JobTick vs Healthchecks.io.
The Rails-native take.
Healthchecks.io is a solid generic cron monitor: cheap, reliable, and language-agnostic. It works by listening for a heartbeat from each job — usually a manual curl in your code.
JobTick is built specifically for Rails. It reads your schedule.rb, recurring.yml, or sidekiq.yml on deploy and registers every scheduled job automatically — no per-job curl, no per-job changes.
No credit card required. Cancel anytime.
Both detect silence. One does it for you.
Healthchecks.io and JobTick agree on the fundamental idea — a job that stops pinging is a job to alert on. They diverge on how much work that costs you.
Healthchecks.io workflow: create a check in the dashboard, copy the unique URL, paste a curl into the job. Repeat per job. New job? New check, new curl. Renaming a job? Edit two places.
JobTick workflow: add gem 'jobtick', set your API key, deploy. JobTick reads your scheduler config and registers every job. Add a job to schedule.rb? It appears in your dashboard on next deploy.
What this matters for: teams with more than 5-10 jobs, or schedulers that change often. Below that bar, Healthchecks.io is genuinely fine — and cheaper. Above it, the per-job overhead compounds.
Feature comparison.
Where the two tools land on the dimensions that matter for a Rails app.
| Capability | JobTick | Healthchecks.io |
|---|---|---|
| Auto-discovers Whenever jobs | ✓ yes | ✗ no — manual curl per job |
| Auto-discovers Solid Queue recurring jobs | ✓ yes | ✗ no — manual curl per job |
| Auto-discovers Sidekiq cron / periodic jobs | ✓ yes | ✗ no — manual curl per job |
| Catches silent failures (no exception required) | ✓ yes | ✓ yes |
| Zero configuration per job | ✓ yes | ✗ no |
| Run history & duration trends | ✓ yes | ✓ yes |
| Email, Slack, PagerDuty alerts | ✓ yes (PagerDuty on Studio+) | ✓ yes |
| Self-hosted option | ✗ hosted only | ✓ open source |
| Free tier | 14-day trial, then paid | ✓ 20 checks free |
| Starting price | €14/mo | $5/mo (paid tiers above the free plan) |
Comparison reflects publicly documented features as of 2026. Healthchecks.io is open source and self-hostable, which is a real advantage if that matters to your team.
Honest guidance.
Pick Healthchecks.io if: you have a small number of jobs, you want a free tier, you need self-hosting for compliance, or your stack isn't Rails-heavy.
Pick JobTick if: your scheduler config changes often, you want monitors to track your code (not the other way around), or you're tired of explaining curl pings to teammates.
Try it on your real schedule.
14-day free trial. Two lines in your Gemfile. Every scheduled job monitored automatically.
No credit card required. Cancel anytime.
