groundcover vs Parca
groundcover
groundcover.com
Parca
parca.devSide by side
| Figure | groundcover | Parca |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $30/mo | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | Yes | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | — | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 4 | 1 |
| Spec score · eBPF Observability Tools | 8.4 (#6) | 8.1 (#9) |
| Spec score · Runtime Monitoring Software | 8.3 (#20) | 8.1 (#25) |
| Deployment | Bring Your Own Cloud deploys the backend in the customer’s cloud while groundcover manages it, and the UI is hosted by groundcover. | The project documents installation using binaries, containers, Kubernetes, and Snaps. |
| Product | groundcover is a cloud-native observability platform powered by eBPF for monitoring production environments. | Parca continuously collects, stores, and makes CPU, memory, I/O, and other profiles available for querying over time. |
| Support | Standard support offers business-hours availability with stated response targets from under 8 hours for critical issues to under 72 hours for low-priority issues. | Polar Signals offers paid support for users of Parca’s open-source project. |
Plans
In their own words
groundcover
groundcover is a cloud-native observability platform for monitoring production environments. Its eBPF sensor collects metrics, logs, and traces without code changes or manual instrumentation, processes data at the edge, and the product states that ingestion happens in real time without sampling. Bring Your Own Cloud deployment puts the backend in the customer’s cloud while groundcover manages it and hosts the UI. Fully On-Prem deployment places both backend and UI on customer premises, including cloud or physical servers. Integrations include Kubernetes, OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, AWS CloudWatch, Google Cloud Monitoring, Azure, MongoDB Atlas, Redis Cloud, Datadog, and GitHub. Agent Mode can investigate telemetry and create dashboards, monitors, gcQL queries, and OTTL pipelines. The Free plan is free forever and includes 12-hour data retention and Slack Community support; paid plans start at $30 per host per month. Billing is based on average monthly monitored Kubernetes nodes or Linux hosts, not telemetry volume. The platform is available on Linux, self-hosted, and web.
Parca
Parca is a self-hosted profiling system that collects and stores CPU, memory, I/O, and other profiles for queries over time. Its eBPF-based Parca Agent captures user-space and kernel-space stack traces, while the system also accepts valid pprof-formatted profiles pushed through gRPC or pulled from targets over HTTP. Users can query by labels, compare dimensions such as processes or code versions, and view profiles in the web interface with Icicle Graphs. A Grafana plugin can display profiles stored in Parca. The agent supports automatic profiling for languages including C, C++, Go, Rust, .NET, Deno, Erlang, Java, Julia, Node.js, Wasmtime, PHP, Ruby, and Python. Installation options include binaries, containers, Kubernetes, and Snaps. Parca is open source under the Apache 2 License and is free. The agent requires Linux kernel 4.18 or newer and privileged access to load eBPF programs. Parca says it receives profiling statistics and function-name metadata, not binaries or source code.