# Instruments

9 Hacker News commenters recommended Instruments and 2 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 5 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** Apple's free performance profiler bundled with Xcode, praised for finding bottlenecks and for its UI; critics note its trace format is proprietary.

## Why people recommend it

- Excellent UI for its tools (2 comments): "their UI is almost always the best for actually finding what the problem is" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45780986)) "Instruments has exceptionally good UI for its tools" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46935191))
- Good at finding performance bottlenecks (2 comments): "Instruments 26 has been nice for finding performance bottlenecks" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47843447)) "Apple Instruments is so good at what it does" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45781229))
- Generally praised as very good (2 comments): "Instruments is quite great though" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45943840)) "That app is incredibly good" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46842410))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [perf](https://hackerapproved.com/p/perf.md): 13 recommend
- [Java Flight Recorder](https://hackerapproved.com/p/java-flight-recorder.md): 10 recommend
- [Perfetto](https://hackerapproved.com/p/perfetto.md): 8 recommend
- [Python 3.15 sampling profiler](https://hackerapproved.com/p/python-3-15-sampling-profiler.md): 6 recommend
- [Heaptrack](https://hackerapproved.com/p/heaptrack.md): 5 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Instruments", https://hackerapproved.com/p/instruments/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).