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RealUptime Monitor vs Healthchecks.io

Healthchecks.io is a focused dead-man's-switch monitor: your cron jobs, backups, and workers ping it, and silence triggers the alert. It is open source (BSD 3-Clause), self-hostable, run by a small business, and honest about its scope. This page compares it with RealUptime Monitor on that scope honestly: for pure cron monitoring the two overlap almost completely, and the real question is whether you also need your websites and services probed from the outside.

The short version

Healthchecks.io does one thing, cron and heartbeat monitoring, and does it well and cheaply; RealUptime Monitor does the same heartbeats plus the active outside-in checks Healthchecks.io deliberately does not.

If everything you need monitored is a cron job, Healthchecks.io is a fine answer: it is cheap, open source, focused, and it even has phone-call alerting on paid plans, which we do not. The gap it leaves is everything that serves requests. A heartbeat can only tell you a job ran; it cannot tell you your API answers from Sydney, your certificate expires on Thursday, or your database port stopped accepting connections. RealUptime Monitor covers both directions in one account: the same push-based heartbeats for the jobs, plus active HTTP, TCP, and DNS checks from independent regions for everything else, feeding one alert pipeline and one status page. Stated plainly: our paging is email, Slack, webhook, or your existing PagerDuty; if SMS or a phone call is a hard requirement, that is a real point in their favor.

Start free: 5 servers

Verified September 2, 2026. Sources: Healthchecks.io pricing, Healthchecks.io (how it works), Healthchecks.io about (license, company).

Cron and heartbeat monitoring

Have

heartbeat monitors on every plan including Free, sharing the same monitor slots and alert fan-out as every other check type

Have

its entire product, and a mature one: per-check schedules, grace periods, and log entries per check

Active uptime checks (HTTP, TCP, DNS) from outside

Have

probes your sites and services from multiple named regions, each reporting separately, by default

Don’t have

by design: it listens for pings from your jobs and alerts when they stop; it does not probe your site from outside

Free tier

Have

10 monitors (heartbeats included) plus 5 server-agent slots, $0/mo

Have

20 checks and 100 log entries per check, $0/mo, no card required

Open-source, self-hostable code

Don’t have

hosted only today

Have

BSD 3-Clause; the hosted service and the self-hosted code are the same product

Phone-call and SMS notifications

Don’t have

pages by email, Slack, webhook, and the integration registry (Discord, Teams, Opsgenie, PagerDuty, Zapier); no telephony of its own

Have

SMS, WhatsApp, and phone-call credits included on Business ($20/mo) and Business Plus ($80/mo)

Status pages from the same account

Have

RealUptime Status shares the account; public pages update from the same probes

Not published

no status-page product advertised on its pricing page

Looking for a Healthchecks.io alternative?

For the reasoning behind checking from more than one region at all, see why a status page can show all green during a real outage. Comparing more than just this one alternative? The status page tool checklist covers what to test before committing to any of them.

Start free: 5 servers