Compare / Sentry Crons
norc vs Sentry Crons
Sentry Crons bolts cron monitoring onto a product most infra teams already have open for error tracking, so the appeal is consolidation, not cron-specific depth. It bills as an add-on to Sentry's base plan plus per-monitor overage, meaning the real cost includes whatever Sentry tier you're already on. It shares the same ceiling as the rest of this table: it monitors the job, it doesn't let you edit or deploy it.
| norc | Sentry Crons | |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing | ||
| Free tier | Yes | Yes · 1 cron monitor |
| Cheapest paid plan | $8/mo · 5 machines | $26/mo + $0.78/monitor |
| Value metric | flat tier by machine count | per cron monitor |
| 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 | n/a · never edits |
| Platform | ||
| Native apps | Desktop (macOS) · iOS · Android · CLI | Web · mobile app unmaintained |
| Monitoring | ||
| Cron-job failure / heartbeat monitoring | ✓ | ✓ |
| Alerting channels | Many | Many |
| Self-host / on-prem | Desktop agent | Yes · OSS |
| Management | ||
| Remotely edit & write cron jobs on your machines | ✓ | — |
| 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.
Sentry Crons starts at $26/mo + $0.78/monitor. norc charges a flat tier by machine count instead of per monitor, with unlimited jobs on each machine — see norc pricing.
norc vs Sentry Crons: common questions
- Is norc cheaper than Sentry Crons?
- Sentry Crons's cheapest paid plan is $26/mo + $0.78/monitor; 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 Sentry Crons edit cron jobs on my servers?
- Sentry Crons: —. 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 Sentry Crons have native desktop or mobile apps?
- Sentry Crons: Web · mobile app unmaintained. 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 Sentry Crons goes down?
- Sentry Crons: 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 Sentry Crons instead of norc?
- If your team already lives in Sentry for error tracking and performance, having cron failures show up in the same triage view you already check daily is worth the add-on cost — you're not adding a new tool to your stack, just a new signal to an existing one.
Pricing and features as of August 2026. See the full compare matrix.