Cron job monitoring with heartbeat pings and alerts, plus hosted cron jobs that call your URLs on a schedule.
Pricing and hosting
- Pricing
- Free plan
- Free plan
- 20 checks, 3 cloud cron jobs
- Open source
- No
- Self-hosted
- No
- Launched
- 2026
- Status
- Active
- Website
- watchcron.com
Plans and prices change; check the tool's own site before you decide.
What it does
Cron and heartbeat monitoring checklist
7 of 8 confirmed in WatchCron's own documentation. The same checklist is used for every tool in Cron and heartbeats.
- Ping URL Yes
- Grace period Yes
- Cron expressions Yes
- Start and failure signals Yes
- Run duration Yes
- Output capture Not confirmed
- Alert integrations Yes
- API or IaC Yes
Exit codes are mapped to success/fail pings by the script; sending output or codes to the ping not documented
Checked against: watchcron.com, watchcron.com (2), watchcron.com (3), watchcron.com (4)
Alternatives to WatchCron
Other cron and heartbeat monitoring tools. See all 12.
-
Checkly Synthetic monitoring for developers: API checks and Playwright browser checks written as code, deployed from CI and run from many regions. -
cronalive Heartbeat monitoring for cron jobs with HTTP uptime and TLS expiry checks, plus Laravel, Python and Node packages that create checks from code. -
Cronitor Monitoring for cron jobs, background workers and scheduled tasks that tracks run duration and failures, plus website uptime checks and status pages. -
Dead Man's Snitch Dead man's switch for cron jobs and scheduled tasks: each job checks in to a unique URL, and a missed check-in triggers an alert. -
Drumbeats Cron job, heartbeat and uptime monitoring with incident tracking and status pages, billed by check-in volume rather than monitor count. -
Healthchecks.io Cron job and heartbeat monitoring: each job pings a unique URL, and a missed or late ping sends an alert. The server is open source and can be self-hosted. -
LastPing Dead man's switch monitoring for cron jobs, CI pipelines and AI agents, with an MCP server so agents can set up their own monitors. -
Sitesure Heartbeat and scheduled-task monitoring alongside website uptime, SSL, DNS and domain checks, priced per monitor. -
Uptime Kuma Self-hosted monitor for HTTP, keyword, TCP, ping, DNS, Docker and push checks, with status pages and dozens of notification integrations. -
Watchgoose Heartbeat monitoring and status pages for cron jobs, backups and background workers, with an MCP server and free plans for open source projects. - Runitor Command runner for Healthchecks.io: wraps a job, sends start, success or failure pings with its output, and also works with self-hosted Healthchecks.