Silent Fail vs Healthchecks.io

These are two different products that happen to share a mechanism. Healthchecks is a general purpose cron monitor, aimed at servers and scheduled jobs, and it is excellent at that. Silent Fail is built for one situation: your work runs in n8n, Make or Zapier, and you need to know when it stops.

If you administer servers, Healthchecks is probably the better fit and the rest of this page will tell you why. If your automations live in a no code platform, the setup guidance, the alerting behaviour and the scheduling here were designed for exactly that and theirs were not.

It is open source and you can run it yourself. The source is on GitHub under the BSD 3-clause licence, and their docs describe hosting your own instance as a supported option. If you want your monitoring on your own infrastructure, or you want to never depend on a vendor staying in business, that is decisive and we cannot match it.

The free tier is far more generous. Their Hobbyist plan is free and monitors 20 checks. Ours is free and monitors 3. If you have a dozen jobs and no budget, that is not a close call.

It has far more alert channels. Their site lists more than twenty, including Slack, Discord, Telegram, PagerDuty, Opsgenie, Matrix, SMS, WhatsApp and phone calls. We send email and nothing else. That is a deliberate choice on our side, but if you need a page at 3am it is not the choice you want.

Cron expressions. If your schedule is already written as a cron expression, they accept it directly.

It is built for your platform, not adapted to it. We have specific instructions for the n8n HTTP Request node, the Make HTTP module and Webhooks by Zapier, with the exact URL shape and where to put it in the workflow. Healthchecks is written for cron jobs and background workers, so the translation to a no code platform is yours to do. That gap is the entire reason this product exists.

One email per outage, and we can show you why. A monitor that goes down sends exactly one alert, then nothing until it recovers, then one all clear. It is enforced by a single flag set when the alert goes out and cleared only on recovery, so the rule fits in one sentence and holds under every ordering. Alert fatigue is what makes people stop reading monitoring email, and the only real defence is a product that cannot spam you by construction.

Sensible defaults, so a first monitor is correct without tuning. A new monitor gets twice its interval as grace automatically, so a job that usually takes four minutes and occasionally takes nine does not wake you. You can change it, but you should not have to think about it to avoid a false alarm on day one.

Daily schedules are timezone correct. A daily 09:00 deadline means 09:00 where you are, evaluated against your zone including across daylight saving changes, rather than 09:00 UTC. Nothing shifts by an hour twice a year.

Healthchecks details taken from their pricing page, home page and self hosting docs on 31 August 2026. Prices change, so check theirs before deciding.