Vigil vs Cronitor
Updated · prices checked September 2026
Cronitor is a very good cron monitor with uptime checks attached, priced per monitor and per user. Vigil covers the same heartbeat patterns (cron with timezone, start, fail, exit codes, job output) and 50 monitors for everyone on your team for $19/month, with servers, logs and private status pages included. Cronitor goes deeper on job telemetry and scheduler integrations.
Cronitor pricing September 2026
- Hacker: free. 5 monitors, 1 user, 5-minute checks, 1 status page with 50 subscribers.
- Business: $2 per monitor per month plus $5 per user per month. 30-second checks, SMS and on-call alerting, 12-month data retention.
- Status pages on Business: branded $25/month, private $50/month.
- Add-ons: synthetic browser checks $1 per 1,000 checks, web analytics $10 per 100,000 events, SAML SSO +$5 per user.
- Enterprise: from $6,000/year.
Source: as of September 2026, from cronitor.io/pricing. Vendors change prices; the Cronitor site is authoritative.
Vigil pricing
- Free: 20 monitors at 5-minute checks, 1 server, 1 status page, 3 team members, 7 days of history, Telegram/Slack/Discord alerts. Commercial use allowed. Free forever.
- Starter $19/month: 50 monitors at 1-minute intervals, 3 servers, 3 status pages, unlimited team members, 30 days of history.
- Pro $49/month: 200 monitors at 1-minute intervals, 15 servers, unlimited team members, 10 status pages with custom domain, password and white-label, 2,000,000 log lines, 5 Kubernetes clusters, RUM, 150 AI analyses, 90 days of history.
- Business $149/month: 1,000 monitors, 100 servers, unlimited team members, 10 identity providers (SSO, SAML, SCIM), 10 private locations, 1-year history.
- Every feature, including SSO, SLOs and private locations, is on every plan; the plans differ only in numbers.
- New accounts start on a 14-day Pro trial with no card, then stay on Free unless you choose a plan. Yearly billing gets 2 months free, no overage charges.
- Self-hosted $149/month per instance on your own server or air-gapped network.
- Add-ons on paid plans from $4: +50 monitors ($5), +5 servers ($5), +5 status pages ($4), +1M log lines ($4).
Flat monthly prices, no per-host, per-GB or per-run meters. Full plan matrix.
Feature and price comparison
✓ included · ~ partial or paid add-on · ✕ not offered. Vigil figures are for the $49 Pro plan unless stated.
| Vigil | Cronitor | |
|---|---|---|
| Uptime / API monitors and fastest interval | ✓ 20 Free (5-minute checks) / 50 Starter / 200 Pro / 1,000 Business. 1-minute checks on paid plans, 12 monitor types (Uptime, API check, API flow, Browser check, Heartbeat, TCP port, Domain & DNS, App health, Dependency, Content change, Price / number, Keyword) | ✓ 5 free at 5 minutes; $2 per monitor on Business with 30-second checks |
| Servers (infrastructure agent) | ✓ 1 / 3 / 15 / 100 servers included. Single-file agent for Linux and macOS, PowerShell agent for Windows: CPU, memory, disks, network, processes, services, Docker, packages, vulnerabilities, disk forecasts | ✕ Not offered |
| Logs | ✓ 10k / 250k / 2M / 10M lines included. File and journald shipping, full-text search, live tail, log-alert rules | ✕ Not offered |
| APM / traces | ~ Any OpenTelemetry SDK can send traces, metrics and logs over OTLP; Vigil's own lightweight SDKs cover Python and Node. Endpoints with p95 and Apdex, stored slow traces, slow queries, N+1 detection, service map. Not a full APM suite: no profiling | ✕ Not offered |
| Kubernetes | ✓ 1 cluster on Free and Starter, 5 on Pro, unlimited on Business. DaemonSet manifest; incidents for CrashLoopBackOff, OOMKilled, NotReady, pressure | ~ Monitors Kubernetes CronJobs; no cluster health |
| Real User Monitoring | ✓ Web Vitals p75, page views, JS errors. 1 site Free, 2 sites / 100k views Starter, 10 sites / 1M views Pro, 50 sites / 10M views Business | ~ Web analytics add-on, $10 per 100k events |
| Status pages: private, custom domain, white-label | ✓ Private by default, password or private-link sharing, custom domain with automatic HTTPS, white-label and custom CSS on every paid plan. 1 / 3 / 10 / 50 pages | ~ 1 free; branded $25/month, private $50/month |
| Team seats | ✓ 3 on Free, unlimited on every paid plan. Owner / admin / member / viewer roles | ~ 1 free; $5 per user per month on Business |
| Alert channels (incl. Telegram) | ✓ Telegram, Slack, Discord, Teams, Google Chat, Matrix, ntfy, Gotify, Pushover, webhooks (HMAC, templates), email, phone push. Tickets to PagerDuty, Opsgenie, Jira, ServiceNow, Zendesk (1 ticketing channel on Free, more on paid plans). No SMS or phone calls on the hosted service; the self-hosted edition pages by SMS and call through your own Twilio account | ✓ Email, Slack, Teams, PagerDuty, Opsgenie, webhooks, SMS and on-call on Business |
