
• You need full white-labeling (custom SMTP, portal domains, reseller API)
• You need built-in on-call scheduling and escalation policies
• You want GEO audits for AI search readiness
• You need server-level monitoring (CPU, memory, disk) alongside website checks
• Pricing that allows you to resell at a margin is important to your business model

The honest bottom line

The two tools share most of their core monitoring. So the real question was never "who watches more things." It's "who is this for?"

Oh Dear is for developers and teams watching their own apps. It does that exceptionally well: tight Laravel integration, a clean and focused experience, none of the bloat.

Hoppla is for the people watching other people's sites: agencies, hosts, MSPs. The white-labeling, the reseller pricing, the on-call rotations and escalation policies all exist because that was the job in front of me when I couldn't find a tool that did it.

Not reselling monitoring? Oh Dear is a genuinely excellent choice, and I'd tell you so to your face. Reselling it? That's why Hoppla exists.