illari vs Sentry Crons
Facts checked 2026-09-21. Vendor pricing changes; verify before deciding.
Sentry Crons does the same check-in job as any heartbeat monitor: in_progress, ok, or error for each run. The difference is where it lives. It's a line item on an error-tracking bill, not a standalone product, and the pricing and alert routing follow from that.
| Sentry Crons | illari | |
|---|---|---|
| Scope | Cron check-ins, a feature inside Sentry's APM/error-tracking product | Dedicated scheduled and triggered run monitor |
| Free tier | 1 monitor, email alerts only | 25 monitors, every channel included |
| Additional monitors | ~$0.78/monitor per billing cycle | Flat $20/mo, monitors not metered |
| Slack, PagerDuty, and other integrated alerts | Requires the Team plan (~$26–29/mo) or above | Included on every plan |
| Run content | Check-in state, tied to Sentry's error/exception tracking | Exit code, duration and metric anomaly, threshold rules on your own numbers, hung-run |
| Scheduling | Crontab or interval, with a timezone | Full 5-field cron + IANA timezone, DST handled |
Sentry's plans and add-on pricing move around; confirm current numbers before deciding.
Where illari is different
- Flat, unmetered pricing. Sentry's free monitor is genuinely free, but every monitor after it is billed individually, and reaching a real fleet of jobs means paying per monitor on top of whatever the rest of the Sentry bill already costs. illari is $20 flat regardless of monitor count.
- Alert channels aren't gated to a higher plan. Sentry's free tier is email-only; Slack and PagerDuty need the Team plan. illari includes Slack, Discord, Telegram, PagerDuty, incident.io, ntfy, Pushover, and webhooks on every plan.
- Checks on what the run reported, not just the check-in state: a non-zero exit, a run far off its own duration baseline, and threshold rules on numbers the job sends (
rows < 1,cost_usd > 5). - No APM adoption required. illari is the whole product, not a feature you pick up alongside error tracking you may not otherwise need.
Where Sentry Crons is the better pick
- You already run Sentry for errors and performance. If the team lives in the Sentry dashboard already, keeping cron status next to the stack traces that explain a failure has a real convenience upside.
- You only need one or two monitors. The free monitor plus a couple of $0.78 add-ons can be cheaper than a flat $20 at very small scale, if email alerts are enough.
- You want the failure linked to the exception that caused it, inside the same trace and issue-tracking flow Sentry already gives you for the rest of the app.
Sentry Crons makes sense as a box to check next to error tracking you're already paying for. illari makes sense when the monitor is the product, with flat pricing and every alert channel included from the first monitor.
Try illari
25 monitors free, $20/mo for everything, monitors not metered. One HTTP request from the job.