atop vs Glances

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.

Glances is a free, open-source, cross-platform tool for monitoring real-time system statistics and running processes. Its listed coverage includes CPU, memory, load, processes, network, disk I/O, sensors, filesystems, containers, alerts, and uptime. Client/server mode enables remote monitoring through a terminal, web interface, or API, while its built-in web UI lets users view a system from a browser-equipped device. Statistics can be exported to CSV or JSON files, databases such as InfluxDB and Prometheus, brokers such as RabbitMQ and Kafka, or a REST endpoint. The project documents Docker and Podman support and describes Docker and LXC container monitoring in its README. Installation options include pip, pipx, Homebrew, Linux and FreeBSD packages, and Docker images. Glances 4 requires Python 3.10 or higher. Its default installation does not include web interface dependencies; separate extras cover features such as web, GPU, containers, exports, and MCP. Version 4.5.1 and higher can provide an MCP server for AI assistants. The project uses the LGPL version 3 license.