CronPupCron job monitoring tools compared: Healthchecks.io, Cronitor, Dead Man's Snitch and CronPup
All of these tools do the same core job: your job pings a URL, and silence triggers an alert. They differ in price shape, extras and philosophy. The prices below are copied from each vendor's public pricing page on 5 November 2026. Check their sites for current numbers. We make CronPup, so weigh our opinion accordingly.
| Free tier | ~50 monitors | ~300 monitors | Pricing shape | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Healthchecks.io | 20 checks | $20/mo (Business, 100 checks) | $80/mo (Business Plus, 1,000) | Tiers |
| Cronitor | 5 monitors | about $100/mo + $5 per user | about $600/mo + $5 per user | $2 per monitor + $5 per user |
| Dead Man's Snitch | 1 snitch | $19/mo (100) | $49/mo (300) | Tiers |
| Better Stack | 10 monitors + heartbeats combined | about $80/mo (4 extra packs of 10 heartbeats) | about $580/mo (29 extra packs) | Packs of 10 heartbeats at $20/mo; Responder seats $34/mo |
| CronPup | 10 monitors | $12/mo (100) | $29/mo (300) | Tiers, no per-user fees |
Healthchecks.io stays free up to 20 checks, so for 11–20 monitors it costs less than any paid plan here.
When to pick which
- Healthchecks.io has the most generous free tier (20 checks), a long track record, lots of integrations (including SMS and phone calls on paid plans), and it's open source, so you can self-host it. If you want a mature, proven tool, it's an excellent choice.
- Better Stack is a full incident-management platform (uptime checks, on-call, unlimited phone and SMS alerts on paid plans, status pages, logs) with heartbeats as one part. If you want on-call schedules and phone escalation in the same place as your job monitoring, it does far more than we do. Details.
- Cronitor covers much more than cron: uptime checks, status pages, synthetic tests and real-user monitoring. If you want one vendor for all of that and per-monitor pricing suits you, it's the broadest option.
- Dead Man's Snitch is simple and focused, with an established product and clear tiers.
- CronPup is new and small. It's the cheapest of these at 21–300 monitors, it includes TLS certificate expiry checks in the same monitor quota, and it has cron-expression schedules with timezones, start/fail/exit-code signals, a JSON API and a simple public status page on every plan. It sends to email, ntfy push, Slack/Discord and PagerDuty, but doesn't do SMS, phone calls or uptime checks, and its status page is basic (no custom domains or incident posts). If you need those, use one of the others.
What matters more than the vendor
Whatever you pick: ping only on success (&& or the exit code), set grace periods a bit above
real run times, and route alerts somewhere a human will actually see them. See
How to monitor cron jobs.
Try CronPup free, with 10 monitors and no card.