Parca vs Retina
Parca
parca.devRetina
retina.shSide by side
| Figure | Parca | Retina |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | — |
| Free plan | Yes | — |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | — |
| Windows | — | Yes |
| macOS | — | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | — |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 0 |
| Spec score · eBPF Observability Tools | 8.1 (#9) | 7.0 (#26) |
| Data collection | Profiles can be pushed to Parca through gRPC or pulled from targets through HTTP. | It uses eBPF plugins to collect and enrich network telemetry with Kubernetes context. |
| Deployment | The project documents installation using binaries, containers, Kubernetes, and Snaps. | Retina is installed into an existing Kubernetes cluster using Helm. |
| Product | Parca continuously collects, stores, and makes CPU, memory, I/O, and other profiles available for querying over time. | Retina is an open-source Kubernetes network observability platform for monitoring application health, network health, and security. |
| Security | 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. | The project states that Retina images published to GHCR are cryptographically signed and provides cosign verification instructions. |
| Support | Polar Signals offers paid support for users of Parca’s open-source project. | The project directs bug reports and feature requests to GitHub issues and lists [email protected] for other maintainer contact. |
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.