Oh Dear Alternative With Phone Call Alerts and SMS Without a Vonage Account

No. Oh Dear does not offer native voice call alerts. Its notification options are email, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Google Chat, Discord, Telegram, Pushover, ntfy, webhooks, and integrations with on-call tools such as PagerDuty and Opsgenie. If a phone has to ring, you either route alerts into a paid on-call product or build a webhook bridge to a voice provider yourself.

That matters most for agencies. A client store that goes down at 11pm on a Friday is not fixed by a Slack message in a channel nobody reads until Monday. A paging tool solves it, and PagerDuty's Professional plan is $21 per user a month on annual billing or $25 monthly, so a three person rota adds $63 to $75 a month on top of the monitor.

TrackDowntime puts the call inside the plan. On Professional and Enterprise every number attached to an endpoint is phoned and texted on each round until the check passes, and recovery sends an email and an SMS so the person who picked up knows they can go back to bed.

Yes, but only through Vonage, formerly Nexmo. Oh Dear's own documentation says Vonage is the only SMS provider it integrates with: you create a Vonage account, generate an API key and secret, and paste them into the notifications screen. Texts are then sent from your Vonage account and paid for there. Twilio, AWS SNS, MessageBird and other gateways are not supported directly, and Oh Dear suggests forwarding its webhooks to your own code if you use a different provider.

For a developer that is ten minutes of setup. For an agency it is one more vendor relationship, one more card on file and one more credential that can expire without anyone noticing until the night a text does not arrive. With TrackDowntime there is nothing to connect: add a phone number to the endpoint and the SMS is part of the subscription.

Stay on Oh Dear if you want breadth per site. One Oh Dear site covers uptime checks every minute, SSL certificate and certificate transparency monitoring, broken link and mixed content crawling, DNS record and blocklist monitoring, cron and scheduled task monitoring, performance tracking, unlimited status pages, unlimited users and branded monthly client reports. Downtime is confirmed from a second location before anyone is told. TrackDowntime does not crawl links, watch DNS, monitor cron jobs or publish status pages, and it checks from a single location.

Stay on Oh Dear too if price per site at small sizes decides it. Oh Dear Freelance is $55 a month for 10 sites and Solo Plus is $32 for 5. Our Professional plan is $99 a month for 25 endpoints and Starter is $49 for 5 endpoints with email alerts only. If nobody needs to be phoned, Oh Dear is the better deal under about 25 sites, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.

Oh Dear prices by site in steps. TrackDowntime prices by endpoint and goes flat at Enterprise. The figures below are Oh Dear's US dollar prices, monthly billing, read from ohdear.app/pricing in October 2026, next to our monthly list prices. Yearly billing on Oh Dear gives two months free; ours halves the monthly price.

Two honest caveats. First, an Oh Dear site bundles many check types, while one TrackDowntime endpoint is one URL with an HTTP check and SSL expiry, so a fair count for a store might be two endpoints (homepage and checkout). Second, the Oh Dear column has no phone calls in it; add a paging tool if you need them. At 10 sites Oh Dear is clearly cheaper, at 25 the two are close, and at 50 on monthly billing Oh Dear wins again. Above 100 sites on monthly billing, or above 50 on yearly billing, a flat Enterprise plan with calls included costs less than the Oh Dear tier alone.

Many agencies do not need to choose. Oh Dear is excellent at the slow problems: a certificate expiring in 14 days, a broken link on a landing page, a DNS record someone changed, a cron job that stopped running. Those deserve an email or a Slack message in the morning. A storefront returning 503 at night deserves a phone call now.

The split that works is simple. Keep every client site in Oh Dear for the breadth and the branded reports. Add the five to twenty URLs per account that cost money when they fail to TrackDowntime with the numbers of the people who can fix them. Both services check from outside your servers, so nothing in the client stack changes, and the outage log here gives you measured durations for the SLA conversation.