Healthchecks.io alternative with AI agent setup

In short

Both watch scheduled jobs the same way. Each job reports when it runs, and you get an alert when a run fails or its report doesn't arrive in time. They differ in who sets it up and where alerts can go.

Choose Healthchecks.io if you need Slack, text messages, PagerDuty or another of its many alert channels, your team shares the checks, or you want to host your monitor yourself. Choose Sereno if you want your AI agent to set up your checks and tell you what's failing, or you have more than 20 jobs to watch for free.

Where Healthchecks.io is stronger

• Alerts in 27 places, including Slack, Discord, Microsoft Teams, PagerDuty, Opsgenie, Telegram, ntfy and Pushover. healthchecks.io
• Text messages, WhatsApp and phone calls, as monthly credits on its Business plans. healthchecks.io/pricing
• Team access, with Team Member, Manager and Read-only roles. healthchecks.io/docs/projects_teams
• Open source under the BSD 3-clause license, so you can host it yourself. healthchecks.io/docs/self_hosted
• It keeps the first 100 kB of each report's body, where Sereno keeps the last 2 KB. healthchecks.io/docs/http_api
• Reports by email as well as web requests, and filters that look for keywords in them. healthchecks.io/docs/configuring_checks
• Systemd OnCalendar schedules, besides cron and simple intervals. healthchecks.io/docs/configuring_checks
• Its Business plan is free for open-source projects and nonprofits. healthchecks.io/pricing

Where Sereno is stronger

• Your AI agent can set it up. Sereno has a hosted MCP server, and you connect Claude Code, claude.ai, ChatGPT, Cursor or VS Code by signing in. Your agent then finds your scheduled jobs, adds a report line to the ones you pick, and tells you what's failing. Healthchecks.io's home page and docs don't mention MCP or agent setup (as of October 26, 2026). An agent can use its Management API instead, with an API key you make and copy. healthchecks.io/docs/api
• Sereno gives you 200 checks free. Healthchecks.io's free plan has 20. healthchecks.io/pricing
• Sereno hides the passwords and keys it recognizes in job output. Before it saves a report, sends an alert or shows a report to your agent, it replaces them with [hidden]. This is a best-effort safety net. Healthchecks.io's HTTP API docs say it stores the first 100 kB of each report's body, and don't mention hiding anything. healthchecks.io/docs/http_api
• Sereno has a separate maximum run time. In Healthchecks.io, Grace Time also sets how long a started run may take. healthchecks.io/docs/configuring_checks

Who Sereno is for

Sereno is for people who build with an AI agent like Claude Code or Cursor, and have scheduled jobs on a server, Vercel, GitHub Actions or Supabase. It's the wrong pick if you need alerts in Slack, Discord or by text message, or shared access for a team, or you want to host your monitor yourself.

Side by side

Healthchecks.io's side comes from its own pages, linked in each row and read on October 26, 2026. Sereno's side comes from its own code, checked on October 26, 2026. Each of its rows links the page here that says so, where there is one. Sereno's docs have the details. If something here is wrong or out of date, write to [email protected].

Moving a job from Healthchecks.io

1. Make a check in Sereno for each job first, with New check on your dashboard and the same schedule, time zone and grace. Sereno makes the check's slug, the last part of its report address, from its name, unless you type one. Sereno doesn't make a check from a report the way Healthchecks.io does with create=1, so a report to a check that doesn't exist yet gets a 404. If the job also reports when it starts (with /start, or through Sereno's alerts-run), open More options in New check and set Max run time to the job's grace in Healthchecks.io, up to 2 days. It's 1 hour unless you change it, and a run still going after that counts as failed. healthchecks.io/docs/http_api
2. In each report line, swap the start of the URL and keep its ending, such as /start, /fail, an exit code or ?rid=. A line with no ending still means the run worked. A line that reports to https://hc-ping.com/UUID now reports to:

   https://asksereno.com/k/PROJECT_KEY/CHECK_SLUG

   Copy
   healthchecks.io/docs/http_api
3. PROJECT_KEY and CHECK_SLUG stand for your project's key and your check's slug, and the check's page shows the address with both filled in. A line with a ping key and slug, https://hc-ping.com/PING_KEY/SLUG, becomes https://asksereno.com/k/PROJECT_KEY/SLUG when the Sereno check has the same slug. Sereno slugs use only lowercase letters, digits and dashes, so a slug like db_backup becomes db-backup in Sereno: change it in the line too. healthchecks.io/docs/http_api
4. A line ending in /log gets a 404, since Sereno has no such ending. Send that output as the body of the run's /ok or /fail instead, for example with curl's --data-binary. healthchecks.io/docs/http_api
5. Reports by email don't carry over, since Sereno takes web requests only: give those jobs a report line from the setup guides below. An OnCalendar schedule needs a cron expression instead. For a Simple schedule, pick Every in New check and give it the same period, in minutes, hours or days. Its grace stays the same. healthchecks.io/docs/configuring_checks
6. Send a test report from the server where the job runs, or from your own computer for a job on Vercel, GitHub Actions or Supabase. It prints OK, and on the check's page in Sereno, Test report gets a tick. A test report never changes the check's status.

   curl -fsS -m 10 https://asksereno.com/k/PROJECT_KEY/CHECK_SLUG/test

   Copy
7. Once the job's first real run shows in Sereno, remove its check in Healthchecks.io, so one failure doesn't alert you twice.

Sereno's setup guides cover crontab jobs and alerts-run, Vercel cron jobs, GitHub Actions schedules and Supabase cron jobs. Your AI agent can also make the checks and swap the lines for you.

More guides

• Ask your AI agent why a cron job failed
• Monitor Vercel cron jobs
• Monitor GitHub Actions scheduled workflows
• Monitor Supabase cron jobs that call Edge Functions
• Get an alert when a cron job fails or doesn't run
• Cronitor alternative with 200 free checks

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