What Oh Dear, Better Stack and Healthchecks.io shipped in October 2026
Uptime and cron monitoring has big platforms and one-person products side by side. Here is what four of them changed between mid-October and early November 2026, with dates, taken from their own changelogs and release notes.
Oh Dear: a weekly changelog and four free tools
Oh Dear publishes a changelog every week. From its changelog:
| Date | What shipped |
|---|---|
| Oct 16 | Simpler first-monitor setup at sign-up; webhook destinations that fail for 48 hours are paused automatically; scoped API tokens can no longer reach team-wide endpoints |
| Oct 23 | AI fix prompts in Broken Links notifications, and emails to owners of sites running PHP versions affected by two new CVEs |
| Oct 30 | Custom headers on webhook destinations, header rules on uptime checks, and guest access made read-only across the app, API and MCP tools |
| Nov 6 | Four free tools: a cron expression editor, an SSL certificate checker, a redirect checker and DNS watch |
Better Stack: native apps and a Claude plugin
- Changelog #18 (updated Oct 15): iOS and Android apps rebuilt as native apps. Critical alerts can bypass silent mode and Do Not Disturb, looping alerts ring until someone responds, and iOS Lock Screen Live Activities show incident duration and the next escalation.
- Changelog #19 (updated Oct 29): a free Claude plugin on every plan. You can ask Claude to add monitors, heartbeat checks for backup jobs and alerts, and use an incident webhook so Claude investigates when you’re paged and opens a pull request with a fix. Codex and Cursor plugins are listed as coming soon.
Healthchecks.io: v5.0 changes the Docker image
From the Healthchecks releases:
- v5.0, Oct 20: the Docker image moves from uWSGI to gunicorn, which breaks custom
docker-compose.ymlfiles that calluwsgidirectly. A crash in any child process now restarts the whole container. Shell integrations can be edited. - v5.0.1 to v5.0.3, Oct 22 to 27: a custom listening port, an option to turn off access logs, concurrent SMTP sessions and newer base images.
Uptime Kuma: fixes and security releases
From the Uptime Kuma releases:
- 2.5.8, Oct 26: TLS support removed from the TCP Port monitor (existing monitors become plain TCP monitors), and a fix for an admin-only remote code execution issue through Apprise arguments.
- 2.5.9, Oct 31: a fix for RSS cache poisoning, plus push monitor and timezone fixes.
What it likely means
- AI assistants are becoming an interface. Better Stack ships a Claude plugin, and Oh Dear’s guest access rules now cover its MCP tools. Setting up monitoring by asking an assistant is starting to be expected.
- Free tools are an SEO play. Oh Dear’s cron, SSL, redirect and DNS tools target searches that people make long before they buy monitoring.
- Self-hosting has upkeep. Both open-source tools shipped breaking or security changes that self-hosters have to apply themselves.
What a competitor in this market could do
- If you have a free tool, check where it ranks next to Oh Dear’s new ones.
- Decide whether you need an MCP server or an assistant plugin, and say so on your comparison pages.
- If you run on Healthchecks.io or Uptime Kuma internally, check the v5.0 Docker change and the 2.5.8 security fix.
How this roundup was made
Every item above comes from the company’s own public changelog or release notes, with the date they give. Better Stack’s posts show only an “updated on” date. We did not test the features ourselves. This is the kind of summary Competitor Radar sends every week for the competitors you choose. You can scan any site for free to see which pages it changed in the last 30 days.