Cronitor review

Cronitor started with cron jobs and still does them better than most uptime tools, but every plan also includes website, API and heartbeat monitoring. The free Hacker plan gives 5 monitors with email and Slack alerts, a basic status page and 5-minute checks, which suits a homelab or side project. Business has no base fee: you pay $2 per monitor and $5 per user each month after a 14-day trial, so 20 monitors and three users come to $55 a month by Cronitor's own example. That unlocks 30-second checks, SMS alerts, PagerDuty, OpsGenie and other on-call integrations, 12 months of data retention and SAML SSO for an extra $5 per user. Browser checks cost $1 per 1,000 runs and real user monitoring is sold by event volume. The per-monitor model is the cheapest way in for small setups, but it gets expensive compared with tiered plans once you pass a few dozen monitors.

Who it is for

Developers who need to watch scheduled jobs and a handful of endpoints at a low cost.

Price

Free Hacker plan with 5 monitors; Business $2 per monitor plus $5 per user per month.

Business $2 /mo per monitor + $5 /mo per user
Quoted from the vendor pricing page on November 9, 2026.

Key features

• Cron, heartbeat, website and API monitoring on every plan
• 30-second check frequency on Business
• 11 alert integrations including SMS and on-call tools
• Status pages with branded and private options
• Real user monitoring and synthetic browser checks billed by usage

Strengths and weaknesses

• Strength: No base fee: pay only for monitors and users
• Strength: Strong cron job and heartbeat focus
• Strength: Month-to-month billing with no contract
• Weakness: Free plan has only 5 monitors and no SMS alerts
• Weakness: Costs rise linearly as monitor counts grow
• Weakness: Branded status pages cost $25 per page per month

Key facts

• Free plan: Yes, 5 monitors with email and Slack alerts
• Fastest check: 30 seconds on Business
• Free trial: 14 days on Business

Where it ranks

Cronitor is No. 5 in our Best Uptime Monitoring Tools verdict.