What is the best EasyCron alternative?

It depends on why you are leaving. Crontap fits if you want retries, uptime monitors, and heartbeats in one account with monthly or annual billing, and it costs less than EasyCron for most fleets of 6 to 25 every-minute jobs. cron-job.org fits if all you need is free one-minute scheduling. If your requests run for hours, or you have many low-frequency jobs, staying on EasyCron is usually the better call.

How much does EasyCron cost per year?

$24 to $240 a year on Individual plans and $120 to $1,200 on Enterprise. Individual-1 is $24 a year (about $2 a month, paid upfront) for 8,000 executions per day (EPD); Individual-2, -3, and -4 are $60, $120, and $240 for 24,000, 60,000, and 120,000 EPD. Every paid plan is billed yearly with no monthly option. Third-party lists that quote $12 or $50 a month are out of step with the official pricing page (checked November 9, 2026).

Is EasyCron free, and does the free plan expire?

There is a free plan with 200 executions per day (EPD), a 20-minute minimum interval, a 5-second timeout, 10 logs, and no email alerts or custom HTTP request settings. That holds two 20-minute jobs or eight hourly ones. It does expire: you have to renew it on the Plan page every month or your jobs are disabled. EasyCron's terms also let it stop serving free accounts at any time and allow one free account per person. Crontap Starter has no renewal step: 2 combined items, hourly schedules, and email alerts.

What is EPD in EasyCron?

Executions per day: the total runs of all your jobs on the busiest day. A job every minute is 1,440 EPD, a job every hour is 24, and a daily job is 1. EasyCron reserves the EPD when you add the job, and your plan's EPD is the only limit on how many jobs you can have.

What is EasyCron's timeout limit?

5 seconds on free, 12 hours on Individual plans, and 24 hours on Enterprise, and you can set a shorter per-job timeout. Crontap allows up to 1 hour per attempt, and recurring schedules end the request about 15 seconds before the next run. A proxy can still cut a long request short: EasyCron's own FAQ on Cloudflare 524 errors says to bypass Cloudflare, because the proxy ends the request first.

Can EasyCron run jobs every few seconds?

No. Paid plans run at most once a minute, and EasyCron's FAQ suggests a PHP script that loops with sleep inside one run as a workaround. Crontap has the same 1-minute floor on Pro and Ultra, and an hourly floor on Starter.

Does EasyCron retry failed cron jobs?

EasyCron documents no retry policy for failed requests, and its create-job API has no retry setting, only a timeout, success rules, and alert thresholds. Its downtime compensation runs a job once right after EasyCron itself comes back from an outage. Crontap retries failed runs by default as brief, bounded in-process attempts, not durable queue delivery. Every plan can toggle retries; Pro and Ultra set 1 to 5 retries, the delay, and optional 429 or other 4xx retries, and the alert fires once the attempts are exhausted.

Does EasyCron have an API, and does Crontap?

EasyCron has a REST API on every plan, with daily quotas of 100 requests on free, 2,000 to 20,000 on Individual, and 10,000 to 200,000 on Enterprise. Crontap's public REST management API is on Ultra only, from $95.99 a year. Every Crontap plan includes an MCP server that lets supported clients manage schedules, uptime monitors, heartbeats, and history within plan limits.

Topics:Automation platforms

Comparison

Crontap vs EasyCron: pricing, timeouts and when to switch

Crontap is the better EasyCron alternative if you run 6 to 25 every-minute jobs, or if you want retries, uptime monitors, and heartbeats in one account with monthly or annual billing. Stay on EasyCron if a request needs more than an hour, or if you run many low-frequency jobs, where its executions-per-day pricing is hard to beat. It also fits if you rely on regex checks of the response body.

Schedule your first job Read the full comparison

At a glance

EasyCron vs Crontap, side by side.

