PM2 vs Supervisor
PM2
pm2.keymetrics.ioSupervisor
supervisord.orgSide by side
| Figure | PM2 | Supervisor |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $79/mo | — |
| Free plan | Yes | — |
| Free trial | Yes | — |
| Open source | Yes | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Windows | Yes | — |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 6 | 0 |
| Spec score · Process Monitoring Software | 9.0 (#2) | 7.3 (#21) |
| Integrations | Official integration documentation covers Docker, Heroku, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, cloud providers, Nginx, transpilers and Capistrano-style deployments. | The project lists third-party tools and libraries, including Puppet modules, Nagios and Icinga plugins, and clients for its XML-RPC interface. |
| Process management | PM2 starts, stops, restarts, monitors and groups application processes from its command line. | It can start processes, restart them after crashes, and report their status. |
| Purpose | PM2 is a daemon process manager that helps manage applications and keep them online. | Supervisor is a client/server system for controlling processes on UNIX-like operating systems. |
| Security | The PM2 AI Assistant page says access to monitoring data is secured by OAuth with a PM2.io account. | The documentation warns that configuration files may contain unencrypted credentials and should be protected with appropriate filesystem permissions. |
Plans
PM2
- PM2 RuntimeFree
- RuntimeFree
- Plus$79 a month
- PM2 Plus$79 a month
- EnterprisePriced on request
- PM2 EnterprisePriced on request
In their own words
PM2
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.
Supervisor
Supervisor is a free client/server system for starting, monitoring and controlling processes on UNIX-like operating systems. It can restart processes after crashes and report their status. Administrators set per-process options in an INI-style configuration file, including failed-process restarts and automatic log rotation. Priorities and groups let related processes be started or stopped together.
Control is available through a command-line client, an optional browser interface and an XML-RPC interface. The browser view can display and control process status when the HTTP server is enabled; authentication can be required for commands over UNIX-domain or TCP sockets. Supervisor also has an event-notification protocol usable by programs in any language and extension points for Python developers. It can be installed with pip or from a downloaded distribution, including on systems without internet access. It is intended for project- or customer-related processes, not as a replacement for init as process ID 1. It runs on supported UNIX-like systems and does not run under Windows.