Cronheart vs Healthchecks.io
Both watch your scheduled jobs with the same heartbeat (dead man's switch) model — a job that stops pinging gets you paged. They differ on pricing, framework integration, and how you host them. Here's an honest side-by-side so you can pick the right one.
Healthchecks.io also offers a $5/mo Supporter tier, but it keeps the same 20 checks as the free plan. Figures verified against healthchecks.io in June 2026 — check their pricing page for the latest.
Where Cronheart pulls ahead
- Official SDKs, not just curl.
cronheartcovers Node and TypeScript with adapters for croner,node-cron,node-schedule,cron, BullMQ and NestJS, andcron-monitor/php-sdkships a first-class Symfony Scheduler and Laravel bridge; Healthchecks.io is language-agnostic and leaves the wiring to you. - More monitors per dollar on paid tiers. $5/mo gets you 50 monitors and $19/mo gets you 200 — where the comparable paid step elsewhere is $20/mo for 100.
- Provision from code. A REST API and CLI create and list monitors and channels, so your infrastructure-as-code owns them.
- Rich alerts out of the box. Colour-coded incidents, captured job output on the page that wakes you, signed webhooks, and public SVG status badges.
When Healthchecks.io is the better fit
- You need to self-host. Healthchecks.io is open source under the BSD license and runs on your own infrastructure. Cronheart is hosted-only for now.
- You need SMS, phone calls or Opsgenie. Healthchecks.io's 25+ integrations cover paging surfaces Cronheart doesn't yet.
- You want the longest track record. Healthchecks.io is a mature, widely adopted project with years of production use and a large community.
We'd rather you pick the right tool than oversell ours. If the points above are dealbreakers, Healthchecks.io is genuinely excellent.
Frequently asked
Is Cronheart a drop-in replacement for Healthchecks.io?
For the core heartbeat model, yes. Both watch a job by expecting a periodic HTTP ping, so you point your existing curl at a Cronheart monitor URL and you are covered. The start / success / fail lifecycle and cron schedules map across directly.
Can I self-host Cronheart the way I can self-host Healthchecks.io?
Not today. Cronheart is a hosted service; self-hosting is on the roadmap but not released. If running the monitor on your own infrastructure is a hard requirement right now, Healthchecks.io is open source under the BSD license and a solid choice.
How does the pricing compare?
Both are free for 20 monitors with no credit card. Cronheart's first paid tier is $5/mo for 50 monitors; on Healthchecks.io the $5 Supporter tier keeps the same 20 checks as its free plan, and its next tier with more checks is $20/mo for 100.
What does Cronheart add for PHP teams specifically?
First-class scheduler integration. The cron-monitor/php-sdk package wires heartbeats into Symfony Scheduler and the Laravel scheduler via auto-discovery, so you map a scheduled command to a monitor instead of hand-writing curl. Healthchecks.io is language-agnostic and ships no framework SDK.
Which one has more alert integrations?
Healthchecks.io, by a wide margin — it offers 25+ integrations including SMS, phone calls and Opsgenie. Cronheart covers email, Telegram, Slack, Discord, Microsoft Teams, Google Chat, PagerDuty and signed webhooks. If you need SMS or phone calls today, that is a point for Healthchecks.io.
More comparisons: vs Cronitor · vs Dead Man's Snitch — or learn how to monitor cron jobs.
Try Cronheart free
20 monitors, no credit card. Point a curl at a monitor URL and you're covered in minutes.