Accessibility Inspector vs Tracy Profiler
Accessibility Inspector
developer.apple.comTracy Profiler
github.comSide by side
| Figure | Accessibility Inspector | Tracy Profiler |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Windows | — | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | — | Yes |
| iOS | — | Yes |
| Android | — | Yes |
| Self-hosted | — | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 1 |
| Spec score · Game Profiling Software | 8.4 (#5) | 8.1 (#11) |
| Intended users | Apple describes Xcode as a tool suite for building apps for Apple platforms, and Accessibility Inspector helps developers identify accessibility issues in those apps. | The project describes Tracy as a profiler for games and other applications. |
| Purpose | Accessibility Inspector displays, queries, and tests accessibility information for elements in an app’s view hierarchy. | Tracy is a real-time, nanosecond-resolution remote telemetry, hybrid frame and sampling profiler for games and other applications. |
Plans
Accessibility Inspector
- Xcode (includes Accessibility Inspector)Free
In their own words
Accessibility Inspector
Accessibility Inspector is Apple’s free macOS tool for examining accessibility information in app interfaces. It displays an element’s accessibility properties, available actions, and position in the view hierarchy. Audits identify common issues such as insufficient contrast, clipped text, and missing descriptions. Results can be saved as HTML reports containing summaries, screenshots, issue descriptions, and fix suggestions. Accessibility audits can also run in UI tests through performAccessibilityAudit(for:_:). The target menu includes apps on Mac and selected iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, or tvOS devices. Open it from Xcode through Xcode > Open Developer Tool > Accessibility Inspector. Apple’s listing describes Xcode as Mac-only, requiring macOS 26.2 or later and an Apple M1 chip or later, and labels it Free. Clearing reported issues does not prove complete accessibility; Apple recommends additional checks with assistive apps such as VoiceOver.
Tracy Profiler
Tracy Profiler is a remote profiler for games and other applications, built to capture telemetry in real time at nanosecond resolution. It combines CPU profiling with frame and sampling analysis, and supports C, C++, Lua, Python and Fortran integrations. GPU profiling covers OpenGL, Vulkan, Direct3D 11/12, Metal, OpenCL, CUDA and WebGPU. Tracy can also capture memory allocations, locks and context switches, and associate screenshots with recorded frames. A capture daemon can find Tracy clients over UDP and save each capture to a separate file; a separate tool merges multi-process traces. Merging preserves zones, messages and plots, but drops GPU zones, memory events and call stacks. Sampling can heuristically reconstruct zone call stacks. An optional assistant analyzes captured data with llama.cpp models and requires local setup. Tracy is free under the 3-clause BSD license. Platforms include Windows, Linux, macOS, Android, iOS and other listed environments; releases include PDF documentation and compiled Windows x64 binaries.