EasyCron vs Crontap, dimension by dimension
Dimension	EasyCron	Crontap
Pricing model	Executions per day (EPD) on your busiest day; no separate job cap	Per combined item: schedules, uptime monitors, heartbeats
Billing	Paid plans yearly only: Individual $24 to $240, Enterprise $120 to $1,200	Monthly or annual; Pro from $2.99/mo or $23.99/yr
Free plan	200 EPD, 5 s timeout, no email alerts; renew monthly or jobs are disabled	Starter: 2 combined items; schedules hourly+, 1 uptime monitor daily, and 1 heartbeat hourly; no renewal step
Cadence floor	Free 20 minutes; paid 1 minute	Starter hourly; Pro and Ultra 1 minute
Per-job timezone	Yes, per job	Per-schedule IANA timezone
Request timeout	Free 5 s; Individual 12 h; Enterprise 24 h	Up to 1 h per attempt; recurring runs end about 15 s before the next
Cron syntax	Five fields plus optional year; L, W, #, ?; @ macros	Five fields; L, #, ?, names, @ macros; no W or year; plain-language input; run-once
Success rules	2xx by default; paid plans can match a regex on the body	2xx status (GraphQL errors count as failure); no body match
Logs and history	Up to 6 months; 10 logs free, 200 or 500 paid, plus failure logs; 10 or 20 KB of response head and tail	100 / 1,000 / 10,000 runs per schedule; status, code, duration, size, error summary; no response body
Management API	REST on every plan; 100 requests/day free, 2,000 to 20,000 on Individual	Public management API on Ultra only; MCP on every plan within plan limits
Request extras	9 methods, Basic auth fields, cookies, placeholders, published IPs	7 methods, headers, JSON body; auth and cookies as headers; no published IP list
Team accounts	Subusers on Enterprise (10 to 200)	No team accounts or subusers
Public status pages	None for your jobs	Free on every plan for uptime monitors and heartbeats: templates from Clean to themed worlds, incidents, maintenance, status badge, RSS, and status.json. Pro, Ultra, and legacy Pro add a logo, branding removal, and a custom subdomain
Human Notifications	Paid: email after 1 to 5 consecutive failures, and Slack. Free: no email alerts. No Discord or Telegram	All plans: email, test sends, product defaults, per-item default/custom/off routing, and delivery history. Pro, Ultra, and legacy Pro add Slack, Discord, and Telegram
Machine webhook Integrations	Webhook notifications on Enterprise only; REST API on every plan	Separate machine webhook Integrations with per-event success, failure, missed, and recovered levers where applicable
Schedule failure batching	Not compared; Crontap schedule-specific alert setting	Schedule alerts: unsaved default Starter 24h / 3 failures, paid 10m / 3; configurable floor Starter 1 day, paid 1 minute
Heartbeat / dead-man monitoring	No heartbeat monitoring	Native: period + grace, /fail, missed/recovered/explicit-failure alerts, ping URL, and 90-day history
Uptime monitoring	No uptime monitoring	Native HTTP uptime: down/recovered alerts, history, 90-day rollups, and integration controls
Retries and customization	No documented retry policy; one catch-up run after EasyCron downtime	Default on: 3 retries with 2× exponential backoff and jitter. Pro, Ultra, and legacy Pro: 1–5 retries plus delay and retry outcomes; alert after exhaustion

How they work

The two approaches in one paragraph each.

EasyCron

EasyCron prices by executions per day (EPD), the total number of runs on your busiest day. Each job reserves its share of EPD as soon as you add it, so one every-minute job uses 1,440 EPD, and there is no separate cap on the number of jobs. Paid plans are bought a year at a time, and higher plans also raise the timeout, log slots, and API quota.

Crontap

Crontap prices by item. A schedule, an uptime monitor, and a heartbeat each count as one item, and on Pro and Ultra a schedule costs the same whether it runs every minute or once a day. The flip side is that every extra job, even a daily one, takes a slot. Plans bill monthly or annually.

Where each side wins

Honest broker, both columns.

EasyCron wins on

Long timeouts: 12 hours per request on Individual plans and 24 hours on Enterprise, against Crontap's 1 hour per attempt.
Lots of low-frequency jobs: 50 daily jobs use 50 EPD, which fits the free plan or Individual-1, the smallest paid plan, at $24 a year.
A richer cron dialect with W (nearest weekday) and an optional year field, plus regex rules that mark a run as success or failure from the response body on paid plans.
A REST API on every plan, including 100 requests a day on free, where Crontap's public REST API needs Ultra.
Request extras Crontap lacks: URL and body placeholders such as EASYCRON_TIMESTAMP, a published list of the IPs its requests come from, for allowlists, separate failure log slots, and saved response head and tail.
A more generous free plan for scheduling alone: 20-minute jobs and up to 200 runs a day, against Crontap Starter's hourly floor and two combined items.
Team features on Enterprise: subusers and webhook notifications.

