atop vs btop

atop is a free, GPL-licensed performance monitor for Linux. It uses a full-screen ASCII interface to report system and process activity at regular intervals. System-level views cover CPU, memory, swap, disk, and network activity. Process and thread views include CPU use, memory growth, disk use, and other statistics, including consumption by processes that finish during the interval. atop can save compressed raw counters for longer-term analysis, preserving daily logs for 28 days by default. The atopsar command turns those logs into system activity reports. It also reports CPU, memory, disk I/O utilization, and pressure for cgroup v2. An optional netatop kernel module adds per-process and per-thread TCP and UDP packet counts and bandwidth statistics. Displays can use bar graphs or detailed text, with columns adjusting to terminal width. Downloads list source and x86_64 RPM packages for version 2.13.0.

btop is a free resource monitor for Linux and macOS that displays processor, memory, disk, network, and process activity. Its game-inspired menus, mouse support, and responsive interface provide ways to navigate system views and process controls. Users can inspect process details, filter or sort the list, view it as a tree, send signals, or pause the process list. Network graphs scale automatically; other displays cover disk activity and speeds, plus a battery meter. Users can choose graph symbols, create presets, and use theme files shared with bpytop and bashtop or a custom themes directory. GPU monitoring is supported on Linux and on macOS with Apple Silicon GPUs when built with GPU support. NVIDIA monitoring needs the nvidia-ml library, AMD needs rocm_smi_lib, and Intel needs SYSFS read permission. The project documents Linux and macOS installation, package installation for FreeBSD and NetBSD, and Homebrew for macOS and Linux. It recommends a terminal with 24-bit truecolor and wide-character support, a UTF8 locale, and a font covering specified Unicode blocks. The repository lists the Apache-2.0 license.