Alternatives / UptimeRobot
UptimeRobot alternatives
Reasons teams start looking for something other than UptimeRobot, and where to look instead.
Why people look for a UptimeRobot alternative
- built for website/API uptime first, cron heartbeats are a secondary use case
- no crontab editing or job management, alerting is on downtime, not schedule control
- no view of the machines running your scheduled jobs
norc: monitoring plus control over the jobs
UptimeRobot will tell you when a job misses its check-in. norc does that too: it flags runs that never happened or failed. It also lets you act on what it finds. One view shows every machine's jobs with run history, you can edit a schedule from desktop, terminal or phone without SSH, and runs missed while a machine was off are caught up, up to a cap. Your system cron still runs the jobs, and norc only touches the ones it manages. If you need more than alerts, norc is the closer fit. It is not self-hosted and not open source, so if that decides it for you, look at the peers below.
Other UptimeRobot alternatives worth a look
- Cronitor $2/monitor/mo + $5/user/mo
- Healthchecks.io $20/mo · 100 jobs
- Dead Man's Snitch $5/mo · 3 snitches
- Sentry Crons $26/mo + $0.78/monitor
Switching from UptimeRobot: common questions
- Is norc cheaper than UptimeRobot?
- UptimeRobot's cheapest paid plan is $7/mo · 10 monitors; norc's is $8/mo · 5 machines. The two use different pricing units, so it depends on your fleet: norc charges a flat tier by machines and jobs (free is 15 jobs on 2 machines, Pro 30 jobs on 5, Power 150 jobs on 25), rather than per monitor or per check.
- Can UptimeRobot edit cron jobs on my servers?
- UptimeRobot: —. norc: yes. Monitors are good at noticing a missed check-in, and norc does that too. It also writes the real crontab on each paired machine, touching only the jobs it manages, so you can add, change, or remove jobs without SSH or inbound ports.
- Does UptimeRobot have native desktop or mobile apps?
- UptimeRobot: iOS · Android. norc: Desktop (macOS) · iOS · Android · CLI. Most tools in this category are web dashboards only, which matters when a job never ran overnight and you want to fix it from a phone rather than find a laptop.
- Do my scheduled jobs keep running if UptimeRobot goes down?
- UptimeRobot: n/a · monitors only. norc: real cron runs them. norc never runs your jobs. The system cron daemon on your own machine does. A norc outage costs you visibility and remote editing, and the jobs keep running.
- Should I use UptimeRobot instead of norc?
- If you already use UptimeRobot to watch websites and APIs and just want cron heartbeats in the same free dashboard, it works. You give up cron-specific depth and get one dashboard for everything you watch.
Pricing and features as of August 2026. See the full compare matrix.