Glances vs Middleware
Glances
nicolargo.github.io
Middleware
middleware.ioSide by side
| Figure | Glances | Middleware |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | $0.30/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | Yes |
| Open source | Yes | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| iOS | — | Yes |
| Android | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | — |
| Plans published | 2 | 3 |
| Spec score · Container Monitoring | 8.8 (#8) | 9.0 (#3) |
| Documentation depth | Official documentation covers installation, quickstart, configuration, command reference, plugins, exports, APIs, and MCP usage. | Getting-started documentation covers host agents, SDKs, integrations, API keys, target URLs, operating systems and languages. |
| Public API | The software exposes XML-RPC and RESTful JSON APIs for other client applications. | A custom-log API accepts POST requests at demo.middleware.io/v1/logs authenticated with a Middleware API key. |
| Support | The project directs users to its manual, official Reddit forum and GitHub Discussions for help. | Free users receive community support, pay-as-you-go customers get a dedicated Slack or Teams channel, and custom-contract customers receive an account team and 24x7 support. |
| What it does | Glances is a Python-based, cross-platform system monitoring tool with terminal and web interfaces. | Middleware is a cloud observability platform that collects telemetry, logs and events and presents dashboards, alerts and AI-driven root-cause analysis. |
Plans
In their own words
Glances
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.
Middleware
Middleware is a hybrid observability platform for detecting and resolving issues across infrastructure, application performance, and real-user monitoring. Its listed coverage includes infrastructure monitoring, logs, metrics, distributed tracing, database monitoring, synthetic monitoring, browser testing, and LLM observability. The AI SRE Agent and OpsAI capabilities include root cause analysis, automatic issue detection, faster issue solving, and automatic PR generation. The Free Forever plan costs nothing and includes up to 100GB of data, 1k RUM sessions, 20k synthetic checks, 10 browser test runs, and 2 million OpsAI tokens, with 14-day retention and community support. Pay As You Go costs $0.30 a month, billed according to use, with default 30-day retention. Middleware lists 450+ integrations and a Public API. It runs on Android, iOS, Linux, macOS, web, Windows, and API. The company says it encrypts customer data in transit and at rest using TLS 1.2+ and AES-256.