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Drumbeats vs Cronitor
We build Drumbeats, so weigh this accordingly. Every Cronitor number below links to the page we read it on. Facts checked .
Verdict
Cronitor is a broad observability suite: cron, heartbeat, website and API checks, 1 year of history, SMS and on-call routing, billed at $2 per monitor plus $5 per dashboard user a month. Drumbeats does one job on purpose, telling you the moment a cron job, queue worker or scheduled task silently stops, and it is priced so that every job gets a monitor and the whole team sees the dashboard: 50 monitors free, then $20 a month flat.
- Pick Cronitor if you want one vendor for uptime, cron, SMS paging, synthetic browser checks and web analytics, need a year of history, and your setup is small enough that per-monitor and per-user billing stays simple.
- Pick Drumbeats if background jobs are what keeps you up at night: you want start, success and failure reported per run, queue workers covered, every alert channel from day one, the whole team on the dashboard, and a bill that does not grow with the number of jobs you protect.
Price at three real sizes
Each size assumes 3 people who receive alerts and one run an hour per monitor, billed monthly in USD. Where a vendor only lists a yearly price, the table shows that price divided by 12 and says so.
| Monitors | Drumbeats | Cronitor |
|---|---|---|
| 10 monitors3 people, hourly jobs | $0Free7,200 Beats a month | $35Business3 seats at $5 each |
| 50 monitors3 people, hourly jobs | $0Free36,000 Beats a month | $115Business3 seats at $5 each |
| 200 monitors3 people, hourly jobs | $20Pro144,000 Beats a month | $415Business3 seats at $5 each |
Drumbeats plans are read from the same source as our pricing page. Cronitor prices are from cronitor.io/pricing, read 2 Nov 2026.
Side by side
| Feature | Drumbeats | Cronitor |
|---|---|---|
| Free plan | 50 monitors, 200K beats a month, every alert channel | 5 monitors (Hacker), email and Slack alerts, no SMS |
| Paid pricing | $20 a month flat (Pro): unlimited monitors, 1M beats | $2 per monitor + $5 per user a month (Business), no minimum |
| Shortest check interval | 30s on paid plans, 1 min on Free | 30s on Business, 5 min on Hacker |
| History kept | Last 1,000 pings per monitor on Pro, 250 on Free | 1 year on Business |
| Team seats | Unlimited on every plan, including Free | 1 on Hacker; $5 per user a month on Business |
| Alert channels | 8 on every plan: email, Slack, Telegram, Discord, webhook, browser push, Microsoft Teams & PagerDuty | Email and Slack alerts on Hacker; all 11 alert integrations, SMS and on-call on Business |
| SMS alerts | No | Yes, on Business |
| Status pages | A public page per monitor on every plan; branded multi-monitor pages from Pro | 1 basic page on Hacker and Business; branded page $25/mo per page, private page $50/mo per page |
| Monitor types | Cron, heartbeat, queue workers and HTTP uptime | Cron, heartbeat, website and API monitoring on every plan |
| API and agents | REST API and an MCP server on every plan | Unlimited API requests on Business |
| Open source | No | No |
Who wins where
Where Cronitor wins
- History. Business keeps 1 year of data; Drumbeats keeps the last 1,000 pings per monitor on Pro.
- SMS and on-call. Cronitor sends SMS and plugs into PagerDuty, Datadog On-Call, OpsGenie and Splunk On-Call. Drumbeats has PagerDuty and browser push, and no SMS.
- Breadth. Synthetic browser checks and web analytics are add-ons on Business; Drumbeats does not offer either.
- Tiny setups. With fewer than ten monitors and one user, Business costs less than the $20 Pro plan, and Hacker is free for 5 monitors.
Where Drumbeats wins
- Cover every job, not the ones you budget for. Drumbeats bills for activity (Beats), not per monitor, so the fiftieth job costs the same as the first: 50 monitors and 3 people run on Free, 200 on Pro for $20. The same 200 on Business is $415 a month, and a per-monitor bill quietly argues for monitoring fewer jobs.
