Compare / UptimeRobot
norc vs UptimeRobot
UptimeRobot is a website and service uptime monitor with a generous free tier (50 monitors) that can also watch cron heartbeats, but cron was never its primary use case — it's built for pinging URLs and alerting on downtime. That's a reasonable fit if cron jobs are a small slice of what you're monitoring, but it offers nothing on the management side: no remote edit, no AI job creation, no fleet view.
| norc | UptimeRobot | |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing | ||
| Free tier | Yes | Yes · 50 monitors |
| Cheapest paid plan | $8/mo · 5 machines | $7/mo · 10 monitors |
| Value metric | flat tier by machine count | per 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 | iOS · Android |
| 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 | ✓ | — |
| 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.
UptimeRobot starts at $7/mo · 10 monitors. norc charges a flat tier by machine count instead of per monitor, with unlimited jobs on each machine — see norc pricing.
norc vs UptimeRobot: common questions
- Is norc cheaper than UptimeRobot?
- UptimeRobot's cheapest paid plan is $7/mo · 10 monitors; 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 UptimeRobot edit cron jobs on my servers?
- UptimeRobot: —. 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 UptimeRobot have native desktop or mobile apps?
- UptimeRobot: iOS · Android. 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 UptimeRobot goes down?
- UptimeRobot: 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 UptimeRobot instead of norc?
- If you're already using UptimeRobot to watch websites and APIs and just want cron heartbeats folded into the same free dashboard, it's a reasonable single-pane option — you're trading cron-specific depth for one dashboard that covers everything you're already watching.
Pricing and features as of August 2026. See the full compare matrix.