Profiler and performance monitoring for PHP and Python: on-demand profiles, continuous profiling in production, and performance assertions that can run in CI.
Pricing and hosting
- Pricing
- Paid
- Open source
- No
- Self-hosted
- No
- Status
- Active
- Website
- blackfire.io
Plans and prices change; check the tool's own site before you decide.
What it does
Continuous profiling checklist
6 of 9 confirmed in Blackfire's own documentation. The same checklist is used for every tool in Profiling.
- Always-on in production Yes
- CPU profiles Yes
- Memory or allocation profiles Yes
- eBPF, no code changes Yes
- Several languages Yes
- Flame graph UI Not confirmed
- Profile comparison Yes
- Linked to traces Not confirmed
- OpenTelemetry profiles Not confirmed
Continuous profiling for PHP, Python, Go, Node.js, Ruby, Rust, Java; deterministic profiler views are call graph and timeline.
Checked against: blackfire.io, docs.blackfire.io, blackfire.io (2), blackfire.io (3)
Tracing and APM checklist
4 of 10 confirmed in Blackfire's own documentation. The same checklist is used for every tool in Tracing and APM.
- Distributed tracing Not confirmed
- OTLP traces ingest Not confirmed
- Service map Not confirmed
- Auto-instrumentation Yes
- Database query analysis Yes
- Error capture Not confirmed
- Latency and error alerts Yes
- Trace to log correlation Not confirmed
- Sampling controls Not confirmed
- Code-level detail Yes
PHP/Python monitoring plus profiler; site mentions spans and service calls but not multi-service distributed tracing.
Checked against: blackfire.io, docs.blackfire.io, blackfire.io (2)
Alternatives to Blackfire
Other continuous profiling tools. See all 13.
-
Amazon CodeGuru Profiler AWS profiling agent for JVM and Python apps on EC2, ECS, EKS and Lambda that finds the most expensive code paths and suggests fixes. Billed per sampling hour after a 90-day free tier. -
Coroot Open source observability that uses eBPF to build service maps and collect metrics, logs, traces and profiles without code changes, with root-cause hints. -
Elastic Observability Logs, metrics, APM traces and synthetics built on Elasticsearch and Kibana, run yourself or on Elastic Cloud. -
Google Cloud Profiler Google Cloud statistical profiler for Go, Java, Node.js and Python services that samples CPU and heap in production and shows flame graphs in the console. Google lists no charge for it. -
Grafana Pyroscope Continuous profiling database that collects CPU, memory and other profiles from running applications so you can find hot code paths over time. -
OpenTelemetry eBPF Profiler Whole-system eBPF profiling agent donated to OpenTelemetry by Elastic. Profiles native, JVM, Python, Ruby, PHP, Node.js and Go code without instrumentation and exports via OTLP. -
Parca Open source continuous profiler: an eBPF agent samples CPU stacks from every process on a host with no code changes, and the server stores profiles for querying as flame graphs over time. -
Perforator Continuous profiler open sourced by Yandex for large fleets: deploys to Kubernetes, collects low-overhead eBPF profiles cluster-wide, and can feed profile-guided optimization builds. -
Pixie Kubernetes observability that uses eBPF to capture service traffic, metrics and CPU profiles automatically; a CNCF sandbox project. -
Polar Signals Cloud Hosted continuous profiling from the team behind Parca: send eBPF or pprof profiles and compare CPU and memory usage across deployments, priced by samples ingested. -
zymtrace Self-hosted, cluster-wide profiler for AI training and inference fleets: continuous whole-system CPU profiling plus GPU and accelerator profiling for CUDA, ROCm and other chips. - gProfiler Open source system-wide profiler from Intel (built by Granulate) that merges several language profilers into one flame graph per host; a local backend and UI are published separately.