Compare / Cronitor
norc vs Cronitor
Cronitor is a dedicated monitor built for teams that want deep alerting integrations and telemetry per job. It's priced per monitor plus per user, so a team watching fifty jobs across a five-person team is paying on two axes at once. norc prices per machine you manage instead, and adds the control side: it can edit and deploy the crontab entries it manages, across every machine, without SSH.
| norc | Cronitor | |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing | ||
| Free tier | Yes | Yes · 5 monitors |
| Cheapest paid plan | $8/mo · 5 machines | $2/monitor/mo + $5/user/mo |
| Value metric | flat tier by machines and jobs | per monitor + user |
| Jobs included | 15 free · 30 Pro · 150 Power (per account) | Billed per monitor |
| Reliability & security | ||
| Jobs keep running if the vendor is down | ✓ real cron runs them | n/a · monitors only |
| Needs inbound access or your SSH keys | No · outbound agent | No · receives pings |
| Preserves hand-edited crontab lines | ✓ only touches its own | ⚠️ CLI rewraps entries |
| Platform | ||
| Native apps | Desktop (macOS) · iOS · Android · CLI | Web + CLI |
| Monitoring | ||
| Cron-job failure / heartbeat monitoring | ✓ | ✓ |
| Alerting channels | In app for now | Many |
| Self-host / on-prem | Agent runs on your machines | — |
| Management | ||
| Remotely edit & write cron jobs on your machines | ✓ | Partial · CLI wraps local entries |
| Plain-English schedule to cron expression (optional, bring your own key) | ✓ | — |
| One view of every machine’s jobs | ✓ | — |
Native apps: Competitor app availability checked against vendor sites and app stores in August 2026. “Web only” means no official native app was found at that time; third-party website wrappers are not counted.
Cron-job failure / heartbeat monitoring: Monitors are good at noticing a missed check-in, and norc does that too: it sweeps each job against its schedule and flags runs that never happened or failed. On top of that you get one view of every machine, schedule editing, and catch-up for runs missed while a machine was off (up to a cap).
Cronitor starts at $2/monitor/mo + $5/user/mo. norc charges a flat tier by machines and jobs instead of per monitor, with job limits counted per account across all machines. See norc pricing.
norc vs Cronitor: common questions
- Is norc cheaper than Cronitor?
- Cronitor's cheapest paid plan is $2/monitor/mo + $5/user/mo; 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 Cronitor edit cron jobs on my servers?
- Cronitor: Partial · CLI wraps local entries. 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 Cronitor have native desktop or mobile apps?
- Cronitor: Web + CLI. 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 Cronitor goes down?
- Cronitor: 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 Cronitor instead of norc?
- Cronitor is still the right pick if your team is already deep in its alerting integrations (PagerDuty, Slack routing rules, etc.) and you only need visibility, not the ability to remotely edit and redeploy the jobs themselves.
Pricing and features as of August 2026. See the full compare matrix.