btop vs PM2

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.

PM2 is a daemon process manager for managing applications and keeping them online. PM2 Runtime is an open-source process manager; PM2 Plus adds monitoring for Node.js production applications. Runtime supports cluster mode, zero-downtime reloads, watch and restart, startup scripts, log management and memory-based reloads. For containers, pm2-runtime can run Node.js applications with process fallback, flow control, monitoring and source-map support. PM2 Plus lists a web monitoring interface, application overview, issue tracking, custom metrics, server health checks and Node.js V8 monitoring. Its alerts include email and Slack notifications, while Enterprise adds rule-based alerting. The AI Assistant connects Claude, Cursor and other MCP-compatible assistants to monitoring data through OAuth with a PM2.io account. Documentation covers Docker, cloud providers, Heroku, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Nginx and deployment workflows. Runtime costs nothing, and Plus costs $79 a month.