# Alternatives to Healthchecks

Cron and heartbeat monitoring, open source.

Healthchecks ranks #8 of 8 in Uptime monitoring, with an Alt Score of 46. It is licensed under BSD-3-Clause, open source with paid hosting from $5/month and available on the web. 4 of 10 checklist rows are verified against a public source.

Source: https://altcatalog.com/alternatives/healthchecks/
Category: Uptime monitoring

## Overview

- **Who it's for**: Developers, ops teams, and sysadmins who run cron jobs, scheduled tasks, or background workers (backups, ETL, reports) and need to know if one silently stops running.
- **What you get**: A dead man's switch monitoring service: each job gets a unique ping URL, with configurable period and grace-time thresholds and cron-expression scheduling. A live dashboard shows check status and ping history, with alerts via email, Slack, PagerDuty, SMS, Telegram, and dozens of other integrations when a check is late or missing. It's open source and self-hostable, or usable as a hosted SaaS with a free tier (up to 20 checks).
- **How it works**: You create a check and get a unique URL, then have your job call that URL (via curl, HTTP GET, or a client library) when it starts and/or finishes. Healthchecks.io expects a ping within the defined period plus grace time; if none arrives, it fires a notification through your configured channels.

## Profile

- **License**: BSD-3-Clause (verified 2026-07-10)
- **Pricing model**: OSS + paid hosting (verified 2026-07-10)
- **Starts at**: $5/month (verified 2026-07-10)
- **Platforms**: Web
- **Status**: active (verified 2026-07-10)

## Ranked alternatives

| # | App | Alt Score | Licence | Platforms |
|---|-----|-----------|---------|-----------|
| 1 | [Checkly](https://altcatalog.com/alternatives/checkly.md) | 96 | Proprietary | Web |
| 2 | [Better Stack](https://altcatalog.com/alternatives/better-stack.md) | 91 | Proprietary | Web, iOS, Android |
| 3 | [UptimeRobot](https://altcatalog.com/alternatives/uptimerobot.md) | 91 | Proprietary | Web, iOS, Android |
| 4 | [StatusCake](https://altcatalog.com/alternatives/statuscake.md) | 86 | Proprietary | Web |
| 5 | [Uptime Kuma](https://altcatalog.com/alternatives/uptime-kuma.md) | 86 | MIT | Windows, macOS, Linux |
| 6 | [Gatus](https://altcatalog.com/alternatives/gatus.md) | 82 | Apache-2.0 | Windows, macOS, Linux |
| 7 | [Pingdom](https://altcatalog.com/alternatives/pingdom.md) | 60 | Proprietary | Web |

Alt Score = Verified coverage (90%) + Visibility (10%). See https://altcatalog.com/how-alt-score-works/

## Feature comparison

Legend: Yes / No / Partial / ? (not verified).

| Uptime monitoring checklist | Healthchecks | Checkly | Better Stack | UptimeRobot | StatusCake | Uptime Kuma |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pricing model | OSS + paid hosting | Freemium | Freemium | Freemium | Freemium | Free |
| Starts at | $5/month | $24/month (Starter) | $25/month | €7/month (Solo, billed annually) | €19.99/month (Superior) | ? |
| License | BSD-3-Clause | Proprietary | Proprietary | Proprietary | Proprietary | MIT |
| Platforms | Web | Web | Web, iOS, Android | Web, iOS, Android | Web | Windows, macOS, Linux |
| Check interval (free tier) | ? | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Status pages | ? | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Multi-region checks | ? | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | ? |
| SSL expiry alerts | ? | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Cron / heartbeat monitoring | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Alert channels (Slack, SMS, webhook) | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hostable | Yes | Partial | ? | ? | No | Yes |
| Incident management | ? | Yes | Yes | Yes | Partial | Yes |
| Response-time graphs | ? | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| API access | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Partial |

## Sources

Sources for Healthchecks. Each alternative is sourced on its own page.

- **Pricing model**: OSS + paid hosting — <https://healthchecks.io/docs/self_hosted/> (verified 2026-07-10)
  - Quote: “Healthchecks is open-source, and is licensed under the BSD 3-clause license.”
- **Starts at**: $5/month — <https://healthchecks.io/pricing/> (verified 2026-07-10)
  - Quote: “$5 / month”
- **License**: BSD-3-Clause — <https://github.com/healthchecks/healthchecks/blob/master/LICENSE> (verified 2026-07-10)
  - Quote: “Copyright (c) 2015, Pēteris Caune and other contributors
All rights reserved.”
- **Platforms**: Web — <https://raw.githubusercontent.com/healthchecks/healthchecks/master/README.md> (verified 2026-07-10)
  - Quote: “Healthchecks comes with a web dashboard, API, 25+ integrations for”
- **Status**: active — <https://github.com/healthchecks/healthchecks/releases/tag/v4.2> (verified 2026-07-10)
  - Quote: “Release v4.2 · healthchecks/healthchecks”
- **Cron / heartbeat monitoring**: Yes — <https://raw.githubusercontent.com/healthchecks/healthchecks/master/README.md> (verified 2026-07-10)
  - Note: pings") from your cron jobs and scheduled tasks ("checks").
When a ping does not arrive on time, Health"
  - Quote: “Healthchecks is a cron job monitoring service. It listens for HTTP requests
and email messages (”
- **Alert channels (Slack, SMS, webhook)**: Yes — <https://healthchecks.io/docs/> (verified 2026-07-10)
  - Quote: “Healthchecks.io supports many types of integrations: email,
webhooks, SMS, Slack, PagerDuty, etc.”
- **Self-hostable**: Yes — <https://healthchecks.io/docs/self_hosted/> (verified 2026-07-10)
  - Quote: “Healthchecks is open-source, and is licensed under the BSD 3-clause license.”
- **API access**: Yes — <https://healthchecks.io/docs/api/> (verified 2026-07-10)
  - Quote: “With the Management API, you can programmatically manage checks and integrations
in your account.”

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Ranked by verified data, never by who paid. https://altcatalog.com/trust/