Wanepia vs Healthchecks.io
Healthchecks.io is a focused dead man's switch for cron jobs — and very good at it. Wanepia does the same heartbeat monitoring, then adds active HTTP/TCP/TLS/DNS checks and a service catalog behind one API.
Healthchecks.io
An open-source cron job monitoring service. Your jobs ping a unique URL; if the ping doesn't arrive on schedule, you get alerted. Free tier of 20 checks, a large integration list, and a management API. Passive monitoring only — it waits for pings, it doesn't probe your services.
Wanepia
API-first service catalog with monitoring built in. Push checks give you the same dead man's switch semantics (heartbeat endpoint, grace windows), plus active HTTP, TCP, TLS, and DNS probes, structured entities, a dependency graph, and alerts via Slack, Discord, Telegram, webhook, ntfy, and NATS.
| Feature | Healthchecks.io | Wanepia |
|---|---|---|
| Cron / heartbeat monitoring (dead man's switch) | ✓ | ✓ |
| Grace window before alerting | ✓ | ✓ |
| Active HTTP uptime checks | — | ✓ |
| TCP / TLS / DNS checks | — | ✓ |
| Push results with latency + error detail | log payloads | ✓ |
| Service catalog with blueprints | — | ✓ |
| Dependency graph between services | — | ✓ |
| REST API | ✓ | ✓ |
| Alertmanager deadman integration (heartbeat endpoint) | ✓ | ✓ |
| Slack / Discord / Telegram / webhook alerts | ✓ | ✓ |
| ntfy alerts | ✓ | ✓ |
| NATS alerts | — | ✓ |
| Prometheus metrics export | ✓ | ✓ |
| Model Context Protocol (MCP) for AI agents | — | ✓ |
| Open source | ✓ | — |
| Self-hosted option | ✓ | ✓ (by request) |
| Free tier | ✓ 20 checks | ✓ 10 services |
| EU hosting | EU option | ✓ default |
Healthchecks.io column based on public docs and pricing at healthchecks.io, August 2026. Tell us if something is out of date: hello@wanepia.com
Healthchecks.io answers one question extremely well: did my scheduled job run? It is passive by design — your job pings it, and silence triggers the alert. If that is your whole problem, it is a mature, honest tool with a genuinely generous free tier, and we would not talk you out of it.
Wanepia starts from a different place: a catalog of your services, with monitoring attached. Push checks cover the dead man's switch case — your agent or cron job posts to POST /v1/checks/{id}/results (or the body-agnostic /heartbeat endpoint for third-party webhooks like Alertmanager), and a configurable grace window turns silence into an alert. But the same entity can also carry active HTTP, TCP, TLS, and DNS checks, sit in a dependency graph, and be queried over the same REST API your CI/CD and AI agents use.
So the question is not "which cron monitor is better" — it is whether you want cron monitoring as a standalone tool, or as one check type inside a service catalog. See the docs for how push checks and staleness detection work, or the dead man's switch guide for working curl and alertmanager.yml examples.
Choose Healthchecks.io if…
You only need cron job monitoring, you want an open-source tool you can self-host for free, or 20 free checks matters more than active probing. It does its one job very well.
Choose Wanepia if…
You want heartbeat monitoring and active uptime checks in one place, tied to a real catalog of services your team and tooling can query — instead of a second dashboard bolted next to your uptime monitor.
Bottom line
Healthchecks.io is the reference tool for ping-based cron monitoring, and it is open source. Wanepia is not trying to out-ping it — it folds the same dead man's switch pattern into a broader system: catalog, active checks, dependency graph, and an API-first design with an MCP server for AI agents.
If your monitoring is a list of cron jobs, use Healthchecks.io. If it is a system of services, start with Wanepia free — 10 services, no card.