PM2 vs runit

PM2 is a daemon process manager for managing applications and keeping them online. PM2 Runtime is an open-source process manager; PM2 Plus adds monitoring for Node.js production applications. Runtime supports cluster mode, zero-downtime reloads, watch and restart, startup scripts, log management and memory-based reloads. For containers, pm2-runtime can run Node.js applications with process fallback, flow control, monitoring and source-map support. PM2 Plus lists a web monitoring interface, application overview, issue tracking, custom metrics, server health checks and Node.js V8 monitoring. Its alerts include email and Slack notifications, while Enterprise adds rule-based alerting. The AI Assistant connects Claude, Cursor and other MCP-compatible assistants to monitoring data through OAuth with a PM2.io account. Documentation covers Docker, cloud providers, Heroku, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Nginx and deployment workflows. Runtime costs nothing, and Plus costs $79 a month.

runit is a free Unix init scheme that supervises services and can replace sysvinit or other init schemes. It runs on GNU/Linux, BSD systems, MacOSX and Solaris, and can be adapted to other Unix operating systems. As process 1, it manages boot, normal operation and shutdown in three stages. The runsv component launches a service's run program and restarts it if it exits; an optional finish program and log service can also be used. The sv utility reports status and provides controls to start, stop, restart, pause or signal supervised services. For logs, svlogd can filter messages and write automatically rotated logs. The chpst utility changes process state and sets limits for resources such as memory, open files, process count, output size, core size and CPU time. runsvdir can start and monitor runsv processes for up to 1,000 service subdirectories. runit can supervise services alongside an existing init scheme without replacing it. The maker provides source and installation instructions, including manual installation without root access. Its documentation warns that UDP logging is unreliable and should be confined to private networks.