Best Process Monitoring Software in 2026

PM2

PM2 Runtime suits users who need an open-source process manager for applications.

Glances suits people who want system statistics and process monitoring across supported systems, including remote views or exports.

Process Lasso suits Windows users who want to automate process priorities, affinities, power plans, or sleep prevention.

runit suits Unix administrators who need service supervision, process controls and logging, either as an init replacement or alongside an existing init scheme.

Autoruns

Autoruns suits Windows users who want to inspect and manage configured startup entries, including entries for other accounts.

bottom suits users who want terminal-based system monitoring and process controls on an officially supported desktop operating system.

AppControl

AppControl suits Windows users investigating background activity, including gamers, IT professionals, privacy-conscious users, and people troubleshooting applications.

OpenProcMon suits Windows users who need detailed process, file, registry, or network activity logs, and developers building on its SDK or MCP tools.

Monit suits administrators who want self-hosted monitoring and automated maintenance for Unix systems.

Linux administrators and performance analysts who need interval-based system, process, thread, and cgroup activity records.

btop suits Linux and macOS users who want to inspect system and process activity in a terminal.

htop

htop suits users who need terminal-based process monitoring on Linux or macOS and related Unix systems.

Linux administrators and developers who need process-level I/O visibility.

It suits advanced end users, developers, and system administrators working with Linux performance data.

It suits Windows users who need to inspect or control processes across local and remote computers.

It suits Windows users who need to inspect local or remote process memory and close processes, including troubleshooting a slow remote machine.

Supervisor suits system administrators who need to manage project- or customer-related processes on UNIX-like systems.