Cronitor is a capable monitoring suite, but if you mainly need rock-solid cron and background-job alerting without enterprise pricing, CronGuard gives you the essentials at a fraction of the cost.
Start Monitoring FreeNo credit card required.
| Feature | CronGuard | Cronitor |
|---|---|---|
| Cron / heartbeat monitoring | ||
| SMS & WhatsApp alerts | Add-on | |
| Slack & Telegram alerts | ||
| Real-time WebSocket dashboard | Partial | |
| Unlimited monitors on entry paid plan | ||
| Public status pages | ||
| Paid plan entry price | $8/mo | $49/mo |
CronGuard focuses on doing one thing extremely well: telling you the moment a scheduled job fails to check in. You add a unique ping URL to your job and choose a schedule and grace period — that is the whole setup.
Compared to Cronitor, CronGuard keeps pricing simple and flat. There are no per-monitor surcharges that punish you as you grow: the Pro plan is $8/mo for unlimited monitors, team members and 1-minute intervals.
You still get the things that actually matter at 3am — instant SMS, WhatsApp, Slack and Telegram alerts, execution-time tracking to catch slow degradation, and a real-time dashboard you do not need to refresh.
Yes. The Pro plan supports 1-minute check-in intervals, which is enough granularity for almost every cron and background-job use case.
You add a unique ping URL to the end of your cron job or scheduled script. Each time the job runs successfully it calls that URL. If CronGuard does not receive the expected ping within your defined schedule and grace period, it alerts you instantly. This is known as a "dead man's switch" — it catches silent failures that traditional monitoring misses.
No. CronGuard works with a single HTTP request (curl, wget, or any HTTP client). There is nothing to install on your server, which means it keeps working even if your entire host goes down.
Yes. CronGuard has a free Developer plan with email notifications and no credit card required, so you can start monitoring a critical job in under a minute.