Cronitor started with cron jobs and it shows, in a good way. If your problem is "did the nightly batch run, and did it finish in time", Cronitor was built for exactly that and it is very good at it.
What Cronitor does better
Cron and job monitoring is its speciality. Deeper scheduling awareness than a generic heartbeat: it understands cron expressions, expected duration, and overlapping runs, rather than just noticing that a ping did not arrive.
It is cheaper when you have very few monitors. $2/month per monitor plus $5/month per user, with no base fee. Five monitors and one user is about $15/month. If you have three cron jobs and nothing else, that beats paying for a plan.
Free tier for tiny setups. 5 monitors free forever with email and Slack alerts.
Eleven alert integrations on the paid plan, including SMS — which we do not do.
Where we differ
Per-monitor pricing turns on you. At 50 monitors and 3 users, Cronitor is $100 + $15 = $115/month. Ours is €19/month for 50 monitors with 10 members. At 250 monitors the gap is wider still: €79/month against roughly $500. The crossover is somewhere around ten monitors — below that Cronitor is cheaper, above it the flat plan wins, and it stops being close quickly.
Their free tier is 5 monitors; ours is 10.
We cover more than jobs. Cron monitoring is one of fifteen check types here, alongside HTTP, JSON assertions, keyword, TCP, DNS, ping, databases, browser flows, mail blocklists, Minecraft, Source/Steam, FiveM and Discord bot presence. Cronitor has grown into uptime checks too, but jobs remain its centre of gravity and game servers and Discord bots are not on the list.
The alerting proof. Outbox before every send with a ~50-minute retry ladder, a weekly test event through every channel with the failures named, and /api/health returning 503 when the checker itself stops. For a dead man's switch this matters more than usual: the entire value of a heartbeat monitor is the alert, so an alert that silently fails to send makes the monitor worse than useless.
Side by side
| Cronitor | Uplance | |
|---|---|---|
| Free plan | 5 monitors, email + Slack | 10 monitors, all channels |
| Pricing model | $2/mo per monitor + $5/mo per user | Flat plan |
| 50 monitors, 3 users | ~$115/mo | €19/mo (10 members) |
| 250 monitors | ~$500/mo | €79/mo (50 members) |
| Cron / job monitoring depth | Deeper — schedule aware | Heartbeat with grace period |
| SMS alerts | Yes | No |
| Check types | Jobs plus uptime checks | 15, including game servers and databases |
| Data retention | 12 months on Business | 30 / 90 / 365 days by plan |
| Proof alerts were delivered | No | Outbox, retry ladder, weekly drill |
| Enterprise entry | From $6,000/yr | €79/mo, or talk to us |
Which one to pick
Cronitor if you are monitoring a handful of scheduled jobs and want the sharpest tool for that specific job, or if you need SMS. Under about ten monitors it is also simply cheaper.
Uplance if your cron jobs are one part of a bigger surface, or if per-monitor billing has started making you think twice about adding a monitor. You should never be reluctant to monitor something because of what it costs.