compare · alertping vs healthchecks.io
Healthchecks.io alternative that also monitors websites, APIs and SSL, not just cron jobs
Short answer: Healthchecks.io and AlertPing do two different jobs. Healthchecks.io waits for your cron jobs to ping it. It never reaches out and touches anything, so it cannot tell you your website is down. AlertPing does both: it accepts heartbeats from your jobs and probes your sites, APIs, ports and certificates every 30 seconds from three regions. Switch if you are tired of running a heartbeat tool next to a separate uptime tool. Stay on Healthchecks.io if cron is all you watch, because it is free for 20 jobs, open source, and genuinely excellent at the one thing it does.
Last updated July 2026 · Healthchecks.io pricing checked July 15, 2026
alertping ▸ run check
live
▸ type a domain and run a real-feel check
▸ probes from 3 regions · FRA · IAD · SIN
▸ waiting…▌
queued probing▌
If ever goes down, you get:
Alert fired ▸ 2 channels · 6.2 s after first failure
AlertPing app
● DOWN : HTTP timeout confirmed from 3/3 regions (FRA, IAD, SIN). Incident opened.
sms · on-call
AlertPing: DOWN. Confirmed 3/3 regions . First fail: Frankfurt.
the real difference
One waits to be pinged. The other goes and looks.
Almost every comparison of these two tools gets framed as a price fight. It is not one. The difference is architectural, and once you see it the choice usually makes itself.
healthchecks.io
Inbound only
Your backup script finishes and curls a unique URL. Healthchecks.io notes the time. If the next ping does not arrive inside the grace window, it alerts you. That is a dead man's switch, and it is the right tool for catching a cron job that silently stopped running.
It never opens a connection to your server. Their own documentation is direct about this: Healthchecks.io listens for HTTP requests from your scheduled tasks. If your web server catches fire at 2am, nothing pings, and nothing is supposed to ping, so nothing fires.
alertping
Inbound and outbound
AlertPing accepts the same style of heartbeat from your jobs, so the dead man's switch still works. It also actively probes: HTTP and HTTPS checks, ping, TCP ports, SSL certificate expiry, JSON body assertions, every 30 seconds from three regions that have to agree before you get woken up.
The practical effect is one dashboard and one escalation policy for the backup job and the site the backup protects, instead of two tools with two bills that each know half the story.
Worth saying plainly: this is not a criticism of Healthchecks.io. They have never claimed to do uptime monitoring. Their homepage says “Simple and Effective Cron Job Monitoring” and their own published comparison against Cronitor marks website uptime monitoring and status pages as things they do not offer. They are precise about their scope, which is more than most vendors manage. The question is only whether that scope covers what you need to watch.
side by side
AlertPing vs Healthchecks.io, row by row
Every Healthchecks.io figure below was read off healthchecks.io on July 15, 2026. Third-party directories carry wrong numbers for this product (we found several claiming a paid Hobbyist tier that does not exist), so we only used the vendor's own pages. Our prices are on the uptime monitoring pricing page.
| AlertPing | Healthchecks.io | |
|---|---|---|
| What it monitors | Cron heartbeats, websites, APIs, TCP ports, SSL expiry | Cron heartbeats only. No outbound probing of any kind |
| Free plan | None. Paid from $19/mo, 14-day trial | Yes. Hobbyist is free for 20 jobs, forever |
| Entry paid price | $19/mo for 20 monitors | $5/mo Supporter (same 20 jobs, it is a donation tier) |
| 100 monitors | $59/mo Team, any mix of jobs and websites | $20/mo Business, 100 cron jobs |
| Top tier | $189/mo for 500 monitors | $80/mo Business Plus, 1,000 jobs |
| SMS alerts | Included, unmetered, on every plan including the $19 one | Credit-limited: 0 on Hobbyist and Supporter, 50/mo on Business, 500/mo on Business Plus, shared with WhatsApp |
| Notification channels | SMS, email, Slack, webhooks | 27 channels, including Signal, Matrix, ntfy, Telegram, Prometheus, PagerDuty, Opsgenie |
| Multi-region confirmation | 3 regions must agree before an alert fires | Not applicable, since nothing is probed |
| Status pages | Hosted and branded, on your domain, in every plan | None |
| Self-hosting | No, hosted only | Yes. BSD-3-Clause, Python and Django, on GitHub |
| History kept | Per-check history and response times in the dashboard | 100 log entries per job (1,000 on Business and above). Measured in entries, not days |
| Free for open source | No | Yes, Business plan free for OSS projects and nonprofits |
the honest part
When you should stay on Healthchecks.io
We would rather you pick the right tool than churn in six weeks. There are several situations where Healthchecks.io is simply the better answer, and pretending otherwise would be insulting.
Cron is genuinely all you watch
If you have 12 backup and ETL jobs and no website to speak of, you do not need outbound probing. Twenty jobs cost nothing. Paying us $19 for capability you will never use is a bad trade and we will not pretend it isn't.
