FAQ

Crontinel tracks three things in your Laravel app: scheduled tasks (cron jobs), queues, and Horizon. You get visibility into whether jobs ran on time, how long they took, whether they failed, and what your queue backlog looks like. It is not just a "did my server respond" ping. It actually understands your Laravel internals.

Healthchecks.io is a dead man's switch. It knows a ping didn't arrive, but it has no idea why your job failed or what your queue depth looks like. Cronitor works but it is expensive and treats Laravel like any other language, so you end up writing boilerplate to get useful data out. Crontinel is a first-class Laravel package that hooks directly into the scheduler, queue system, and Horizon with zero configuration beyond a service provider.

There is a framework-agnostic PHP package (crontinel/php) for vanilla PHP or other frameworks, and agent packages for Node.js and Python for scheduled/cron-style command execution. The richest experience, with full scheduler, queue, and Horizon internals, is Laravel 11, 12, and 13. Outside Laravel, Crontinel still monitors your scheduled jobs, just without the Laravel-specific depth. PHP 8.2 or higher is required for the PHP package.

Yes. The free plan covers one app with up to five monitors, seven days of history, and Slack, email, Discord, Teams, Telegram, and webhook alerts. No credit card required. It is enough to monitor a side project or evaluate whether Crontinel fits your workflow before committing to a paid plan.

Install the package with composer require crontinel/laravel, publish the config, and set your API key. The whole setup takes under two minutes. A self-hosted dashboard is included out of the box, so you can start seeing data immediately without sending anything to an external service.

Slack, email, PagerDuty, Discord, Microsoft Teams, Telegram, SMS, and webhooks. Webhooks support HMAC signature verification so you can trust the payload is actually from Crontinel. Slack, email, Discord, Teams, Telegram, and webhooks are available on every plan, including free; PagerDuty and SMS require a paid plan. You can scope channels per app if you want Slack alerts for non-critical apps and PagerDuty for the ones that wake people up.

The Laravel package ships with a built-in dashboard, so you can run entirely self-hosted with no external dependencies. The SaaS at app.crontinel.com is optional and exists for teams that want centralized monitoring across multiple apps, longer history retention, and managed alert routing. Neither option locks you in.

The Free plan covers one app and up to five monitors. Starter, Pro, and Max are planned, but their checkout flow and final usage terms are still under review. The earlier lifetime deal is closed.

The MCP server lets AI coding assistants (like Claude or Copilot) query your Crontinel data directly. Your AI assistant can check job status, look up recent failures, or inspect queue health without you switching context to a dashboard. It is useful if you already work with an AI assistant in your editor.

Yes, crontinel/laravel is MIT-licensed and fully open source. You can read every line of code, fork it, and contribute back. The SaaS layer at app.crontinel.com is a separate commercial product, but the core monitoring package and self-hosted dashboard are free and open.