Quick answer
Healthchecks.io - Healthchecks.io does one job: it watches your cron jobs, and the free Hobbyist plan covers 20 of them. Better Stack's free plan shares 10 slots between uptime monitors and heartbeats, and adds logs, traces, metrics and error tracking.
How the free tiers compare
Better Stack's free plan covers 10 monitors and heartbeats, one status page, Slack and email alerts, 100,000 exceptions a month, 5,000 session replays, 30 GB of metrics, and 3 GB each of logs and traces kept for 3 days. Healthchecks.io's free Hobbyist plan monitors 20 jobs and keeps 100 log entries for each job.
Better Stack vs Healthchecks.io free tier, side by side
| Better StackFTV 49 | Healthchecks.ioFTV 55 | |
|---|---|---|
| Jobs or heartbeats | 10 monitors and heartbeats, shared | 20 jobs |
| History | 3 days for logs and traces | 100 log entries per job |
| Telemetry on the free plan | 100,000 exceptions/month, 5,000 session replays, 30 GB metrics, 3 GB logs, 3 GB traces | Job monitoring only |
| First paid plan price | Responder license - $29/mo billed annually, $34/mo monthly | Supporter - $5/mo, same limits as Hobbyist |
After you outgrow the free tier
Healthchecks.io's Supporter plan costs $5 a month and keeps the Hobbyist limits. It exists for users who want to pay for the service. Business costs $20 a month, or $16 a month billed annually, for 100 jobs, 1,000 log entries per job, 50 SMS and WhatsApp credits and 20 phone call credits. Better Stack's Responder license costs $29 a month billed annually and adds on-call, incident management and unlimited phone and SMS alerts. Each Responder license includes 10 heartbeats, and each extra pack of 10 costs $17 a month billed annually.
Cost at real usage
| Usage | Better Stack | Healthchecks.io |
|---|---|---|
| Monitoring 100 cron jobs | $182/mo billed annually: a $29 Responder license with 10 heartbeats, plus 9 packs of 10 extra heartbeats at $17 each | $20/mo for Business, or $16/mo billed annually |
Estimates, not quotes. Usage-based rates change - verify with the vendor's pricing page before committing.
When to pick each one
Pick Better Stack when…
- You want uptime monitors and cron heartbeats in one place, with a status page.
- You also want logs, traces and error tracking.
- You run 10 scheduled jobs or fewer.
Pick Healthchecks.io when…
- You run more than 10 scheduled jobs. Hobbyist covers 20.
- You only need to know when a cron job fails to run on time.
- You want a cheap step up: Business is $20 a month for 100 jobs.
Bottom line
Pick Healthchecks.io if cron jobs are all you need to watch. It covers 20 for free and 100 for $20 a month. Pick Better Stack if heartbeats are one part of a bigger setup with uptime checks, logs and error tracking.
Read the full listings: Better Stack and Healthchecks.io. Scores use the FTV methodology at /ftv. Browse more head-to-heads on /compare, or see the top-ranked free tiers on /top.