Price, flatly
They are roughly three times cheaper at every comparable tier, and free at entry. $20 for 100 jobs against our $59 for 100 monitors is not close. You are paying our difference for probing, SMS and status pages. If you do not want those, do not pay it.
You want to self-host
BSD-3-Clause on GitHub, 10,000-plus stars, still actively committed to. Run it on your own box for the price of the box, with your data never leaving your network. We have no answer to this and cannot pretend to.
You need an unusual channel
Twenty-seven integrations against our four. If your team lives in Signal, Matrix, ntfy or Telegram, or you want to scrape alerts into Prometheus, they support it today and we do not.
Deep cron instrumentation
Start and success signals, exit codes, runtime measurement, cron expression awareness, systemd support. They have spent eleven years on this since launching in 2015. Our heartbeats are solid but they are not this detailed.
You run an open source project
They give the Business plan away free to open source projects and nonprofits, and donate a share of revenue back to open source. If that describes you, take them up on it.
the case for moving
When AlertPing is the better buy
You are already paying for two tools
This is the common case. Healthchecks.io at $20 for the jobs, plus an uptime service at $20 to $50 for the websites, plus a status page product on top. Three dashboards, three alert configurations, three invoices, and no single place that shows you the backup failed because the database host went unreachable. One $59 plan covers 100 monitors of any type with one escalation policy.
SMS actually has to arrive
On Healthchecks.io the free and $5 tiers cannot send SMS at all, and Business gives you 50 credits a month shared between SMS and WhatsApp. A noisy month burns that. Our SMS is included and unmetered on the $19 plan, because an alert that fails to reach a sleeping human is not an alert. See downtime alerts.
A customer asked for a status page
Healthchecks.io has no status page and concedes it. If you sell to businesses, a hosted status page on your own domain has become a due-diligence checkbox, and buying a separate product for it costs more than the monitoring did.
You need someone on call
Healthchecks.io is, by its founder's own published account, a one-person company in Latvia with an excellent eleven-year record. That is admirable and it is also a bus factor of one, with no enterprise SLA. For a hobby project that is fine. For something with a contractual uptime commitment, weigh it deliberately.
migrating
Moving your heartbeats across
A heartbeat is a URL your job curls. Moving them is a find and replace, and you can run both tools side by side while you do it.
-
1
Create the checks
Add a heartbeat monitor per job with the same period and grace time you already use. Each one gives you a ping URL.
-
2
Swap the URL
Replace the hc-ping.com URL in each crontab or script with the new one. Keep both lines for a week if you want a clean overlap.
-
3
Add what was missing
Now add the website, API, port and SSL checks that had no home before. They come out of the same monitor allowance.
-
4
Point alerts at people
Set one escalation policy for everything: Slack during the day, SMS out of hours, webhook into your own tooling.
New to heartbeats, or want the shell examples? The walkthrough is in how to monitor a cron job, and the concept itself is explained in what a dead man's switch is in monitoring. If you are also weighing the other cron specialist, we wrote a Cronitor alternative comparison.
asked before switching
Healthchecks.io alternative questions, answered
Does Healthchecks.io do website uptime monitoring?
No. Healthchecks.io only listens for pings sent by your own cron jobs and scripts; it never makes an outbound request to your site. Their own published comparison table marks website uptime monitoring as absent. To watch a website you need a tool that probes it, which is what AlertPing does every 30 seconds from three regions.
Is Healthchecks.io free?
Yes. The Hobbyist plan is free forever for 20 cron jobs with 100 log entries each, and it sends no SMS. Supporter at $5 a month is a donation tier with identical limits. Business is $20 a month for 100 jobs, and open source projects and nonprofits can get Business free by asking.
Is Healthchecks.io open source?
Yes, under the BSD-3-Clause license, written in Python and Django, on GitHub with over 10,000 stars and active commits. You can self-host it on your own infrastructure at no license cost. AlertPing is hosted only, so if self-hosting is a requirement, Healthchecks.io wins outright.
Does Healthchecks.io have a status page?
No, it has no public status page feature, which their own comparison documentation confirms. If you need to show customers a branded uptime page during an incident, you would pair Healthchecks.io with a separate status page product, or use a tool like AlertPing that includes hosted status pages in every plan.
What is the best self-hosted Healthchecks.io alternative?
Healthchecks.io itself, honestly. It is BSD-licensed and built to be self-hosted, so the best self-hosted version of it is it. Uptime Kuma is the usual answer for self-hosted website probing, and it also handles heartbeats. AlertPing is not a candidate here: we are hosted only and make no claim otherwise.
Can I run cron and website monitoring in one tool?
Yes, and it is the main reason teams leave a heartbeat-only tool. AlertPing counts a cron heartbeat as an ordinary monitor, so 30 jobs and 70 websites both fit inside the same $59 Team plan, under one alert policy and one bill, rather than splitting across a cron tool and an uptime service.
Heartbeats and uptime checks in one plan
Keep the dead man's switch. Add the website, API, port and SSL checks it was never built to do. 30-second probes, 3-region confirmation, SMS in every plan.