Old magazines like The C/C++ Users' Journal and DDJ used to have ads for companies selling malloc()/free() replacement libraries, exactly because a single implementation isn't adequate to all scenarios.
Third party allocators improved on this as well as usually avoiding the heap fragmentation problems that system heaps often suffered from back then.
These days the system heaps have improved to a point where you really only need to think about a third party heap for very specialized circumstances. They do usually come with nifty debugging tools though.