Cronitor started by solving a problem most monitoring tools ignore: a scheduled job that silently stops being run produces no error, no response and no log line to alert on. It solved that properly, then grew uptime checks and status pages around it.
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Is Cronitor worth it?
For cron and background job monitoring, it is the best tool in this set and worth paying for — the telemetry it captures about each run goes well beyond a simple did-it-check-in. As a general website monitor it is competent but not exceptional, so the question is whether jobs or websites are your actual problem.
Cronitor monitors scheduled jobs using heartbeats. Your job calls a URL when it finishes; you tell Cronitor how often to expect that call, and it alerts you when the call does not arrive. It is a dead man's switch for work that is supposed to happen.
Where it goes further than most is telemetry. It does not only record that a job checked in — it can capture how long the run took, whether it exited cleanly, and what it printed, which turns "the backup ran" into "the backup ran, took 40% longer than usual, and exited non-zero".
It has since added uptime monitoring, status pages and alerting, so it can cover a website too. That side is solid rather than remarkable.
Everything around scheduled work is excellent; the rest is competent.
Ping URLs, expected schedules, grace windows and clear handling of jobs that have never run. The details that make the difference between useful alerts and false alarms are all thought through.
Duration tracking, exit codes and captured output. Knowing a job now takes three times as long is often the warning before it fails entirely, and few tools capture that at all.
CLI wrappers, libraries in several languages, and clear documentation. Instrumenting a job takes minutes and the docs assume you are technical.
Website checks in the same account, so jobs and sites share alerting and status pages.
Enough monitors to instrument a real project before paying, which suits how developers actually adopt tools.
Slack, PagerDuty, webhooks, email, SMS and phone on suitable plans, fitting into existing on-call setups.
Reasonable, developer-oriented pricing that starts low and scales with monitors.
| Plan | Price | Monitors | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | A handful | Genuinely usable for a small project |
| Entry paid | From ~$7/mo | More monitors | Telemetry and integrations |
| Team tiers | Higher | Scales with usage | Seats, escalation, longer retention |
Monitoring vendors change plan limits and prices frequently and without announcement. Every figure here carries a "verify on their site" caveat and you should take it seriously before making a decision on cost.
We now have heartbeats too — one on the free plan, 25 on the $5 plan and up to 100 on Pro, with a ping URL, an expected period and a grace window, alerting on every channel we support. So the old answer of "Cronitor does this and we do not" is out of date.
What we do not have is the telemetry. Cronitor captures job duration, exit codes and output; we record whether the check-in arrived on time and nothing more. If you want to know that a backup is gradually getting slower, Cronitor tells you and we do not. If you want to know that it stopped running, either tool will tell you, and ours comes alongside uptime monitoring, page change detection, certificates, domains and status pages in the same $5 account.
Every recorded change is compared word by word and kept with a before-and-after image. This is the real output, shown with worked example data.
Price fell from $49 to $39, and an annual discount was added.
The item is available again and the basket button returned.
A new subprocessor was added in another jurisdiction.
The free plan sends to one email address. Every paid plan adds the chat and webhook channels below, with 2 to 10 destinations depending on the plan. However many alerts you receive, the price does not change — nothing here is metered or charged per alert.
There are no voice calls and no SMS. If a phone call at 3am is a hard requirement, say so before you subscribe — we would rather tell you now than refund you later.
There is a free tier with a handful of monitors, which is genuinely enough to instrument a small project. Paid plans start around $7/month. Verify current limits on their site.
A URL your scheduled job calls when it finishes. You declare how often to expect the call; if it does not arrive within that window plus a grace period, you are alerted. It catches the failure mode where a job stops being run at all and therefore produces no error.
Beyond the check-in itself, it can record run duration, exit status and command output. That turns monitoring from "did it run" into "how did it run", which is often where the early warning lives.
Yes — uptime checks and status pages are included. They are competent, though not a standout against tools that do only that.
No. It does not watch page wording. That needs a change detection tool.
Either call the ping URL at the end of your command, or use their CLI wrapper or a client library, which captures duration and exit code automatically. The documentation is good.
The free tier probably covers you. It is worth instrumenting even one important backup — the whole point is that a job which stops running gives you no other signal.
Cronitor captures more about each run — duration, exit code, output. We capture whether the check-in arrived on time. For catching a job that stopped, either works; for understanding a job that is degrading, Cronitor is better.
Last updated August 2026 · Written by Amit Gupta, founder of MonitoringDaddy
Free plan includes a heartbeat. If job telemetry is what you need, Cronitor goes deeper and we say so.