MicroProfile vs Tracy Profiler

MicroProfile is a free, embeddable C++ profiler supplied in a few files for adding profiling to a project. Developers mark code with timer macros and include microprofile.cpp. Its live view is opened in Chrome by visiting the profiler host on port 1338, and it can capture the last 30 frames by default. Captures are self-contained webpages that can be saved and shared; profile data can also be written to HTML or CSV. GPU timers support OpenGL, D3D11, D3D12, and Vulkan. Counters appear in live and capture views, and timeline markers cover longer-running unique timers. A detailed view can compare two captures, but not captures made with earlier versions. Experimental dynamic instrumentation supports Intel x86-64 on Windows, macOS, and Linux, with MICROPROFILE_DYNAMIC_INSTRUMENT_ENABLE and distorm required; Linux builds also need -rdynamic. Default per-thread profiling buffers allocate 2 MB, and GPU buffers default to 128 KB each. The project is MIT-licensed and lists Windows, macOS, Linux, and unspecified console support.

Tracy Profiler is a remote profiler for games and other applications, built to capture telemetry in real time at nanosecond resolution. It combines CPU profiling with frame and sampling analysis, and supports C, C++, Lua, Python and Fortran integrations. GPU profiling covers OpenGL, Vulkan, Direct3D 11/12, Metal, OpenCL, CUDA and WebGPU. Tracy can also capture memory allocations, locks and context switches, and associate screenshots with recorded frames. A capture daemon can find Tracy clients over UDP and save each capture to a separate file; a separate tool merges multi-process traces. Merging preserves zones, messages and plots, but drops GPU zones, memory events and call stacks. Sampling can heuristically reconstruct zone call stacks. An optional assistant analyzes captured data with llama.cpp models and requires local setup. Tracy is free under the 3-clause BSD license. Platforms include Windows, Linux, macOS, Android, iOS and other listed environments; releases include PDF documentation and compiled Windows x64 binaries.