Tool profile
Cronitor: cost, fit and limits
Cronitor is a monitoring service made by Cronitor, Inc. in the United States that watches cron jobs, scheduled tasks and heartbeats, and also runs uptime checks and status pages for engineering teams. It is aimed at developers.
What to know first
Cronitor prices by what you monitor: Hacker is free for 5 monitors, Business costs $2 per monitor and $5 per user each month after a 14 day trial, and Enterprise starts at $6,000 per year on annual invoicing. SAML single sign-on adds $5 per user monthly. The 2026 release named on the site is an MCP server and AI agent monitoring, not downtime detection.
Cronitor at a glance
| Maker | Cronitor, Inc., United States |
|---|---|
| Free plan | Yes |
| Entry price | $0 (Hacker, 5 monitors) |
| API access | Yes |
| Category | Best AI Uptime Monitoring Software in 2026, rank 10 of 13 |
| Website | cronitor.io |
Who Cronitor is best for
Teams with background workers and nightly jobs
Heartbeat monitoring flags a job that never ran, which an HTTP check on the website cannot see. Cronitor alerts when a job runs late, fails or never starts at all.
Small teams with few monitors
With 5 free monitors, a team watching a handful of critical jobs pays nothing until it grows. The plan then moves to per-monitor pricing once you pass that limit.
Companies using existing on-call tools
Integrations with PagerDuty, Datadog On-Call and Opsgenie send Cronitor alerts into schedules that people already follow. That avoids building a separate alert path for background jobs.
Cronitor plans and pricing
| Plan | Price | What it includes |
|---|---|---|
| Hacker | $0 free forever | 5 monitors with email and Slack alerts and a basic status page, without premium integrations, for hobby projects and trials. |
| Business | $2 per monitor and $5 per user per month | 14 day free trial, unlimited API requests, volume discounts and Slack, Discord, Teams and webhook alerts; you pay for the monitors used. |
| Enterprise | From $6,000 per year | Annual invoice billing with enterprise support, for larger organizations; SAML SSO is an extra $5 per user per month. |
Checked November 2026.
What Cronitor does
- Cron and heartbeat monitoring
- A job pings Cronitor when it starts or finishes, and a missed or late ping raises an alert, which is the core design of the product.
- Uptime monitoring
- Website uptime checks sit beside job monitors, so a team can cover both public pages and private workers from one account. A team can cover public pages and private workers from the same account without a second vendor.
- Status pages
- A basic status page is on the free plan, and the service lists status pages as a product area for customer communication. Free accounts get a basic page, while the paid plans carry Slack, Discord and Teams alerts.
- Alert and on-call integrations
- Alerts reach email, Slack, Discord, Teams and webhooks, and on-call tools PagerDuty, Datadog On-Call and Opsgenie, with a Splunk integration also listed. Premium integrations are not part of the free Hacker plan.
How Cronitor handles your data
The privacy policy says data is retained as long as the account is active or as the policy allows, in its section 6. The pages we read name no hosting region and no certification, and say nothing on whether customer data trains models. The site mentions an MCP server and AI agent monitoring released in 2026, so check what an agent can read before you connect one.
Where Cronitor falls short in practice
- Costs grow with counts. At $2 per monitor and $5 per user a month, a team with 100 monitors and 10 users pays well above flat-rate tools. Volume discounts exist on Business but their rates are not published.
- Narrow free plan. Hacker is capped at 5 monitors and offers no premium integrations, which stops most real systems from using it for long. It also excludes the premium integrations that paging relies on.
Works with
Alternatives to Cronitor
Cronitor: common questions
What does Cronitor monitor?
Cronitor's core product is cron job and heartbeat monitoring: a scheduled task reports in, and a missing report raises an alert. It also lists uptime monitoring and status pages. That makes it a fit for background jobs, backups and queue workers, more than for a marketing site.
How much does Cronitor cost?
Hacker is free for 5 monitors. Business is $2 per monitor and $5 per user each month after a 14 day trial, with volume discounts. Enterprise starts at $6,000 per year on annual invoice billing, and SAML SSO adds $5 per user per month, as of November 2026.
Does Cronitor have AI features?
The site lists a 2026 MCP server and AI agent monitoring release. The pages we read name no AI feature for detecting downtime or investigating incidents. If AI-assisted triage matters, Better Stack and Hyperping name features of that kind, and Oh Dear describes AI browser checks.
Which on-call tools does Cronitor connect to?
The pages list PagerDuty, Datadog On-Call and Opsgenie for on-call, Slack, Discord, Teams and webhooks for alerts, and Splunk among integrations. Premium integrations are not part of the free Hacker plan, so a team that depends on paging should test the Business trial first.
Is Cronitor good for monitoring a public website?
It can run uptime checks, but the design centers on scheduled jobs. For a public homepage with a status page and fast intervals, tools such as UptimeRobot or Hyperping list more website-centered features. Many teams run Cronitor for jobs beside a separate website monitor.