Parca vs Valgrind
Parca
parca.devValgrind
valgrind.orgSide by side
| Figure | Parca | Valgrind |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | — |
| macOS | — | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| Android | — | Yes |
| API | Yes | — |
| Self-hosted | Yes | — |
| Plans published | 1 | 1 |
| Spec score · Profiling Software | 8.2 (#6) | 7.4 (#22) |
| Profiling | Parca focuses on sampling profiling, which the project says can run continuously in production with very little overhead. | Cachegrind simulates CPU caches and reports cache misses, memory references and instructions by source line, while Callgrind adds call graph data. |
| Support | Polar Signals offers paid support for users of Parca’s open-source project. | Users can seek help through documentation and the valgrind-users mailing list, but the project says answers from unpaid volunteers are not guaranteed. |
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.