Both solve the same real problem: a scheduled job that stops running produces no error, no log line and nothing to alert on. Both solve it the same way. The differences are everything around that.
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Which should you choose?
Healthchecks.io if you want a focused, generous, open-source tool that you can self-host if you ever need to — it does one job extremely well and its free tier is unusually good. Cronitor if you want cron monitoring and uptime checks from the same vendor and prefer a more polished commercial product. For pure cron monitoring, Healthchecks.io is hard to beat on value.
Written by MonitoringDaddy, who also sell monitoring. We have tried to be straight about where each of these wins, including where they beat us. Prices and features are as at August 2026 and change often.
| Cronitor | Healthchecks.io | MonitoringDaddy | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Model | Commercial SaaS | SaaS, and open source | – |
| Self-hostable | No | Yes — the source is public | – |
| Free tier | Yes, small | Yes, unusually generous | – |
| Also does uptime | Yes | Limited | Yes, same allowance |
| Focus | Broader monitoring platform | Cron monitoring, done properly | – |
| Best suited to | Teams wanting one commercial vendor | Teams who value focus and openness | – |
Both charge by the number of jobs watched. Healthchecks.io is the more generous at every level, and the only one of the two you can run yourself if the pricing ever stops working for you.
| Tier | Cronitor | Healthchecks.io | MonitoringDaddy |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | A handful of monitors | Twenty checks — genuinely usable | One heartbeat, permanent |
| Entry paid | Around $10/month | Around $5/month | From $5/month |
| Self-hosted | Not available | Free, you run it | Not available |
| What scales the bill | Number of monitors | Number of checks | Plan tier only |
| Feature | Cronitor | Healthchecks.io | MonitoringDaddy |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cron / heartbeat monitoring | Yes | Yes — its whole purpose | Yes |
| Grace period configuration | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Cron expression awareness | Yes | Yes | Period and grace |
| Self-hosting | No | Yes | No |
| Uptime monitoring | Yes | Limited | Yes, same allowance |
| SSL expiry | Yes | No | Yes, same allowance |
| Domain expiry | No | No | Yes, same allowance |
| Status pages | Yes | Yes | Yes, with a custom domain |
| Alert channels | Email, SMS, chat, webhooks | Very many, including chat and webhooks | Email, Slack, Teams, Discord, Telegram, Flock, webhooks |
| Page content change watching | No | No | Yes, same allowance |
| All check types on one allowance | Separate products | Cron only | Yes |
A tick in a table hides most of the difference. This is what each row is really saying.
Both work identically and correctly: your job calls a URL when it finishes successfully, and you are alerted when that call fails to arrive within the period plus a grace window. This is the only way to catch a job that never ran, because a job that never ran produces nothing to observe.
The setting that decides whether the tool is useful or ignored. A nightly backup that usually takes ten minutes but occasionally takes forty needs a grace window covering the slow night, or you will be paged for a job that was merely busy — and alerts you learn to ignore are worse than none.
Healthchecks.io is open source and can be run on your own infrastructure. That matters for two reasons: data residency requirements, and the knowledge that a pricing change can never strand you. Cronitor offers no equivalent.
Healthchecks.io's free tier is unusually generous — twenty checks is enough for a real small production estate, not a demo. Cronitor's is smaller. If you are watching a handful of nightly jobs, one of these costs nothing and the other does not.
Cronitor has grown into a broader platform with uptime checks; Healthchecks.io has stayed focused on doing one thing properly. Which you prefer depends on whether you want one vendor for everything or the best tool for this job.
Neither watches domain expiry or page content, and Healthchecks.io does not watch certificates. A team needing cron plus uptime plus SSL is looking at two or three subscriptions unless those sit on one allowance.
In a shell, backup.sh && curl … calls the URL only when the script exits cleanly. A ping at the top of a script reports success for work that has not happened yet, and keeps doing so every night while the job fails on its second line.
Take the longest the job has ever legitimately taken and add a margin. Too tight and you will be paged for slow nights until you stop reading the alerts entirely.
Something like curl -fsS -m 10 --retry 3. A monitoring call should never be the thing that hangs your backup, and a brief network blip should not manufacture a false alarm.
It is the one structural difference here. If data residency or vendor independence matters to you, only one of these two can ever satisfy it.
You want cron and uptime monitoring from a single commercial vendor, and a more polished product matters more to you than the free tier or self-hosting.
You want the best focused cron monitoring available, a free tier that covers a real estate, and the option to run it yourself.
For pure cron monitoring, Healthchecks.io is excellent and its free tier is more generous than ours — that is the honest position. Where we differ is that heartbeats sit on the same allowance as uptime, SSL expiry, domain expiry, API checks and page-change watching, so a team needing all of those is on one bill rather than three.
Uptime, SSL expiry, domain expiry, API checks, cron heartbeats and page-change watching all draw on one allowance here, rather than being separate products or separate bills.
Start freeThe 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.
Catching jobs that stop running. A failed backup that exits with an error is easy to notice; one that is never invoked produces no error, no log line and no response. The only signal is silence, and only something expecting a check-in can notice it.
Yes — it is open source and designed to be run yourself. That is its structural advantage over Cronitor, and it matters most for data residency requirements or long-term vendor independence.
Healthchecks.io, clearly. Twenty checks is enough to cover a small production estate rather than just try the product out.
Both do. Anything that can run a curl command at the end of a successful run works — a Kubernetes CronJob, a GitHub Actions workflow, a Windows scheduled task or a Raspberry Pi in a cupboard.
Then no hosted heartbeat service will work, including these. The check depends on the job being able to make one outbound HTTPS request. Nothing else — inbound access, agents, credentials — is required.
Usually yes, and they answer different questions. Heartbeats tell you scheduled work happened; uptime tells you a service is answering. Whether you want those from one vendor or two is largely a billing preference.
Last updated August 2026 · Written by Amit Gupta, founder of MonitoringDaddy