Flowhush vs Healthchecks.io

Healthchecks.io is one of the best-known heartbeat monitors. It's mature, open source, and has a generous free plan. Flowhush is newer and narrower: heartbeats for automation workflows (n8n, Make, Zapier, AI agents, cron) with checks on what the run produced. This page compares them as fairly as we can. We make Flowhush, so check our claims against the sources at the bottom. Prices are from each pricing page as of November 2026.

The short version

• Healthchecks.io is the stronger general-purpose cron monitor. It understands real cron and systemd OnCalendar schedules with timezones, has an exit-code endpoint, many integrations including SMS and phone calls, and can be self-hosted.
• Flowhush is built for workflow tools and AI agents. It can parse the ping body as JSON and fail the run when required keys are missing or empty (Pro), or when the output contains forbidden phrases (Team). Its setup guides target n8n, Make and Zapier.

Pricing

Being honest about the numbers: for plain cron monitoring, Healthchecks.io is cheaper. Its free plan covers 20 jobs to our 5, and 100 jobs cost $20/month against $29 for Flowhush Team. Flowhush is cheaper from 21 to 50 monitors ($12 for Pro against $20 for Business) and above 100 ($29 for unlimited against $80 for Business Plus). Between 51 and 100, Healthchecks.io's $20 beats our $29.

Feature comparison

Where the difference matters

Schedules

If your job runs 30 2 * * 1-5 (2:30 on weekdays) in Europe/Berlin, Healthchecks.io can model that exactly: no false alarm on Saturday, and correct behaviour across daylight-saving changes. Flowhush expects a ping every N seconds after the last success, so a weekdays-only job needs a period of about 72 hours to get through the weekend, which also means a missed Tuesday run is detected later. For cron-heavy infrastructure, this is the biggest functional difference.

Output checks

Healthchecks.io's content filtering looks for keywords in the request body. You can, for example, classify a ping as success only if the body contains Backup successful, and treat everything else as a failure. That's a good fit for scripts that print a known line.

Flowhush parses the body. With Required JSON keys set to data.items, meta.generated_at, a run that returns {"data": {"items": []}} is recorded as a failure (Missing or empty JSON key: data.items) even though it completed. That's the common failure mode in n8n, Make and Zapier workflows and in AI agent pipelines, where you can't predict the error text but you know what a good result looks like.

Integrations and escalation

Healthchecks.io has far more notification options, including SMS and phone calls and incident tools like PagerDuty and Opsgenie. Flowhush sends one alert to email, Slack, Discord or Telegram when a monitor goes down and one when it recovers. Free and Pro include one channel, and Team allows several.

Control and hosting

Healthchecks.io is open source (BSD license) and can be self-hosted, which matters if your monitoring must stay in your network. Flowhush is hosted only.

Same job, both tools

The ping code is nearly identical. A cron job with start and fail signals:

# Healthchecks.io
curl -fsS -m 10 --retry 3 https://hc-ping.com/YOUR-CHECK-UUID/start
/opt/backup/run.sh; curl -fsS -m 10 --retry 3 https://hc-ping.com/YOUR-CHECK-UUID/$?

# Flowhush (no exit-code endpoint, so branch on the result)
curl -fsS -m 10 --retry 3 https://flowhush.com/p/YOUR-MONITOR-UUID/start
/opt/backup/run.sh && curl -fsS -m 10 --retry 3 https://flowhush.com/p/YOUR-MONITOR-UUID \
                   || curl -fsS -m 10 --retry 3 https://flowhush.com/p/YOUR-MONITOR-UUID/fail

In n8n, both use an HTTP Request node at the end of the workflow (Method GET, URL set to the ping URL, On Error Continue). To use Flowhush's output checks, switch to POST, turn on Send Body, set Body Content Type to JSON, and send {{ JSON.stringify($json) }}.

Healthchecks.io asks you not to ping a single check more than 5 times per minute. Flowhush rate-limits pings per IP address, at about 600 per minute.

When to choose Healthchecks.io

• You monitor cron or systemd jobs on servers and want schedule-aware alerts with timezones.
• You need SMS, WhatsApp, phone calls, PagerDuty or Opsgenie.
• You want to self-host, or prefer open-source software.
• You have 6–20 jobs and want to pay nothing, or 51–100 jobs and want the lowest price.
• Several people need access to the same projects.

When to choose Flowhush

• Your jobs are n8n, Make or Zapier workflows, or AI agents, where "it finished" isn't enough and you need to know the output was not empty, was valid JSON, and had the fields you need.
• You want to fail runs on content, such as refusals or error text inside a 200 response (Team).
• Interval-based scheduling is good enough, and email, Slack, Discord or Telegram alerts cover you.
• You want flat pricing: 50 monitors for $12/month, or unlimited for $29/month.

You can use both. Healthchecks.io for server cron, Flowhush for workflows whose output needs checking. Flowhush's Free plan has 5 monitors and needs no credit card, so you can try it on the workflows that worry you most.