Healthchecks.io is a focused, well-built tool. It does one thing well: if your cron job doesn’t ping within the expected window, it sends you an alert. That’s valuable. For many teams with simple scheduled tasks, it’s exactly what they need.
For Laravel apps running Horizon, it’s not enough.
What Healthchecks.io does
Healthchecks.io works on the dead-man switch model. You register a check, get a unique ping URL, and add a curl call to your cron job:
* * * * * cd /var/www && php artisan send:invoices && curl -fsS --retry 3 https://hc-ping.com/your-uuid > /dev/nullIf the ping doesn’t arrive in the expected window, Healthchecks.io sends an alert. You can configure integrations: email, Slack, PagerDuty, webhooks, and more.
This model is reliable for the scenarios it covers.
The gap: what happens between pings
Healthchecks.io has no visibility into anything happening inside your application between pings. It can tell you a job ran (or didn’t). It cannot tell you:
- Whether Horizon has workers running
- Whether a supervisor is paused
- How many jobs are queued in each queue
- How long the oldest queued job has been waiting
- How many jobs are failing per minute
These are exactly the signals that matter when your application is degrading silently. A supervisor can pause, jobs can pile up to thousands, and downstream services can start timing out, all while Healthchecks.io reports green because the cron ping arrived on schedule.
The instrumentation requirement
Every cron job that Healthchecks.io monitors needs a curl ping added to it. That means:
- Instrumenting every scheduled command individually
- Remembering to add pings when you add new commands
- Handling ping failures (the
--retry 3in the curl call) - Maintaining the mapping between jobs and their ping URLs
Crontinel hooks into Laravel’s ScheduledTaskFinished and ScheduledTaskFailed events automatically. Once the package is installed, all scheduled tasks are recorded with no per-task instrumentation.
Feature comparison
| Capability | Crontinel | Healthchecks.io |
|---|---|---|
| Horizon supervisor status | Yes | No |
| Horizon paused detection | Yes | No |
| Queue depth per queue | Yes | No |
| Oldest job age | Yes | No |
| Failed jobs per minute | Yes | No |
| Cron run history | Yes | Yes (ping-based) |
| Dead-man switch | No | Yes |
| No code instrumentation needed | Yes | No |
| Open source / self-hostable | Yes | Yes (but separate repo) |
| Slack alerts | Yes | Yes |
| Email alerts | Yes | Yes |
| PagerDuty | Yes | Yes |
| Webhook | Yes | Yes |
Pricing
Healthchecks.io has a generous free tier (20 checks, 100 pings/check/month). Paid plans start at $20/month for more checks and team features.
Crontinel has a Free plan for one app, 5 monitors, and 7 days of cron run history. Paid terms are under review. The OSS package is MIT-licensed and works without the SaaS backend.
When Healthchecks.io is the right choice
Healthchecks.io is a solid pick when:
- You run simple cron jobs outside of Laravel
- Dead-man switch monitoring is your primary need
- You want to self-host (they publish their source)
- You need a very generous free tier for many small checks
When Crontinel fits better
Choose Crontinel when:
- Your application uses Laravel Horizon
- You need visibility into queue depth and supervisor state
- You want monitoring that works without modifying every job
- Your background jobs are revenue-critical and need fast alerting
Installing Crontinel
composer require crontinel/laravel
php artisan crontinel:installAdd your alert channel to .env:
CRONTINEL_ALERT_CHANNEL=slack
CRONTINEL_SLACK_WEBHOOK=https://hooks.slack.com/services/...That’s it. Every scheduled task starts recording, and Horizon monitoring starts immediately if Horizon is running.