What it does
Cronitor monitors cron jobs, scheduled tasks, and background processes through lifecycle events or periodic heartbeats. A job can signal when it starts and finishes, while a heartbeat monitor expects a recurring check-in within a configured tolerance. The service is designed to detect missing or failed work that ordinary website uptime checks may not notice, and it offers a free tier plus paid usage-based plans.
A practical first monitor is a scheduled export or nightly maintenance task. Create a job monitor, add the documented start and completion signals to the script, and set its expected schedule and grace period. Cronitor's guide models a job with run, complete, and failure events, making it possible to alert on a task that never started as well as one that ended unsuccessfully. No monitor was created and no telemetry was sent for this listing.
For a long-running service or worker, a heartbeat monitor answers a different question: did the process check in on time? A missed heartbeat is a useful alarm, but it does not explain why the process stopped. Route the alert to an operator and use logs or metrics to investigate.
The pricing page lists a free Hacker plan with five monitors and email or Slack alerts. Its Business plan is shown at $2 per monitor per month plus $5 per user per month, with a 14-day trial. SMS alerts and some premium integrations are not part of the free plan, so check its included channels before adopting it for a critical on-call path.
Strengths
- Job monitoring tracks run, completion, and failure events for scheduled work.
- Heartbeat monitors can detect a service or process that stops checking in.
- The pricing page includes a five-monitor free tier and publishes per-monitor and per-user Business rates.
Watch out for
- Job monitors need instrumentation that reports execution events or heartbeats.
- A missed or failed signal detects a problem but does not diagnose the application or host cause.
- The free Hacker plan excludes SMS alerts and premium integrations.
Best for
- Teams monitoring scheduled scripts, data pipelines, and background jobs.
- Operators who need to detect missed runs or failed task completion without building alerting from scratch.
- Small projects that can start with email or Slack alerts and expand as monitor volume grows.
Sources
- Cronitor Monitoring (Oct 25, 2026)
- Cron Job Monitoring (Oct 25, 2026)
- Heartbeat Monitoring (Oct 25, 2026)
- Simple Pricing (Oct 25, 2026)