Crit Alarm, ntfy, PingParrot and Echobell all get an alert to your phone. They differ on whether you can host them, whether the alarm repeats until you answer, and who holds your alert text.
| Feature | Crit Alarm | ntfy | PingParrot | Echobell |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| What it is | Self-hosted push alarm | Self-hosted push | Free hosted on-call paging | Hosted alerts that phone-call you |
| Repeats until you acknowledge | Yes | No | Yes | Yes, by calling |
| Self-hostable | Yes | Yes | No | No |
| ntfy-compatible | Yes | Is ntfy | No | No |
| What they call it | "alarm" | "notify" | "on-call" | "alerts" |
You can use ntfy as an open source notification service across desktop and mobile devices with topic subscriptions and file attachments. Crit Alarm turns high-priority pushes into alarms that repeat until you acknowledge them. You keep your existing endpoints and scripts because Crit Alarm works with your existing ntfy setup.
Teams choose PingParrot for hosted on-call schedules, multi-step escalation policies, and telephone voice alerts. Crit Alarm runs on your own hardware. The server sits inside your network and your alert text stays there.
Developers use Echobell for managed webhook-to-phone alerts that ring incoming phone calls without managing servers. Crit Alarm rings the alarm inside its own app. You run the server, and the history stays on it.
Crit Alarm works with your existing ntfy setup. The docs cover installing the server, making your first topic, and pointing your monitors at it.