A Cronitor alternative with flat plan pricing
Cronitor is a polished, mature monitor for cron jobs, heartbeats and websites, priced per monitor and per user. People start looking around when the monitor count grows and the bill grows with it. Pingstack prices by plan, so 50 checks are $12 a month on Pro and 250 checks with 5 seats are $29 on Team.
Pingstack in one paragraph
Pingstack monitors cron jobs and scheduled tasks with heartbeat checks, plus websites, SSL certificates, domain expiry, DNS records and TCP ports, in one dashboard. Alerts go to notification groups with rosters, and any dashboard can be a branded public status page. An MCP server lets Claude Code, Copilot, Cursor and Codex set up checks.
Side by side
As of October 2026, from each company’s pricing page and docs. Re-check before publishing
| Cronitor | Pingstack | |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing model | $2 per monitor plus $5 per user each month | Flat plans by check count |
| Free plan | 5 monitors, 1 user | 15 checks |
| 50 monitors, 1 user | $105 a month | $12 a month (Pro) |
| 250 monitors, 5 users | $525 a month | $29 a month (Team) |
| Cron jobs and heartbeats | Yes, with run duration from start and finish events | Yes, with cron schedules, time zones, grace periods, run times, failure signals and value thresholds |
| Website and API checks | Yes, every 30 seconds at fastest on paid plans | Yes, from 3 probe regions |
| SSL, domain, DNS, TCP checks | Not listed as separate check types | Yes |
| Browser checks and real-user monitoring | Yes, paid add-ons | No |
| Slack, Discord, Teams, webhooks | Every plan | Every plan |
| SMS | Paid plans | Coming soon |
| PagerDuty, Opsgenie, Splunk On-Call | Paid plans | PagerDuty and Jira Service Management (Opsgenie’s successor) on Team and Business |
| Status pages | 1 basic page free; branded $25 a month, private $50 a month | Branded public status pages and wallboards on every plan, with a custom domain on paid plans |
| MCP server | Yes, hosted, OAuth or API key, with tools for monitors, status pages, issues and more | Yes, hosted, OAuth or API key, 20 tools for checks, dashboards, incidents and metrics |
| SSO and SCIM | Yes (SAML SSO +$5 per user) | No |
What Cronitor does well
Cronitor has been at this for years, and it shows. It tracks each run’s start and finish, so it knows how long jobs take and can alert when one hangs. Its CLI wraps commands and can report crontab jobs, and there are SDKs for most languages. It covers more of the stack than Pingstack: browser checks, real-user monitoring and web analytics. Its MCP server is broad, with tools for status pages, maintenance windows and integrations as well as monitors. And it has SAML SSO, SCIM and read-only roles for larger teams.
Pick Cronitor if
- You need an alert when a job starts and never finishes
- You want browser checks or real-user monitoring in the same tool
- You need Splunk On-Call, SSO or SCIM today
- You have a few monitors and a few users, where per-monitor pricing stays small
Pick Pingstack if
- You run more than a handful of jobs and want a bill that doesn’t grow with each one
- You want SSL, domain, DNS and TCP checks next to your jobs
- You want a job to report a number, like a backup’s size, and alert when it’s wrong
- You want several people on the account without paying per user
How to switch
- Create a heartbeat check in Pingstack for each job, with the same schedule, time zone and grace period.
- Add the Pingstack ping URL to each job next to Cronitor’s. The recipes cover 25 schedulers.
- Run both for a week, then remove the Cronitor calls.
See cron job monitoring, or all comparisons.
Last updated Oct 15, 2026
Common questions
Can I move my Cronitor monitors to Pingstack automatically?
Not with an importer yet. Create a heartbeat check in Pingstack for each job, add its ping URL to the job next to Cronitor's, and run both for a week before you remove the old one. With the MCP server connected, your coding agent can create the checks from your crontab or workflow files.
Does Pingstack track job duration like Cronitor?
Yes. Send /start when a job begins and Pingstack records how long each run took (the pingstack command does it for you). It won't alert when a run starts and never finishes, though. Cronitor can.
Does Pingstack have SSO?
Not yet. If you need SAML SSO or SCIM today, Cronitor offers both.
