Parca vs Sentry Continuous Profiling

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.

Sentry Continuous Profiling helps teams locate backend performance bottlenecks in Node.js and Python code, down to functions and lines. Continuous profiles can run for unlimited durations. An Aggregate Flamegraph summarizes project performance without requiring a single transaction as its scope. Developers can control profiling manually with SDK APIs or configure it to follow a trace lifecycle, starting when a root span is active. UI Profiling covers iOS, macOS and Android, with browser JavaScript and Electron also listed. Sentry says profiling requires performance monitoring to be enabled in the app, and availability for continuous profiling depends on the SDK. Continuous and UI Profiling use separate profile-hour billing measures and are available through pay-as-you-go usage. Sentry lists a free plan and paid pricing from $26/mo. Its integrations include GitHub, Jira, Slack, GitLab, Linear, Microsoft Teams and PagerDuty. Sentry says its service is hosted on Google Cloud Platform and has SOC 2 Type 2 and ISO 27001 certification and a HIPAA attestation.