SHSelfHostIndex

Checkmate vs Healthchecks

A side-by-side comparison of two self-hosted monitoring & status options — licensing, setup difficulty, resource needs, and what each one replaces.

Not the right match-up?
Checkmate Open-source uptime and infrastructure monitoring tool VS Healthchecks Cron job and scheduled task monitoring
FeatureCheckmateHealthchecks
Deploy effortUnder-an-hour setupUnder-an-hour setup
Health score93 · Excellent93 · Excellent
CategoryMonitoring & StatusMonitoring & Status
LicenseAGPL-3.0BSD-3-Clause
LanguageTypeScriptPython
Setup difficultyEasyEasy
Min. RAM256 MB256 MB
Deploymentdockerdocker, bare-metal
GitHub stars★ 10,883★ 10,358
First released20242015
ReplacesPingdom, Better UptimePingdom

What are Checkmate and Healthchecks?

Checkmate

Checkmate is an open-source server monitoring application that tracks uptime, response times, and infrastructure health. It offers incident notifications and a clean dashboard for homelabs and small teams.

  • Uptime and response monitoring
  • Infrastructure health agent
  • Incident notifications
  • Modern dashboard

Read the full Checkmate guide →

Healthchecks

Healthchecks is a self-hosted service that monitors cron jobs and scheduled tasks using dead man's switch pings. It targets administrators who need to know when a recurring job silently fails. It is deployed via Docker or a Django install.

  • Dead man's switch for cron jobs
  • Many notification integrations
  • Per-check schedules and grace
  • REST API

Read the full Healthchecks guide →

Checkmate vs Healthchecks: key differences

Checkmate is written in TypeScript, while Healthchecks is built with Python. Licensing differs — AGPL-3.0 for Checkmate versus BSD-3-Clause for Healthchecks. Healthchecks is the more established project (first released 2015), while Checkmate arrived in 2024.

Why pick each one

Choose Checkmate if…

  • Clean modern interface
  • Active development

Watch out for

  • Newer project
  • Feature set still growing
Checkmate details

Choose Healthchecks if…

  • Catches silently failing jobs
  • Lots of notification channels
  • Lightweight

Watch out for

  • Narrow use case
  • Not for metrics
Healthchecks details

Frequently asked questions

Is Checkmate or Healthchecks better?

Neither is universally better. Checkmate has the larger community; both share a easy setup difficulty, so the decision comes down to features and licensing.

Are Checkmate and Healthchecks free and open-source?

Yes. Checkmate is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and Healthchecks under BSD-3-Clause. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.

Can I run Checkmate and Healthchecks with Docker?

Checkmate: yes. Healthchecks: yes.

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