A Healthchecks.io alternative that also watches your websites
Healthchecks.io is a focused, open-source cron monitor, and a good one. People start looking around when they also need to watch websites, certificates, domains, DNS or ports, and don't want to run two tools. Pingstack does both, from $12 a month for 50 checks.
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
| Healthchecks.io | Pingstack | |
|---|---|---|
| Cron and heartbeat checks | Yes, with cron expressions, time zones and grace times | Yes, with cron expressions, time zones, grace periods and value thresholds |
| Job duration | Yes, with start signals | Yes, with start signals |
| Alert on a job that hangs | Yes | No |
| Website, SSL, domain, DNS, TCP | Not listed on their pricing page or docs | Yes |
| Alert channels | Dozens, including Slack, Discord, Teams, Telegram, PagerDuty and Opsgenie | Email, Slack, Teams, Discord and webhooks on every plan; PagerDuty, Jira Service Management and Jira tickets on Team and Business; phone calls on paid plans (SMS coming soon) |
| Free plan | 20 checks | 15 checks of any type |
| Paid plans | $20 for 100 checks (with 50 SMS and 20 calls), $80 for 1,000 | $12 for 50, $29 for 250, $79 for 1,000 (600 call credits) |
| Public status pages | No; status badges for READMEs | Branded status pages and wallboards |
| MCP server | Community servers only | Yes, hosted, with browser sign-in |
| Open source and self-hosting | Yes (BSD license) | No |
What Healthchecks.io does well
Healthchecks.io does one job very well. Its cron support is thorough: cron expressions with time zones, start signals that time each run and catch jobs that hang, and exit-code reporting. It connects to more alert channels than almost anything else. The whole thing is open source under the BSD license, so you can run it on your own server, and the hosted service is free for open-source projects and non-profits on request.
Stay with Healthchecks.io if
- You want open source or to self-host
- You only need cron monitoring
- You need alerts on jobs that hang, or more than 15 free cron checks
- You rely on an alert channel Pingstack doesn’t have yet
Switch to Pingstack if
- You want website, SSL, DNS and TCP checks in the same tool
- You want branded status pages for customers
- You want a job to report a number and alert when it crosses a threshold
- You want your AI agent to set up checks over MCP
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 the Healthchecks.io one.
- Run both for a week, then remove the old URLs.
See cron job monitoring, or all comparisons.
Last updated Oct 15, 2026
Common questions
Can I use the same ping URLs?
No. Each Pingstack check has its own ping URL, so you swap the URL in each job. Running both side by side for a week makes the switch safe.
Is Pingstack open source?
No. If you want to self-host, Healthchecks.io is the better fit.
Does Pingstack measure how long a job runs?
Yes. Send /start when a job begins and Pingstack records how long each run took. Healthchecks.io can also use that start signal to catch a job that hangs, and Pingstack can't do that yet.
