Parca vs Zymtrace

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.

Zymtrace profiles CPU and GPU workloads to help teams find performance bottlenecks in AI training and inference. Its whole-system CPU profiler supports languages including Python, Java, Go, Rust, C/C++, Node.js, Ruby,.NET, PHP, Perl, Zig, and Scala. GPU tools correlate CPU and GPU execution, inspect CUDA kernels, GPU instructions, and stall reasons, and monitor measures such as utilization, memory, power, temperature, SM efficiency and occupancy, Tensor Core utilization, and data transfer rates. The GPU profiling page lists vLLM, Ollama, llama.cpp, and SGLang as supported inference engines. Zymtrace runs on Linux; the maker says eBPF dependence currently rules out Windows. All plans are self-hosted, and the maker says customer data stays within customer infrastructure. The air-gapped option performs processing and analysis locally. Instances provide a REST API, and profiling data can be exposed through MCP for AI agents. OpenTelemetry resource attributes and standard-format export are supported. Basic is free, billed Free Forever, and covers CPU profiling for up to five concurrent machines; GPU profiling is available as a trial.