What's the difference between cron and services like Supervisord?

Question

Recently I came across supervisor while researching beanstalk stuff. Can someone explain to me why I might use a process management service like that instead of plain old cron jobs?

Answer 1

I would say that both services have quite different purposes: With cron you start typically short jobs at regular intervals while supervisor can be used to control the existence of typically long-running server processes and it's dependencies.

I.e. you could run a web server with supervisor, but would handle log rotation with logrotate from a cron job.