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Cron services call a URL. A scheduled webhook becomes an event.
cron-job.org and EasyCron are hosted schedulers that call a URL on a cron cadence and log the result, while Cronitor is a monitoring service that watches jobs rather than triggering them; Hooksbase scheduled webhooks differ by making each firing a delivery in the same pipeline as inbound events, so it inherits the webhook’s routing, transforms, signing, retries, replay, and dead-letter path rather than ending at a log entry.
If all you need is something reliable to hit a URL every hour, a dedicated cron service is cheap, focused, and good at it. This page is about where that stops being the whole requirement.
Where the line actually falls
Two of the three products here are schedulers and one is not, which is worth separating before comparing anything. cron-job.org and EasyCron trigger HTTP requests on a cadence; EasyCron in particular is more capable than it often gets credit for, with per-job timezones, logs that keep the response body, failure logs that successful runs do not overwrite, and one-time as well as recurring jobs. Cronitor is a monitoring product — it watches whether the jobs you already run completed, and alerts when they did not. Hooksbase overlaps the schedulers, not the monitor. The distinction that matters against the schedulers is what a firing produces. Both of them make a request, log the result, and tell you if it failed. Neither documents automatically retrying a failed execution, and neither carries the request any further than the log. A Hooksbase firing is a delivery: it flows through the same destination, routing rules, transforms, retry policy, analytics, replay, and dead-letter path as every inbound event.
The tools in this category
Public pricing and documentation as of 2026-08.
A long-running free hosted cron service that calls a URL on a schedule, funded by donations and open-source under the GPL. Popular as the zero-cost way to add a heartbeat to a side project.
Genuinely free, with no stated limit on how many jobs an account may create beyond fair use, and execution as often as once a minute. Timezone-aware scheduling, execution history including response data, and notifications when a job fails or recovers. Hard to beat when the requirement is just "call this URL on a cadence".
Free. The service states it is financed entirely by voluntary donations.
A hosted cron service for recurring and one-time HTTP requests, with custom headers and bodies, a REST API, and a cron expression builder.
The most configurable scheduler of the three. Timezones set per account and per job, execution logging that saves response output, separate failure logs that newer successful runs do not overwrite, configurable success and failure rules including regex matching on the response body, and notifications by email or webhook.
Billed annually against executions per day rather than job count. Free at 200 executions/day; Individual plans $24/year (8,000/day) through $240/year (120,000/day); Enterprise plans $120/year (10,000/day) through $1,200/year (200,000/day).
A monitoring service, not a scheduler. It watches cron jobs, background tasks, and endpoints you already run, and alerts when a run is late, failed, or missing.
It solves a different and real problem — knowing that a job you own silently stopped running. It also covers uptime checks, heartbeats, and status pages.
Free at 5 monitors; Business at $2/month per monitor plus $5/month per additional user with 12-month retention; Enterprise from $6,000/year.
Capability comparison
| Capability | Hooksbase | cron-job.org | EasyCron | Cronitor |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Triggers an HTTP request on a cron cadence | Yes | Yes | Yes | No |
| Automatically retries a failed run | Yes | No | No | No |
| Per-run execution log | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Alerting when runs fail | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Per-schedule timezone support | No | Yes | Yes | No |
| Monitors jobs running elsewhere | No | No | No | Yes |
| Firing shares a pipeline with inbound events | Yes | No | No | No |
| Routing rules select the destination per firing | Yes | No | No | No |
| Versioned transforms in the path | Yes | No | No | No |
| Deliver to SQS, EventBridge, Pub/Sub, or object storage | Yes | No | No | No |
| Standard Webhooks-compatible outbound signing | Yes | No | No | No |
| Replay a firing against the config live at the time | Yes | No | No | No |
| Dead-letter path with bulk re-drive | Yes | No | No | No |
| Free tier | No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Two places a dedicated cron service is simply better.
Timezones and price. Hooksbase evaluates cron expressions in UTC only, with no per-schedule timezone and no daylight-saving handling, while cron-job.org and EasyCron both support timezones directly — EasyCron even sets them per job — so if you need something to run at 09:00 local through a clock change, they handle it and we do not. And scheduled webhooks require Starter or above, so there is no free tier for this channel, while cron-job.org is free outright. If a free, timezone-aware heartbeat is the entire requirement, use one of them.
- • You need the job to fire at a local wall-clock time through daylight-saving changes. Hooksbase cron is UTC only.
- • The requirement is genuinely just calling a URL on a cadence, and cron-job.org does that for free with no stated job limit beyond fair use.
- • You want to monitor jobs that run on your own infrastructure and alert when they stop — that is Cronitor’s job, and Hooksbase does not do it.
- • You need a large number of independent scheduled jobs across unrelated endpoints, where a per-job scheduler is the natural shape.
- • You are not paying for an event layer and a scheduled heartbeat is the only thing you need.
- • The scheduled run and your inbound events should share one destination, one routing table, and one delivery history.
- • A failed firing needs to land somewhere you can inspect and re-drive in bulk, rather than expiring in a scheduler’s log.
- • You need to replay a run from last month against the configuration that was live then.
- • The firing should reach SQS, EventBridge, Pub/Sub, or object storage without an HTTP endpoint in the middle.
- • The scheduled request needs Standard Webhooks-compatible signing so the receiver can verify it.
- • A payload template should tell the consumer which job this firing is, and routing rules should send different jobs to different destinations.
See it on your own events
The free plan covers 5,000 deliveries a month with no card. Point one source at it and compare the delivery history against what you have today.
Frequently asked questions
- What is the best cron job service?
- It depends on the requirement. For a free scheduled URL call, cron-job.org is hard to beat. For per-job timezones, response-body logging, and configurable success and failure rules, EasyCron is the most configurable of the dedicated tools. For monitoring jobs you already run elsewhere, Cronitor is the right category. For a scheduled firing that is retried, replayable, and behaves like the rest of your event pipeline, Hooksbase scheduled webhooks.
- Is Cronitor a cron job service?
- Not in the triggering sense. Cronitor monitors jobs and alerts when a run is late, failed, or missing — it does not schedule or fire them. It is complementary to a scheduler rather than an alternative, and it solves a problem Hooksbase does not address for jobs running on your own infrastructure.
- Does Hooksbase support timezones for cron?
- No. Cron expressions are evaluated in UTC with no per-schedule timezone and no daylight-saving adjustment, so convert before writing the expression. If local wall-clock scheduling through clock changes matters, cron-job.org and EasyCron both handle it directly and this is a genuine gap on our side.
- What happens when a scheduled run fails in Hooksbase?
- It is retried under the same retry policy as an inbound event, and if it ultimately fails it lands in the dead-letter path where it can be inspected, exported, and re-driven in bulk. It is also replayable later from its persisted snapshot.
- Can I schedule a one-off request rather than a recurring one?
- Yes, through a different mechanism. Schedules express a recurring cron cadence; for a single future delivery, send the x-hooksbase-deliver-at header on ingest with a Unix timestamp in milliseconds, or set a webhook-level default delay. Both accept times up to a year out, require Pro or above, and are rejected on webhooks configured for strict FIFO.
- Is there a free plan for scheduled webhooks?
- No. Scheduled webhooks require Starter or above. HTTP, email, and form ingest are available on the free plan, but the cron channel is not — so for a purely free heartbeat, a dedicated cron service is the better answer.