illari vs PagerDuty
Facts checked 2026-09-21. Vendor pricing changes; verify before deciding.
Teams searching for “PagerDuty cron monitoring” are usually hoping their existing subscription already covers it. It doesn't. PagerDuty is an on-call and escalation platform: it pages the right person once an event arrives. Noticing that a scheduled job never checked in is a different job, and that's what illari does.
| PagerDuty | illari | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | On-call scheduling and incident escalation | Scheduled and triggered run monitor |
| Detecting a missed run | Not built in. Their own docs walk you through building it yourself with Event Orchestration, cache variables, and a webhook to re-arm the check | Built in. Point a scheduled job at a URL; a missed check-in is an alert |
| Pricing | 5-user minimum on paid plans, $21–$41/user/mo | Flat $20/mo, monitors and seats not metered |
| Free tier | Up to 5 users, on-call scheduling, no heartbeat detection | 25 monitors, including run-content checks |
| Run content | Whatever the alert payload you send it contains | Exit code, duration and metric anomaly, threshold rules on your own numbers, hung-run |
| Paging, rotations, phone/SMS | Built in, mature | Via a PagerDuty integration |
Pricing and add-ons move around; confirm the current numbers.
Where illari is different
- The detection is the product. PagerDuty's own heartbeat monitoring guide is a build-it-yourself workflow: cache variables to track the last check-in, an orchestration rule to notice the gap, a webhook to reset it. illari's version of that is one HTTP request at the end of a cron job.
- Flat pricing, no seat minimum. PagerDuty's paid plans require five users even if one person is on call. illari is $20 flat regardless of team size.
- Checks on what the run reported, not just whether an event showed up: exit code, a run far off its own duration baseline, and threshold rules on numbers the job sends (
rows < 1,cost_usd > 5).
Where PagerDuty is the better pick
- You need real on-call. Rotations, escalation policies, phone and SMS paging at 3am are PagerDuty's actual job, and illari doesn't attempt any of it.
- You already pay for it. If PagerDuty is already routing your incidents, the right move is pointing illari's alerts at it as a channel, not replacing it.
- You want status pages and postmortem tooling alongside the paging. That's further outside what a scheduled-run monitor does.
PagerDuty makes sure the right person gets woken up correctly. It doesn't know a job didn't run unless something tells it. illari is that something, and it can hand the alert straight to PagerDuty once it fires.
Try illari
25 monitors free, $20/mo for everything, monitors not metered. One HTTP request from the job.