CronAlive vs Cronitor
Which one to pick
Take Cronitor if you need more than cron and uptime: synthetic checks driving a real browser, real user monitoring, branded status pages, SSO — or simply checks from more than a dozen locations when your users are spread across continents. That is a wider product than ours and we are not going to pretend otherwise; they also run crontab.guru, which most of us have used at some point without knowing whose it was.
Take CronAlive if what you need is cron and uptime monitoring — certificates included, they cover those too — at a price that does not track the size of your infrastructure. Their Business plan is charged per monitor plus per user; ours is a flat monthly fee with a check limit. The two models cross somewhere around a hundred checks, and after that they diverge quickly — the sums are below.
Features
| Cronitor | CronAlive | |
|---|---|---|
| Heartbeat / dead man’s switch | Yes | Yes |
| HTTP uptime checks | Yes | Yes |
| Synthetics and RUM | Yes | No |
| Branded status pages | Yes | Public status badges only |
| TLS certificate expiry | Yes — warns before the certificate expires | Yes, 7/14/30 days ahead |
| Probe regions | 12+ locations on 5 continents, up to 12 per check | Three: DE primary, RU and US external |
| Second region confirms an outage | Yes — verified by at least one additional region | Yes — quorum of two regions |
| Telegram alerts | Yes | Yes — DMs and groups, linked by deep link in one tap |
| SDKs and monitors defined in code | Yes — open-source SDKs, plus YAML import and sync | Yes — the SDK creates the check on its first ping, schedule included |
| Shortest check interval | From 30 seconds | From 30 seconds on Business, 5 min on Free |
| Self-hosting | No — hosted service | No — hosted service |
| REST API | Yes | Yes — read-write and read-only keys |
| Team members | Yes — charged per user | 1 / 5 / unlimited by plan |
Checked on 21 August 2026 against their pricing page, their uptime monitoring page and their documentation. Note the row on second-region confirmation: they do it too, and we would rather you read that here than discover it after signing up. It is not a difference between us, and we are not going to dress it up as one.
What it costs at 10, 100 and 500 checks
| Cronitor | CronAlive | |
|---|---|---|
| 10 monitors / checks | $10 / mo — 5 × $2 above the free 5 | Free — 10 checks |
| 100 monitors / checks | $195 / mo — 95 × $2 + $5 for one user | $7 / mo — Pro |
| 500 monitors / checks | $995 / mo — 495 × $2 + $5 for one user | $19 / mo — Business |
How these numbers are produced. Cronitor: Hacker is free with 5 monitors, email and Slack, a basic status page, no SMS and a 5-minute minimum interval; Business is $2 per monitor per month plus $5 per user, with intervals from 30 seconds, 12 months of history, SMS and PagerDuty, and SSO priced separately; Enterprise starts at $6000/year. We bill the five free monitors at zero and charge $2 for each one above them, with a single user — that is the cheapest reading of their pricing, and a comparison that leans the other way is not worth publishing. CronAlive: Free is 10 checks, Pro $7/mo is 100, Business $19/mo is 500; yearly is 20% off ($67 and $182). Checked on 21 August 2026 — prices change, so see their pricing page and ours.
Where they are stronger than us
A wider product. Synthetics and real user monitoring are whole categories we do not enter. If the question is "what did the user actually experience on the checkout page", we have no answer and they do.
Branded status pages and SSO. We have public status badges for a check or a tag; that is not the same as a status page under your own domain. SSO we do not have at all.
Multi-region: they are ahead of us, plainly. Twelve or more locations on five continents against our three, up to twelve locations per check, and you choose which ones. They also confirm an outage from at least one additional region — the same safeguard we have, so the quorum in our column is not an advantage over them, it is table stakes. Add synthetic checks driving a real Chrome, which we do not have at all. If the question is "how does the site behave for users on five continents", they answer it better than we do.
Our difference in this part is not coverage — it is the meter. Their checks are billed per monitor, so watching more places costs more every month; ours are a flat fee with a check limit. That is the honest way to put it, and it is the only way that survives someone reading both pricing pages.
Maturity. They have been at this longer, across more surface area. Age is the one line item that cannot be shipped in a release.
Moving between them
A ping is an ordinary HTTP request, on both sides. Migration is one domain in your scripts:
- curl -fsS -m 10 --retry 3 https://cronitor.link/p/<key>/<monitor> + curl -fsS -m 10 --retry 3 https://ping.cronalive.com/<uuid>
For a bulk move, create the checks through our API, or skip it entirely: our SDKs create a check on its first ping and take the schedule straight from your code, so the crontab becomes the source of truth and there is nothing to migrate at all.
The same applies in the other direction, deliberately. There is no export you have to ask us for, and no format only we can read.
Questions
Can I self-host CronAlive?
No, and there is no plan to. Half of what we run is the part that must not live on your infrastructure: probes in three regions, a ping tier that deploys separately from the dashboard, and someone awake when it breaks. A copy running on the same machine as your jobs goes down with them — which is the one moment monitoring has to survive. Cronitor is a hosted service as well, so this is not a difference between the two; if self-hosting is a hard requirement, neither of us is your answer.
What happens to my data if you shut down?
Checks, pings and events export as JSON through the REST API, and a ping is a plain HTTP request to a URL — nothing in your scripts is written in our dialect. Moving away means changing a domain in a curl line. We would rather be left because something better appeared than because leaving is expensive.
Cronitor has twelve locations and you have three. Does that matter?
It depends what you are asking of them. Three regions are enough to answer "is it actually down, or is it just our route to it" — our primary probes run from DE, and a check flips to down only when at least two distinct regions see the failure within a 15-minute window. They confirm outages from an additional region too, so on that question we are even. Three regions are not enough to tell you how the site feels to users in São Paulo or Singapore. If that is your question, they answer it and we do not.
Why 10 free checks when Cronitor gives 5?
Ten against five is not a claim worth making — both numbers are small on purpose. The difference that matters is what happens after the free tier: per-monitor pricing grows with your infrastructure, a flat rate does not. That is the whole argument, and it only starts to matter around a hundred checks.
Are these prices current?
Both sides were checked on 21 August 2026, and either can change tomorrow. Their pricing page is linked under the price table — if it disagrees with this page, believe theirs and tell us.
Try it on the jobs you actually worry about
Ten checks on the free plan, no card. If it does not beat what you already have, you have lost an evening and learned something.
Also weighing up CronAlive and Healthchecks.io?