- The whole team sees it. Seats are unlimited on every plan, including Free, so the person on call and the person who wrote the job look at the same dashboard. Cronitor adds $5 per dashboard user a month.
- Every alert channel from day one. All 8 channels are on Free: email, Slack, Telegram, Discord, webhook, browser push, Microsoft Teams & PagerDuty. Hacker has email and Slack; Cronitor keeps its premium integrations for Business.
- A free plan you can run production on. 50 monitors and 200K beats a month against 5 monitors, with a public status page per monitor and the API included.
- Set up by an agent. The Drumbeats MCP server lets Claude, Cursor or VS Code create, pause and resolve monitors from the editor, and the REST API is on every plan.
Switching from Cronitor in three steps
- 1
Recreate your monitors
List the monitors in your Cronitor dashboard and create the same ones in Drumbeats, in the dashboard, with the REST API, or by asking an agent through the MCP server. Give each the expected schedule and a grace period, the same way you set them in Cronitor.
- 2
Swap the ping URL
Replace the Cronitor telemetry call in each job with the Drumbeats ping URL. Send start before the work, success after it, and failure when it exits non-zero, so a failed run is reported at once instead of at the next missed window.
# crontab: tell Drumbeats when the job starts, succeeds or fails 0 2 * * * curl -sf https://api.drumbeats.io/v1/ping/<monitor-id>/start \ && /usr/local/bin/nightly-backup.sh \ && curl -sf https://api.drumbeats.io/v1/ping/<monitor-id>/success \ || curl -sf https://api.drumbeats.io/v1/ping/<monitor-id>/failure# crontab: tell Drumbeats when the job starts, succeeds or fails 0 2 * * * curl -sf https://api.drumbeats.io/v1/ping/<monitor-id>/start \ && /usr/local/bin/nightly-backup.sh \ && curl -sf https://api.drumbeats.io/v1/ping/<monitor-id>/success \ || curl -sf https://api.drumbeats.io/v1/ping/<monitor-id>/failure - 3
Run both for a week, then cancel
Keep Cronitor running alongside Drumbeats until you have seen a real alert arrive from both. Cronitor's Business plan bills monthly with no contract, so the overlap costs one extra month at most.
Questions people ask
- How much does Cronitor cost for 50 monitors?
- $115 a month on the Business plan with 3 dashboard users: 50 monitors at $2 plus 3 users at $5. Drumbeats covers 50 monitors on its Free plan when the jobs stay inside 200K beats a month, and Pro is $20 a month for unlimited monitors.
- Does Cronitor have a free plan?
- Yes. The Hacker plan is free and includes 5 monitors, email and Slack alerts and a basic status page, with no SMS alerts and no premium integrations. The Drumbeats Free plan includes 50 monitors, 200K beats a month and every alert channel.
- Does Drumbeats send SMS alerts?
- No. Drumbeats alerts by email, Slack, Telegram, Discord, webhook, browser push, Microsoft Teams & PagerDuty. If you need a text message, Cronitor's Business plan includes SMS and on-call alerts.
- Can I run Drumbeats and Cronitor at the same time?
- Yes. Each tool has its own ping URL, so a job can call both until you trust the new one. Most teams run both for a week and then remove the old call.
- How current are these prices?
- Every Cronitor number on this page links to the page it was read from, with the date we read it. A monthly check re-reads each source and updates the file this page is built from. If you spot an error, email hello@drumbeats.io and we will fix it.
Sources
Cronitor is named here as a product name only; it is a trademark of its owner, and Cronitor has not reviewed this page. Spot an error? Email hello@drumbeats.io and we will correct it.
Try it on one job
Point one cron job at Drumbeats
Create a monitor, paste the ping URL into the job, and see the first check-in land. The Free plan covers 50 monitors with no card.
Free for up to 50 monitors · Setup in 60 seconds · No credit card required