Vigil vs Healthchecks.io
Updated · prices checked September 2026
Healthchecks.io is the best pure cron monitor and Vigil's heartbeats follow the same model: ping URLs with /start, /fail and exit codes, cron schedules with timezones, job output as logs. The difference is scope: Vigil puts those heartbeats next to uptime and API checks, servers, logs, errors and private status pages, from $19/month.
Healthchecks.io pricing September 2026
- Hobbyist: free. 20 monitored jobs, 100 log entries per job.
- Supporter: $5/month or $60/year. Same limits as Hobbyist, to support the project.
- Business: $20/month or $192/year. 100 jobs, 1,000 log entries per job, 50 SMS/WhatsApp and 20 phone call credits a month. Free for open-source projects and nonprofits.
- Business Plus: $80/month or $768/year. 1,000 jobs, 500 SMS/WhatsApp and 100 phone call credits, priority email support.
- Self-hosted: open source under the BSD 3-clause licence.
Source: as of September 2026, from healthchecks.io/pricing and github.com/healthchecks/healthchecks. Vendors change prices; the Healthchecks.io 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 | Healthchecks.io | |
|---|---|---|
| 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) | ✕ No uptime or API checks; job monitoring only |
| 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 | ~ Job output kept per ping (100 entries per job free, 1,000 on Business) |
| 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 | ✕ Not offered |
| 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 | ✕ Not offered |
| 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 | ✕ No customer-facing status pages |
| Team seats | ✓ 3 on Free, unlimited on every paid plan. Owner / admin / member / viewer roles | Team access available; see their pricing page for details |
| 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, webhooks, Slack, Telegram, PagerDuty and many more; SMS, WhatsApp and calls on paid plans |
| Self-hosted option | ✓ Full product on your server or air-gapped network, $149/month per instance, one-line installer, signed releases | ✓ Open source, BSD 3-clause |
| AI incident analysis | ✓ One-click root cause, fix and postmortem draft from the incident's evidence. 5 / 30 / 150 / 1,000 analyses a month | ✕ Not offered |
| 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 | ✓ The reference implementation: period or cron + timezone, /start, /fail, exit codes, logs |
| Small team: 3 servers, 50 monitors, 5 people | ✓ $19/month on Starter (3 servers, 50 monitors, unlimited team members included) | $20/month for 100 jobs; uptime monitors, servers and status pages are 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 Healthchecks.io does well
- Does one thing extremely well: cron and background job monitoring with a clean ping API.
- Cron expressions with timezones, start signals, failure and exit-code reporting, and job output logs.
- Open source (BSD 3-clause) and easy to self-host; free for open-source projects and nonprofits.
- SMS, WhatsApp and phone calls on paid plans, plus many chat integrations.
Where Vigil is ahead
Limits of Healthchecks.io that Vigil does not have:
- Only jobs: no uptime or API checks, servers, logs, errors or RUM.
- No customer-facing status pages.
- Vigil uses the same ping patterns and adds everything else a small team monitors, on one plan.
When to pick Healthchecks.io instead
Pick Healthchecks.io if cron and background jobs are all you need to monitor, if you want open source to self-host, or if you need SMS, WhatsApp or phone calls when a job fails. It is a great, honest product.
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 Healthchecks.io to Vigil
1. List your checks
Export your checks from the Healthchecks.io API: name, schedule or period, timezone and grace time.
2. Create heartbeats
Create Vigil heartbeats with the same schedule (YAML via PUT /api/v1/config or the REST API).
3. Swap the URLs
In each crontab line replace hc-ping.com/<uuid> with the Vigil ping URL; /start, /fail and exit-code suffixes work the same way.
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
Are Vigil heartbeats compatible with Healthchecks-style pings?
The patterns are the same: GET or POST /ping/<token> on success, /start when the job begins, /fail on failure, /<exit-code> with the exit status, and a POST body kept as the log. You replace the host and token in each crontab line.
Does Vigil support cron expressions?
Yes, with a timezone (for example 0 2 * * * in Asia/Kolkata), or a fixed period with grace time, plus a maximum run time.
How many jobs can I monitor?
Heartbeats count as monitors: 20 on Free, 50 on Starter ($19), 200 on Pro ($49), 1,000 on Business ($149).
Does Vigil send SMS for failed jobs?
Not on the hosted service (the self-hosted edition can, through your own Twilio account). Vigil alerts by Telegram, Slack, Discord, Teams, email, push, webhooks and more. Healthchecks.io includes SMS, WhatsApp and calls on paid plans.
Try Vigil next to Healthchecks.io
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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