Pulsy vs Healthchecks.io
Endpoint uptime monitoring, where Healthchecks.io watches your cron jobs
Healthchecks.io is a dead-man's-switch for scheduled jobs: your cron pings it, and it alerts when a ping does not arrive. Pulsy works the other way round — it makes the requests, watching your websites and APIs from outside. Both are open source and self-hostable, and they solve genuinely different problems. Plenty of teams run both.
Where Pulsy differs from Healthchecks.io
- Outside-in HTTP checks against your public endpoints, rather than waiting for a job to check in.
- TLS certificate expiry monitoring, response-time history, and degraded-state detection.
- Public status pages with custom domains, so you can show customers what you already know.
- Also open source and self-hostable — no trade-off in freedom when you add it alongside.
Healthchecks.io vs Pulsy, side by side
| Feature | Pulsy (self-hosted) | Pulsy Cloud | Healthchecks.io |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pricing | Free forever — you run it (AGPL-3.0) | Free tier, paid plans from $12/mo | Free tier + paid plans, or free self-hosted |
| Source code | Open source, AGPL-3.0 | The same AGPL-3.0 code, managed for you | Open source, BSD-3-Clause |
| Where your data lives | Your own infrastructure | Hosted by Pulsy, exportable any time | Your own infrastructure, or their hosted plan |
| Monitoring model | Outside-in — Pulsy calls your endpoint | Outside-in — Pulsy calls your endpoint | Inside-out — your job pings them |
| Best at | Websites, APIs, TLS certificates | Websites, APIs, TLS certificates | Cron jobs, backups, scheduled tasks |
| Response-time history | Charted per monitor | Charted per monitor | Not applicable to the ping model |
| Status pages | Included, custom domains | Included, custom domains | Public status badges |
| Dashboard | Localized (5 languages, RTL) | Localized (5 languages, RTL) | English-first |
Switching from Healthchecks.io is painless
This is usually an addition, not a migration. Keep Healthchecks.io watching your scheduled jobs and point Pulsy at the endpoints those jobs serve — the two together cover both directions. If you are moving wholesale because your checks are all HTTP endpoints anyway, re-create them in Pulsy with the same intervals and connect the same notification channels.
Frequently asked questions
- Can Pulsy monitor cron jobs like Healthchecks.io?
- No. Pulsy has no push/heartbeat endpoint — it makes outbound HTTP requests on a schedule. For dead-man's-switch monitoring of scheduled jobs, Healthchecks.io is the right tool and Pulsy is not a substitute.
- Should I use both?
- Often, yes. They cover opposite directions: Healthchecks.io tells you a job did not run, Pulsy tells you an endpoint stopped answering. Neither detects the other's failure.
- Are both self-hostable?
- Yes. Healthchecks.io is BSD-3-Clause and Pulsy is AGPL-3.0-or-later; both can be run entirely on your own infrastructure with no licence key.
- Does Pulsy check TLS certificate expiry?
- Yes, on every HTTPS monitor, with alerts before a certificate lapses — alongside up/down and degraded status.
Compare Pulsy with other monitors
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