Buyer guide

Best heartbeat monitoring services in 2026

Uptime checks probe from the outside in — but queue workers, backup scripts, on-prem agents, and anything behind a firewall cannot be probed. Heartbeat monitoring inverts the direction: the system pushes a ping, and silence raises the alarm. Here is an honest look at the tools that do it well.

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How to choose

What to weigh

Push model fit: Grace windows, flexible schedules, and support for things that are not cron — workers, backups, devices, data pipelines.
Signal on failure: What you learn when the ping stops: last-seen time, expected schedule, optional payload, or full job telemetry.
Alert routing: Whether silence can page the same channels as your other monitoring — chat, webhooks, on-call tools, SMS.
One tool or two: Whether heartbeats live beside your outside-in checks or require a separate subscription.

The shortlist

Tools worth comparing, with honest pros and cons

PageLantern

Push checks and pull checks in the same workspace, same incidents, same alerting.

Pros: Heartbeats share incidents, status pages, and alert channels with HTTP, API, SSL, domain, DNS, and TCP checks
Grace windows catch late runs without false pages; missed heartbeats open real incidents
All 15 free monitors can be heartbeats
Cons: No payload analytics or duration metrics on pings
Hosted only — a fully air-gapped network cannot reach the ping endpoint

Alternative

Healthchecks.io

The minimal, open-source push monitor.

Pros: 20 free checks with per-check ping logs
Self-hostable inside private networks — the answer for air-gapped systems
Cons: Heartbeats only; pair it with a separate uptime tool for outside-in checks
Minimal by design — no incident workflow

Alternative

Cronitor

Heartbeats with telemetry, in a suite that also probes from outside.

Pros: Pings can carry state, output, and timing — the richest failure signal here
Uptime and synthetic checks available in the same account
Cons: 5 free monitors; $2/monitor/month beyond that
More product than a simple dead-man’s switch needs

Alternative

Better Stack

Heartbeats that page a real on-call rotation.

Pros: Free tier includes heartbeats; missed pings escalate through on-call schedules with phone and SMS
Incident collaboration when the silence turns out to matter
Cons: Adopting an incident platform for heartbeat checks alone is heavy
Responder-based pricing as the team grows

Alternative

Uptime.com

Heartbeat checks inside an enterprise monitoring catalog.

Pros: Heartbeats sit beside transaction, page-speed, and mail-protocol checks
Enterprise trust: SLA reports, 24-month history, unlimited users
Cons: Enterprise-leaning packaging for a small heartbeat need
Entry pricing buys fewer checks than the specialists

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

What is heartbeat monitoring and when do I need it?

Heartbeat (push) monitoring reverses the usual direction: instead of a probe reaching into your system, your system pings the monitor on every successful run, and silence triggers the alert. You need it for anything that cannot be probed from outside — cron jobs, queue workers, backup scripts, on-prem agents, IoT devices, and data pipelines.

What is the difference between heartbeat and uptime monitoring?

Uptime monitoring pulls: an external probe requests your site or API and alerts when it fails. Heartbeat monitoring pushes: your process reports in, and the absence of the report is the failure signal. Most teams need both, which is why it matters whether a tool offers the two side by side or heartbeats alone.

Which heartbeat service has the best free tier?

Healthchecks.io offers 20 free checks (heartbeats only). PageLantern includes 15 free monitors that can mix heartbeats with website, API, SSL, domain, and TCP checks; DNS starts on Starter. Better Stack includes heartbeats on its free personal tier, and Cronitor gives 5 free monitors. Figures were checked on vendor pricing pages in August 2026.