What is Healthchecks used for?

Healthchecks is a cron job and background task monitoring service that alerts you when expected pings do not arrive, available as a hosted service or to self-host. It is a good fit for alerting on missed backup jobs, monitoring scheduled tasks across servers and tracking background workers for silent failures.

Is Healthchecks open source?

Yes. Healthchecks is open source under the BSD-3-Clause licence. Its source code is on GitHub at healthchecks/healthchecks and is written mainly in Python.

Is Healthchecks free?

Yes. Healthchecks is open source, so the software itself is free to use. A managed cloud version is also available, with paid plans from $5 per month.

Can I self-host Healthchecks?

Yes. Healthchecks can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure.

What is Healthchecks an alternative to?

Healthchecks is an open-source alternative to Cronitor, Dead Man's Snitch and Uptime.com. Other open-source alternatives to Cronitor include Uptime Kuma and OneUptime.

Is Healthchecks actively maintained?

Yes. The most recent commit to Healthchecks was on 2 October 2026, and the latest release is v4.4, published on 31 August 2026. The project has 10k stars on GitHub.

Healthchecks: open-source alternative to Cronitor

About Healthchecks

Healthchecks is a monitoring service for cron jobs and scheduled tasks. Each job sends a ping over HTTP or email when it runs, and Healthchecks raises an alert whenever an expected ping fails to show up in time. This catches silent failures of backups, imports and other background work that would otherwise go unnoticed.

Every check has a period, which is the expected time between pings, and a grace time, which says how long to wait before alerting, or it can follow a cron expression instead. The product includes a live web dashboard, an API, more than 25 notification integrations, monthly email reports, WebAuthn two-factor authentication and team features such as projects, members and read-only access. Status badges with hard-to-guess public URLs can be embedded in READMEs or status pages.

Healthchecks is written in Python with Django and uses PostgreSQL, MySQL or MariaDB. It is licensed under the BSD 3-Clause licence and can be self-hosted, with a Dockerfile and prebuilt Docker images provided, or used as the hosted service at healthchecks.io.

Key features

Ping-based cron job monitoring
Period and grace time settings
Cron expression schedules
25+ notification integrations
Live dashboard and API
Team projects and read-only access
Public status badges

Good fit for

→Alerting on missed backup jobs
→Monitoring scheduled tasks across servers
→Tracking background workers for silent failures

Built with: Python; Django
Tags: cron-monitoring; monitoring; alerting; devops; django; self-hosted; scheduled-tasks; uptime

Healthchecks: questions and answers

What is Healthchecks used for?: Healthchecks is a cron job and background task monitoring service that alerts you when expected pings do not arrive, available as a hosted service or to self-host. It is a good fit for alerting on missed backup jobs, monitoring scheduled tasks across servers and tracking background workers for silent failures.
Is Healthchecks open source?: Yes. Healthchecks is open source under the BSD-3-Clause licence. Its source code is on GitHub at healthchecks/healthchecks and is written mainly in Python.
Is Healthchecks free?: Yes. Healthchecks is open source, so the software itself is free to use. A managed cloud version is also available, with paid plans from $5 per month.
Can I self-host Healthchecks?: Yes. Healthchecks can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure.
What is Healthchecks an alternative to?: Healthchecks is an open-source alternative to Cronitor, Dead Man's Snitch and Uptime.com. Other open-source alternatives to Cronitor include Uptime Kuma and OneUptime.
Is Healthchecks actively maintained?: Yes. The most recent commit to Healthchecks was on 2 October 2026, and the latest release is v4.4, published on 31 August 2026. The project has 10k stars on GitHub.