Healthchecks.io alternatives
Six cron-monitoring services compared on the things that actually differ: price at real volumes, self-hosting, alert channels and status pages.
Healthchecks.io has been the reference implementation of cron monitoring for a decade: a ping URL per job, a generous free tier, an open-source codebase you can run yourself, and one person maintaining it carefully. People look for an alternative for specific reasons, so start with which reason is yours.
Why people look
- You want a status page. Healthchecks.io has badges but no hosted status page for your monitors.
- You also need uptime checks. It monitors jobs that call in; it does not poll your URLs.
- The 20-check free tier is not enough and the next step up is more than the problem is worth.
- You want run output and durations in more depth than the log endpoint gives you.
- You want SMS or phone calls — in which case Healthchecks.io is the one that has them, and you should stay.
The options
Healthchecks.io
Free: 20 checks. Business: $20/month or $192/year for 100 checks and 1,000 log entries per check. Business Plus: $80/month for 1,000 checks. Cron expressions with timezones, start and fail pings, a log endpoint, a very wide list of integrations including Matrix and Signal, SMS and WhatsApp credits on paid plans, and a BSD licence so you can self-host the whole thing. No status pages, no uptime checks.
Stay here if you want to self-host, you need phone or SMS alerts, or 20 checks is plenty.
Cronitor
Priced per monitor and per user: roughly $2/month per monitor plus $5/month per user, with a free tier of 5 monitors. Deep instrumentation per job, SDKs for most languages, on-call integrations such as PagerDuty and OpsGenie on its Business plan, 30-second check frequencies, and uptime checks as well as job monitoring.
Choose it if you have a small number of jobs that each matter a great deal and you want the most detail per job. It gets expensive quickly with many monitors: fifty monitors and three users is well over $100/month.
Dead Man's Snitch
The narrowest tool here, deliberately. A "snitch" is one heartbeat, priced in tiers by how many you need. No uptime checks and no status pages; what it does, it does with very little ceremony.
Choose it if you want a dead man's switch and nothing else, and you value a small surface over a feature list.
Better Stack
Heartbeats are one part of a larger incident-management product: uptime monitoring, on-call scheduling, incident timelines, status pages and log management. There is a free tier.
Choose it if you are buying on-call and incident management anyway and would rather have heartbeats included than run a second tool.
UptimeRobot
Primarily a website uptime checker with a large free tier that also offers heartbeat monitors. Choose it if website uptime is the main job and cron monitoring is the side one. See UptimeRobot heartbeat alternatives for the other direction.
Vivere
Ours. Free: 10 monitors, 5-minute minimum period, email and webhook alerts, a public status page. Pro: $9/month or $79/year for 100 monitors, 1-minute periods, 5 members, Slack, Discord, Telegram and ntfy. Team: $29/month for 500 monitors. Heartbeat and HTTP uptime checks in one place, start/fail/exit-code pings, captured run output, a wrapper CLI, an MCP server for AI agents, a JSON API and signed webhooks.
Choose it if you want status pages and uptime checks alongside cron monitoring at a flat price. Do not choose it if you need to self-host or need SMS: we have neither, and are not pretending otherwise.
Moving off Healthchecks.io
Migration is unusually cheap here, because the integration is a URL. Create the equivalent monitor in the new tool, swap the URL in the crontab line or the workflow step, and run both for a week before deleting the old check. Nothing about the job itself changes, and the period and grace concepts map directly.
Checked September 2026 against each vendor's public pricing and documentation. Prices and limits move; confirm before you decide. Vivere is our product, and the sections saying when to choose something else are not decoration — if one of them describes you, choose that.
Common questions
Is there a free alternative to Healthchecks.io?
Several services have free tiers. Healthchecks.io itself gives 20 checks free and is BSD-licensed for self-hosting, which is hard to beat on price alone. Vivere's free tier is 10 monitors with a status page and email and webhook alerts; UptimeRobot's free tier is large but oriented around uptime checks rather than cron.
Can I self-host Healthchecks.io?
Yes. It is a BSD-licensed Django application and self-hosting is officially supported and well documented. If self-hosting is a requirement, it is the strongest option on this page, and honesty requires saying so.
Find out without looking
Vivere watches for the ping that does not arrive. Add one line to the job, pick where alerts should land, and you hear about the run that never happened.
Start free Read the quickstart
Ten monitors, a status page, email and webhook alerts. No card.
Last reviewed September 2026.
Related
- Cronitor alternatives — Alternatives to Cronitor compared on pricing model, monitor count, alert channels and observability depth, including where Cronitor's per-monitor pricing is still the cheaper answer.
- Dead Man's Snitch alternatives — Alternatives to Dead Man's Snitch for cron and heartbeat monitoring, compared on price per monitor, alert routing, run logs and status pages.
- UptimeRobot heartbeat alternatives — Alternatives to UptimeRobot's heartbeat monitors for people whose main need is scheduled jobs rather than website uptime, with an honest note on where UptimeRobot wins.