The best system monitors, according to hackers
8 system monitors recommended in Hacker News comments over the past year, ranked by how many separate people recommend each one.
- Most recommendedbtop38 people recommend it
- Least regretStats menu bar system monitor10 recommend, 1 criticize
All system monitors
- btopA colorful terminal resource monitor that shows CPU, memory, GPU and IO in one screen with good defaults. Critics say it needs recent compilers and changes config files on use.38recommend
- htopFree terminal process viewer that gives a clear overview of resource usage and works well over SSH on servers and desktops.28recommend
- UtilyzeOpen source GPU monitoring tool that reports compute and memory throughput against hardware limits, helping spot bottlenecks. Caveat: it does not support AMD GPUs.11recommend
- Stats menu bar system monitorPeople recommend Stats as a free, open source menu bar app for watching CPU, power and system activity on a Mac.10recommend
- nvidia-smiRecommended for checking VRAM use, hardware decode and power limits on NVIDIA GPUs, with the caveat that utilization can read 100% while the GPU is underused.5recommend
- Activity Monitor for macOSBuilt-in macOS tool for seeing which processes are busy, and some keep it in the Dock. Critics say it shows limited information and its window cannot shrink much.5recommend
- iStat MenusMac menu bar app showing live CPU, power and system stats, useful for watching battery use. Some critics find it slow to start and prefer alternatives.5recommend
- topBuilt-in Unix tool that shows a live, updating list of the processes using the most CPU and memory. Critics say it can miss short latency spikes and its display is information-heavy.5recommend