Crontap wins on

One combined item cap covers schedules, uptime monitors, and heartbeats, so a down homepage or a backup that never checked in alerts from the same account. Free public status pages and badges can show them.
Retries: new schedules retry 5xx responses, timeouts, and network failures by default with exponential backoff, and every attempt lands in history. EasyCron documents no retry policy.
Monthly or annual billing, and a Starter plan with no renewal step or expiry. EasyCron's paid plans are yearly only and its free plan must be renewed every month.
Email alerts on Starter, and Slack, Discord, and Telegram on Pro and Ultra, routed per item. EasyCron's free plan has no email alerts and its paid plans offer email and Slack.
Cheaper for most fleets of 6 to 25 every-minute jobs (see the math below).
An MCP server on every plan lets supported clients manage schedules, monitors, heartbeats, and history.

The math

Cadence and pricing, worked out.

EasyCron's official pricing page lists Individual-1 to Individual-4 at $24, $60, $120, and $240 a year for 8,000, 24,000, 60,000, and 120,000 EPD, with no monthly option (checked November 9, 2026). $24 a year works out to $2 a month, but it is charged as one yearly payment.
Enterprise runs from $120 a year for 10,000 EPD (Enterprise-1) to $1,200 for 200,000 EPD (Enterprise-5). At $120, Enterprise-1 gives a sixth of Individual-3's EPD; the difference buys subusers, webhook notifications, and 24-hour timeouts.
One job every minute is 60 times 24, or 1,440 EPD. So Individual-1 holds 5 every-minute jobs, Individual-2 holds 16, Individual-3 holds 41, and Individual-4 holds 83.
The free plan's 200 EPD with a 20-minute floor holds two 20-minute jobs (72 EPD each), eight hourly jobs (24 EPD each), or up to 200 daily jobs, and keeps 10 logs. Crontap Starter holds 2 items in total, with schedules hourly or slower.
3 and 5 every-minute jobs (4,320 and 7,200 EPD) both fit Individual-1 at $24 a year. Crontap Pro 3 is $23.99 a year, effectively the same price. Pro 5 is $28.99, so EasyCron is cheaper by $4.99.
10 every-minute jobs (14,400 EPD) need Individual-2 at $60 a year, against Crontap Pro 10 at $39.99: Crontap is cheaper by $20.01. 20 every-minute jobs (28,800 EPD) need Individual-3 at $120, against Pro 20 at $63.99: Crontap is cheaper by $56.01.
40 every-minute jobs (57,600 EPD) still fit Individual-3 at $120 a year. Crontap needs Ultra 50 at $159.99, so EasyCron is cheaper by $39.99.
50 daily jobs (50 EPD) fit EasyCron's free plan, or Individual-1 at $24 a year if you want email alerts and custom HTTP request settings. Crontap counts each job as an item, so it needs Ultra 50 at $159.99 a year. EasyCron wins by a wide margin.
The rule for every-minute jobs, up to Individual-3's limit of 41: the two are level at 1 to 3 jobs, EasyCron is cheaper at 4 and 5, Crontap is cheaper from 6 to 25 (except 16, which just fits Individual-2), and EasyCron is cheaper again from 26 to 41. EasyCron also wins on volume of low-frequency jobs. Crontap's price also covers uptime monitors and heartbeats, which EasyCron does not offer, so compare against what you would pay for those elsewhere.
Trying it out: EasyCron offers a 7-day free trial of Individual or Enterprise and refunds the first payment within 7 days. Crontap has a free Starter plan and a 14-day money-back refund on the first monthly or annual payment of a paid plan.

Moving from EasyCron

The migration, in 7 steps.

Inventory each EasyCron job: URL and placeholders, cron expression, timezone, method, headers and cookies, Basic auth fields, body, timeout, success regex, notification settings, and any IP allowlist on the endpoint.
Export the list through the EasyCron REST API (a GET with your X-API-Key header, minding your daily quota) or copy it from the dashboard.
Check each expression in CronTool at tool.crontap.com. Rewrite W rules and year fields, and turn one-time jobs pinned to a year into Crontap run-once schedules.
Map Basic auth fields to an Authorization header and cookies to a Cookie header. Move regex body checks into the endpoint so it returns a non-2xx status on failure, and redesign any job that needs more than an hour per attempt.
Crontap publishes no egress IP list, so protect endpoints with a token or an Authorization header instead of EasyCron's bot IP allowlist.
Create the Crontap schedule paused and run Perform test. Disable the EasyCron job, then enable the Crontap schedule, so the endpoint never fires twice.
On WordPress, point a schedule at wp-cron.php and set DISABLE_WP_CRON, as the Crontap wp-cron guide linked below walks through. The EasyCron WordPress plugin was last updated about four years ago and is tested only up to WordPress 6.2, per wordpress.org (checked November 9, 2026).

