heartbeet vs Cronitor
Cronitor has grown from a cron monitor into a small observability suite: job telemetry, uptime checks, status pages, dashboards. it's polished and professional. heartbeet deliberately does one thing; the question is whether you want the suite or just the dead-man's switch.
the core difference: a suite vs a silence monitor
Cronitor wants to be where you look at your background jobs: durations, outputs, metrics, uptime, status pages, per-seat team accounts. priced accordingly, per monitor plus per user.
heartbeet is a silence monitor with taste: jobs send heartbeats, the beets learn each job's rhythm and page you on silence. no telemetry product, no uptime probes, no per-monitor meter; a flat tier covers unlimited jobs, because a last line of defense shouldn't make you ration what you watch.
side by side
| — | heartbeet | Cronitor |
|---|---|---|
| scope | silence detection for scheduled jobs, full stop | cron telemetry + uptime + status pages + dashboards |
| configuration | none; rhythm + grace period learned per job | schedules/assertions per monitor (rich, explicit) |
| pricing shape | flat: free / $5 backer / $20 team, unlimited jobs on all of them | free tier of a few monitors, then per-monitor + per-user pricing |
| job creation | first heartbeat creates the job | sdk/api/dashboard provisioning (good sdks) |
| alert channels | email (Slack, SMS, webhooks on the roadmap) | broad: Slack, SMS, PagerDuty, webhooks, … |
| early warning | arrhythmia paging on consecutive late heartbeats | duration/assertion alerts (configured) |
| pausing | deploy-shaped: drain + wait windows, per job or per tag, from the project page or any project api key | pause per monitor or group (api), plus scheduled maintenance windows |
| self-hosting | no (we'd both point you at Healthchecks.io) | no |
pick Cronitor if
- you want job telemetry (durations, outputs, trends), not just liveness; that's genuinely their product and it's good.
- you need status pages and uptime checks from the same vendor.
- per-monitor pricing fits how you budget (a handful of important monitors, a team that expenses per seat).
pick heartbeet if
- you want to build the habit of watching everything, and per-monitor pricing punishes exactly that habit.
- you don't want to write schedules and assertions; the beets cover your whole fleet without them.
- you want the cheapest possible answer to "tell me when anything goes quiet" and you'll keep your metrics elsewhere.
the quickstart is one curl; the free tier needs no card.