| Self-hosted option | ✓ Full product on your server or air-gapped network, $149/month per instance, one-line installer, signed releases | ✕ SaaS only |
| AI incident analysis | ✓ One-click root cause, fix and postmortem draft from the incident's evidence. 5 / 30 / 150 / 1,000 analyses a month | ✕ No incident root-cause analysis |
| Cron job / heartbeat monitoring | ✓ Heartbeats count as monitors (20 / 50 / 200 / 1,000). Fixed period with grace time or a cron expression with timezone; /start for run time, /fail, /<exit-code>; POSTed job output kept as a log; maximum run time | ✓ Its speciality: schedules, durations, job telemetry and scheduler integrations |
| Small team: 3 servers, 50 monitors, 5 people | ✓ $19/month on Starter (3 servers, 50 monitors, unlimited team members included) | 50 monitors × $2 + 5 users × $5 = $125/month; a private status page adds $50. Servers not available |
Small-team estimate uses public list prices and the cheapest tier that covers 3 servers, 50 monitors at 1-minute intervals and 5 people. Where a vendor meters by run, GB or hour we show the arithmetic so you can redo it with your own numbers.
What Cronitor does well
- Excellent cron monitoring: job telemetry, run durations, and integrations for schedulers and job frameworks.
- Simple per-monitor pricing that scales down well for a few jobs.
- 12 months of history on Business, 30-second uptime checks, SMS included.
- They run crontab.guru, the cron expression reference most developers use.
Where Vigil is ahead
Limits of Cronitor that Vigil does not have:
- Per-monitor and per-user pricing: 50 monitors and 5 people is $125/month.
- Private status pages are $50/month each.
- No server metrics, logs, Kubernetes, error tracking or RUM.
- No self-hosted option.
When to pick Cronitor instead
Pick Cronitor if you have many scheduled jobs and want the richest cron telemetry, integrations for your job framework, 30-second uptime checks and SMS, or if you only have a handful of monitors and $2 each is cheapest.
What Vigil does not do
- Browser checks use a short line-by-line script run in headless Chromium (with screenshots), not full Playwright test code kept in git.
- No SMS or phone-call alerting on the hosted service (the self-hosted edition can page by SMS and call through your own Twilio account); hosted alerts go to chat apps, phone push, email, webhooks and ticketing tools.
- On-call is simple: rotations, overrides, escalation and acknowledgements, without the scheduling depth of PagerDuty or incident.io.
- Vigil's own APM SDKs are Python and Node; other languages send traces through any OpenTelemetry SDK over OTLP. There is no profiling, and it is not a substitute for a full APM suite.
- Checks run from Vigil's servers plus private locations you host; there is no menu of dozens of public regions.
Moving from Cronitor to Vigil
1. List your jobs
Export your Cronitor monitors with their API: name, schedule, timezone and grace time for each.
2. Create heartbeats
Create Vigil heartbeats with the same cron expression and timezone (YAML via PUT /api/v1/config or the REST API).
3. Update the pings
Replace the ping URLs in your crontab or job code with /ping/<token>, adding /start, /fail or the exit code where you used them.
Run both side by side during the trial: Vigil's alert ingestion accepts Alertmanager and Grafana-style webhooks, so existing alerts can appear on a Vigil status page while you move over.
Frequently asked
Does Vigil support cron expressions and timezones?
Yes. A heartbeat can expect a ping on a fixed period with grace time, or on a cron expression in any timezone (for example 0 2 * * * in Asia/Kolkata), with a maximum run time.
Can I report job start, failure and exit codes?
Yes: /ping/<token>/start marks the start (and measures run time), /fail reports a failure, /<exit-code> reports an exit status (0 is success), and a POST body is kept as the run's log.
How does pricing compare for 50 jobs?
Vigil Starter is $19/month for 50 monitors of any type with unlimited team members. Cronitor Business is $2 per monitor plus $5 per user: $100 for 50 monitors plus $25 for five people.
What does Cronitor do better?
Job telemetry and scheduler integrations, 30-second checks, SMS on Business and 12 months of history. Vigil's heartbeats are ping-based and its paid intervals start at 1 minute.
Try Vigil next to Cronitor
Start free: every new account gets 14 days of Pro, no card. When the trial ends the account stays on Free (20 monitors) unless you choose a plan, and everything you set up stays.
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