ManageEngine Free Process Manager vs PM2

ManageEngine Free Process Manager is a Windows utility for identifying processes that consume system resources and closing unwanted ones. Its local view lists running processes and memory usage, and a search lets you inspect memory used by a selected process. The tool can also display process-level memory usage on a remote machine and terminate processes locally or remotely. Remote connections require a server IP, domain, username, and password, plus WinRM and TrustedHosts configuration. The download page lists Free Process Manager 1.0 as a 5.7 MB Windows EXE with 32-bit main and mirror downloads. It requires Microsoft.NET Framework 3.5 or later. Minimum hardware is a 1 GHz x86 or 1.4 GHz x64 processor, 512 MB RAM, and 3 MB available disk space; installed use is under 10 MB. The plan costs nothing, with a license granted in perpetuity.

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.