CronAlive vs Healthchecks.io
Which one to pick
Take Healthchecks.io if you only need heartbeats, if self-hosting matters to you, or if twenty free jobs are enough. It has been running since 2015, it is open source, you can put it on your own hardware, and its Business plan is free for open-source projects and non-profits. Ten years of operation is not a marketing line — it is the one thing a feature list cannot buy.
Take CronAlive if the same dashboard also has to answer "is the site up, and is the certificate still valid" — HTTP checks from three regions with a two-region quorum before an alert, and TLS expiry warnings. Or if the arithmetic decides it: past a hundred checks our flat rate is several times cheaper. The sums are below; check them yourself.
Features
| Healthchecks.io | CronAlive | |
|---|---|---|
| Heartbeat / dead man’s switch | Yes | Yes |
| HTTP uptime checks | No — heartbeats only | Yes |
| TLS certificate expiry | No | Yes, 7/14/30 days ahead |
| Probe regions | Not applicable — makes no outbound checks | DE primary, RU and US external |
| Second region confirms an outage | Not applicable — makes no outbound checks | Yes — quorum of two regions |
| Telegram alerts | Yes — DMs, groups and channels | Yes — DMs and groups, linked by deep link in one tap |
| Check created by its first ping | Yes — ?create=1 on a slug URL | Yes — same idea, or through an SDK |
| That first ping also sets the schedule | No — new checks default to a 1-day period and 1-hour grace | Yes — the SDK reads it off the scheduled task |
| Self-hosting | Yes — open source | No |
| REST API | Yes — Pinging API and Management API | Yes — read-write and read-only keys |
| Team members | Yes — projects and teams | 1 / 5 / unlimited by plan |
Checked on 21 August 2026 against their pricing page, documentation and integrations page. Two rows say "not applicable" rather than "no", and the difference matters: a heartbeat service never makes an outbound request, so probe regions are not a feature it lacks — they are a question that does not apply to it.
What it costs at 10, 100 and 500 checks
| Healthchecks.io | CronAlive | |
|---|---|---|
| 10 checks | Free — Hobbyist covers 20 | Free — 10 checks |
| 100 checks | $20 / mo — Business | $7 / mo — Pro |
| 500 checks | $80 / mo — Business Plus (1000 jobs) | $19 / mo — Business |
How these numbers are produced. Healthchecks.io: Hobbyist is free with 20 jobs and 100 log entries per job; Supporter is $5/mo with the same limits (a way to fund the project); Business is $20/mo for 100 jobs, 1000 log entries, 50 SMS/WhatsApp and 20 calls, with email support; Business Plus is $80/mo for 1000 jobs. Paying yearly is 20% cheaper — $192/year for Business. CronAlive: Free is 10 checks, Pro $7/mo is 100, Business $19/mo is 500, and yearly is also 20% off ($67 and $182). Monthly rates are shown on both sides, and each row picks the cheapest plan that fits. Checked on 21 August 2026 — prices change, so see their pricing page and ours.
Where they are stronger than us
Open source and self-hosting. You can read every line of Healthchecks.io and run it on your own machine. We are a hosted service, and that is a difference in kind — not a feature we have not got round to.
Twenty free jobs against our ten. Their free tier is twice ours, and their Business plan is free for open-source projects and non-profits. We have nothing to put next to that.
Ten years and a track record. Running since 2015, 4.9 on Capterra, customer reviews on their own front page. We are newer, and no amount of writing changes that — only time does.
Creating a check from code is not our invention either.
Their ?create=1 makes a check on
its first ping, same as ours. The difference is narrower than
we would like it to be: their auto-created check starts on a
one-day period with an hour of grace and you set the real
schedule afterwards, while our SDKs send the schedule with
that first ping. Useful if you have fifty jobs; hardly
decisive if you have five.
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://hc-ping.com/<uuid> + curl -fsS -m 10 --retry 3 https://ping.cronalive.com/<uuid>
For a bulk move, read your checks out of their Management API and create them through ours: name, schedule, grace and tags map across directly. Or skip the API 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. If self-hosting is a requirement rather than a preference, Healthchecks.io is open source and that settles it.
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.
How is multi-region different from a single probe?
A single vantage point cannot tell "the site is down" from "our route to it is down". Our primary probes run from DE; when they fail, the job is dispatched to RU and US, and the check flips to down only when at least two distinct regions see the failure within a 15-minute window. A network problem local to one region does not page you.
Why 10 free checks and not 20?
Because we are not competing on the free tier. Healthchecks.io gives 20 jobs for free, and that is a better free offer than ours. Our arithmetic starts on the paid tiers: 100 checks cost $7 a month here against $20 there, and 500 cost $19 against $80. If ten free checks are all you will ever need, take the twenty.
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 Cronitor?