Cron job monitoring compared: Healthchecks, Cronitor, Dead Man's Snitch

Cron monitoring tools mostly work the same way: your job pings a URL, and you get alerted when a ping is late. The differences that matter are the pricing model, the free tier, and whether you can run it yourself.

This is a comparison written by the people behind illari, which is one of the options below. We've tried to keep it fair — where another tool is the better pick, we say so.

The landscape

Details move around, so check each site before deciding. The shape of each option is stable, though.

Healthchecks.io

The reference implementation for this category. Open source under a BSD license, genuinely self-hostable, generous free tier, and a small paid plan for teams that want it hosted. It supports /start and /fail signals and a small payload on every ping, so it does some lightweight run data too.

Pick it if: you want open source, you want to self-host, or the free tier already covers you. It's hard to beat on those terms.

Cronitor

The most feature-broad option — every plan bundles cron, heartbeat, website and API monitoring, plus synthetic browser checks and web analytics — and it owns crontab.guru. For scheduled jobs it captures output, tracks duration, and records exit codes.

The friction point is pricing: it meters per monitor and per user, so the bill scales with how much you monitor. Some teams find that fine; others specifically dislike being nudged to monitor less.

Pick it if: you want one tool spanning cron, uptime, and analytics, and per-monitor pricing works out at your scale.

Dead Man's Snitch

One of the originals, and still solid at the basic job: expect a check-in, alert when it's missing. The free tier is a single snitch; paid tiers are bucketed by how many “snitches” you need ($5 for 3, $19 for 100, $49 for 300). Email alerts on every plan, but Slack and other integrations start at the $19 tier.

Pick it if: you want something proven and simple and only have a handful of jobs.

Uptime Kuma

Not a service — a self-hosted app you run yourself. Push monitors give you heartbeat checks with a clean dashboard, for free, forever, on your own box.

The tradeoff is that you are now running and monitoring the monitor. If it's on the same infrastructure as your jobs, a bad enough outage takes both down together.

Pick it if: you enjoy self-hosting, want a nice UI, and are comfortable being your own point of failure.

illari

Where we've tried to be different:

• Flat pricing. Free, or Pro at $20/month. No per-monitor or per-seat metering.
• Schedule-accurate detection. Give it a real cron expression and an IANA timezone; expected run times are computed with daylight-saving handled, so a 2 a.m. job doesn't false-alarm twice a year. See the cron expression tester.
• Structured run data in Pro. Exit codes, duration, output capture, and duration-anomaly alerts on the same one-line integration — for the runs that succeed on paper.
• Narrow on purpose. It monitors scheduled jobs. It is not trying to become an uptime or observability platform.

Pick it if: you want hosted monitoring at a flat price, your schedules are timezone-sensitive, or you want run-level checks (exit code, duration, output) without running a second tool.

The short version

Under about 20 jobs on simple schedules, Healthchecks.io's free tier is hard to argue with. Want to self-host and be your own backstop — Uptime Kuma. Need one tool across cron, uptime and analytics and the per-monitor math works out — Cronitor.

Reach for illari when you've outgrown a free tier and don't want a per-monitor meter, when your schedules cross timezones or hit daylight-saving edges, or when you want exit-code and output checks in the same place — at a flat $20 whether that's 30 monitors or 300. Try the schedule tester or read the docs.