Kerno vs Parca
Kerno
github.com
Parca
parca.devSide by side
| Figure | Kerno | Parca |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | — | Free |
| Free plan | — | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | — | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | — | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 0 | 1 |
| Spec score · eBPF Observability Tools | 7.0 (#25) | 8.1 (#9) |
| Deployment | Kerno can run as a Kubernetes DaemonSet or as a binary on bare metal, VMs, EC2, and GCE; Docker images are published for Linux amd64 and arm64. | The project documents installation using binaries, containers, Kubernetes, and Snaps. |
| Security | The project says Kerno makes no outbound network calls by default and that AI integration is opt-in through the configured provider. | The project says the Agent source is open source, it is written in Go, and its binaries and container images are fully reproducible; the Agent needs privileged access to load eBPF programs. |
| Support | The security policy directs general questions to GitHub Discussions and vulnerability reports to [email protected], with acknowledgment targeted within 48 hours. | Polar Signals offers paid support for users of Parca’s open-source project. |
Plans
In their own words
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.