Compare / Cronitor
norc vs Cronitor
Cronitor is a dedicated monitor built for teams that want deep alerting integrations and telemetry per job. It's priced per monitor plus per user, so a team watching fifty jobs across a five-person team is paying on two axes at once. norc instead prices per machine you manage and, unlike Cronitor, lets you write and deploy the crontab entries it's monitoring, not just watch them.
| norc | Cronitor | |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing | ||
| Free tier | Yes | Yes · 5 monitors |
| Cheapest paid plan | $8/mo · 5 machines | $2/monitor/mo + $5/user/mo |
| Value metric | flat tier by machine count | per monitor + user |
| Jobs per machine | Unlimited | Billed per monitor |
| Reliability & security | ||
| Jobs keep running if the vendor is down | ✓ real cron runs them | n/a · monitors only |
| Needs inbound access or your SSH keys | No · outbound agent | No · receives pings |
| Preserves hand-edited crontab lines | ✓ only touches its own | ⚠️ CLI rewraps entries |
| Platform | ||
| Native apps | Desktop (macOS) · iOS · Android · CLI | Web + CLI |
| Monitoring | ||
| Cron-job failure / heartbeat monitoring | ✓ | ✓ |
| Alerting channels | Many | Many |
| Self-host / on-prem | Desktop agent | — |
| Management | ||
| Remotely edit & write cron jobs on your machines | ✓ | Partial · CLI wraps local entries |
| AI / natural-language job creation | ✓ | — |
| Multi-machine fleet management | ✓ | — |
Native apps: Competitor app availability checked against vendor sites and app stores in August 2026. “Web only” means no official native app was found at that time; third-party website wrappers are not counted.
Cronitor starts at $2/monitor/mo + $5/user/mo. norc charges a flat tier by machine count instead of per monitor, with unlimited jobs on each machine — see norc pricing.
norc vs Cronitor: common questions
- Is norc cheaper than Cronitor?
- Cronitor's cheapest paid plan is $2/monitor/mo + $5/user/mo; norc's is $8/mo · 5 machines. The two use different pricing units, so it depends on your fleet: norc charges a flat tier by machine count with unlimited jobs on each machine, rather than per monitor or per check.
- Can Cronitor edit cron jobs on my servers?
- Cronitor: Partial · CLI wraps local entries. norc: yes. This is the main difference between the two. Monitoring tools tell you a job failed; norc writes the real crontab on each paired machine, so you can add, change, or remove jobs without opening inbound ports.
- Does Cronitor have native desktop or mobile apps?
- Cronitor: Web + CLI. norc: Desktop (macOS) · iOS · Android · CLI. Most tools in this category are web dashboards only, which matters when a job fails overnight and you want to fix it from a phone rather than find a laptop.
- Do my scheduled jobs keep running if Cronitor goes down?
- Cronitor: n/a · monitors only. norc: real cron runs them. norc never becomes the thing that runs your jobs — the system cron daemon on your own machine does. A norc outage costs you visibility and remote editing, not execution.
- Should I use Cronitor instead of norc?
- Cronitor is still the right pick if your team is already deep in its alerting integrations (PagerDuty, Slack routing rules, etc.) and you only need visibility, not the ability to remotely edit and redeploy the jobs themselves.
Pricing and features as of August 2026. See the full compare matrix.