Decision

Which one fits.

Pick EasyCron if

You run many low-frequency jobs, need requests that run for hours, rely on regex checks of the response body or a published IP list, or want API access on a low-cost plan. Among other EasyCron alternatives, cron-job.org is worth a look if all you need is free one-minute scheduling.

Pick Crontap if

You run 6 to 25 every-minute jobs, or want retries with attempt history, uptime monitors, heartbeats, and Slack, Discord, or Telegram alerts in one account, billed monthly or annually.

Pair both if

Keep long-running or regex-checked jobs on EasyCron while Crontap runs the jobs that need retries and watches your endpoints with uptime monitors and your background jobs with heartbeats.

FAQ

Crontap vs EasyCron, in detail.

What is the best EasyCron alternative?: It depends on why you are leaving. Crontap fits if you want retries, uptime monitors, and heartbeats in one account with monthly or annual billing, and it costs less than EasyCron for most fleets of 6 to 25 every-minute jobs. cron-job.org fits if all you need is free one-minute scheduling. If your requests run for hours, or you have many low-frequency jobs, staying on EasyCron is usually the better call.
How much does EasyCron cost per year?: $24 to $240 a year on Individual plans and $120 to $1,200 on Enterprise. Individual-1 is $24 a year (about $2 a month, paid upfront) for 8,000 executions per day (EPD); Individual-2, -3, and -4 are $60, $120, and $240 for 24,000, 60,000, and 120,000 EPD. Every paid plan is billed yearly with no monthly option. Third-party lists that quote $12 or $50 a month are out of step with the official pricing page (checked November 9, 2026).
Is EasyCron free, and does the free plan expire?: There is a free plan with 200 executions per day (EPD), a 20-minute minimum interval, a 5-second timeout, 10 logs, and no email alerts or custom HTTP request settings. That holds two 20-minute jobs or eight hourly ones. It does expire: you have to renew it on the Plan page every month or your jobs are disabled. EasyCron's terms also let it stop serving free accounts at any time and allow one free account per person. Crontap Starter has no renewal step: 2 combined items, hourly schedules, and email alerts.
What is EPD in EasyCron?: Executions per day: the total runs of all your jobs on the busiest day. A job every minute is 1,440 EPD, a job every hour is 24, and a daily job is 1. EasyCron reserves the EPD when you add the job, and your plan's EPD is the only limit on how many jobs you can have.
What is EasyCron's timeout limit?: 5 seconds on free, 12 hours on Individual plans, and 24 hours on Enterprise, and you can set a shorter per-job timeout. Crontap allows up to 1 hour per attempt, and recurring schedules end the request about 15 seconds before the next run. A proxy can still cut a long request short: EasyCron's own FAQ on Cloudflare 524 errors says to bypass Cloudflare, because the proxy ends the request first.
Can EasyCron run jobs every few seconds?: No. Paid plans run at most once a minute, and EasyCron's FAQ suggests a PHP script that loops with sleep inside one run as a workaround. Crontap has the same 1-minute floor on Pro and Ultra, and an hourly floor on Starter.
Does EasyCron retry failed cron jobs?: EasyCron documents no retry policy for failed requests, and its create-job API has no retry setting, only a timeout, success rules, and alert thresholds. Its downtime compensation runs a job once right after EasyCron itself comes back from an outage. Crontap retries failed runs by default as brief, bounded in-process attempts, not durable queue delivery. Every plan can toggle retries; Pro and Ultra set 1 to 5 retries, the delay, and optional 429 or other 4xx retries, and the alert fires once the attempts are exhausted.
Does EasyCron have an API, and does Crontap?: EasyCron has a REST API on every plan, with daily quotas of 100 requests on free, 2,000 to 20,000 on Individual, and 10,000 to 200,000 on Enterprise. Crontap's public REST management API is on Ultra only, from $95.99 a year. Every Crontap plan includes an MCP server that lets supported clients manage schedules, uptime monitors, heartbeats, and history within plan limits.

Related guides

Adjacent

Sources

Test one low-risk job

Create it safely, then pause before cutover.

Use Perform test against a safe or idempotent endpoint, then keep the replacement paused. Enable it only after its timing, request, and alert settings match the job you are replacing.

Schedule your first job Read migration steps

GET

/wp-cron.php?doing_wp_cron=1

Running

Your next schedule

Schedule

"every 5 minutes"