Cronitor alternative: Heartcron vs Cronitor
Cronitor and Heartcron solve the same problem: tell you when a scheduled job fails or doesn’t run, and when a website stops answering. The biggest difference is how you pay. Cronitor charges per monitor and per user. Heartcron has flat plans, and team members are free on every plan. Cronitor is a broader platform, with on-call integrations, SMS and browser checks. Here’s the comparison, with the facts about Cronitor taken from its pricing page and docs.
At a glance
| Heartcron | Cronitor | |
|---|---|---|
| Free plan | 20 cron jobs + 10 site checks, 7-day history | 5 monitors in total, 1 user |
| Paid plans | Flat: $9, $29 or $79 a month, 20% off yearly | $2 a month per monitor + $5 per user |
| Team members | Free on every plan | 1 on Free; $5 a month each on Business |
| Fastest site check | 5 min on Free, 1 min from $9, 30 s on Business | 5 min on Free, 30 s on Business |
| Cron expressions with time zones | Yes | Yes |
| Start, success, fail, exit codes | Yes | Yes |
| Job output kept with a ping | Up to 100 KB on paid plans, 10 KB on Free | A message up to 2,000 characters |
| Status pages | 1 on Free, up to 3, 10 or 1,000 on paid plans | 1 on Free and Business; branded or private pages cost extra |
| Alert channels | Email, Telegram, Slack, Discord, webhooks | Email, Slack, Teams, Discord, Google Chat, Telegram, Lark, webhooks; SMS, PagerDuty, Opsgenie and others on Business |
| History | 7 days on Free, 90 days from $9, a year from $29 | 12 months on Business |
| Open-source CLI | heartcron (MIT) | cronitor |
What it costs for a real team
Cronitor’s own example on its pricing page: 20 monitors and 3 users come to $55 a month. On Heartcron the same setup fits the Starter plan at $9 a month: up to 100 cron jobs and 50 site checks, and the three people cost nothing.
| Setup | Heartcron | Cronitor Business |
|---|---|---|
| 20 monitors, 3 users | $9 (Starter) | $55 |
| 100 monitors, 5 users | $9 (Starter: 100 cron jobs + 50 site checks) | $225 |
| 300 monitors, 10 users | $29 (Pro: 500 cron jobs + 200 site checks) | $650 |
The Cronitor numbers are its listed prices, $2 per monitor and $5 per user, without SSO or extra status pages. Cronitor mentions volume discounts but doesn’t publish them.
Where Heartcron is the better fit
- Predictable bills. Adding a job or a colleague doesn’t change the price until you reach the plan’s limit.
- A useful free plan. 20 cron jobs and 10 site checks cover a small project or a homelab completely.
- Full job output. Send up to 100 KB of a job’s output with the ping and read the error in the dashboard instead of logging in to the server.
- Telegram, Slack and Discord on every plan, plus email and signed webhooks.
When Cronitor is the better choice
- You route alerts through PagerDuty, Opsgenie, Splunk On-Call or Datadog On-Call, or need SMS alerts. Heartcron doesn’t send these yet.
- You use Microsoft Teams or Google Chat.
- You want synthetic browser checks or web analytics in the same tool.
- You need SAML SSO and SCIM.
- You want to send custom metrics with each run, such as counts or error counts.
Switching from Cronitor
The concepts map one to one: Cronitor’s run, complete and fail events are Heartcron’s /start, success and /fail pings, and its exit code becomes /<code>.
| Cronitor | Heartcron |
|---|---|
cronitor exec <key> /srv/backup.sh | heartcron run nightly-backup -- /srv/backup.sh |
?state=run | https://ping.heartcron.com/<uuid>/start |
?state=complete | https://ping.heartcron.com/<uuid> |
?state=fail | https://ping.heartcron.com/<uuid>/fail |
With many jobs, skip creating checks by hand: heartcron run <name> --create -- <command>, or a readable ping URL with ?create=1, creates a check on its first run. The docs cover every option.