Perfetto
Ranked 4 of 9 profilers by recommenders
Free tool that spares you building your own trace viewer. Critics say it is less seamless than chrome://tracing.
Free tool that spares you building your own trace viewer. Critics say it is less seamless than chrome://tracing.
10 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 8
- criticize it
- 2
- approval share
- 80%
Recommended in 4 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: not recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: not recommended
- March 2026: not recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: not recommended
- June 2026: not recommended
- July 2026: not recommended
- August 2026: not recommended
- September 2026: not recommended
- October 2026: recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 8 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, not met.
- 4 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, met.
- Recommended in 4 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Useful, avoids building your own viewer
“this alone is profoundly useful and I greatly respect the impact they have had towards commoditizing”
Comment from 1 Nov 2025 on Hacker News “building a viewer for your traces is a completely avoidable pain”
Comment from 21 Jan 2026 in “Anthropic's original take home assignment open sourced”
Other profilers people recommend
The four most recommended other profilers, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| perf | 13 | 4 | 76% | 8 | — | Approved |
| Java Flight Recorder | 10 | 0 | 100% | 6 | — | Approved |
| Instruments | 9 | 2 | 82% | 5 | — | — |
| PerfettoThis page | 8 | 2 | 80% | 4 | — | — |
| Python 3.15 sampling profiler | 6 | 1 | 86% | 3 | — | — |
What people said
11 of the 12 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“a excellent modern alternative to gpuvis”
“Pairs nicely with perfetto for the system-level picture.”
“I'm a huge fan of perfetto. It requires some manual steps to get working with Linux, but it's a great tool”
“building a viewer for your traces is a completely avoidable pain”
“made perfetto and similar just big down”
“it doesn't actually work the way I like”
“it's use in the Android organization in Google is ubiquitous”
“fundamentally, for kernel stuff, it uses ftrace under the hood!”
“this alone is profoundly useful and I greatly respect the impact they have had towards commoditizing”
“It sure is pleasing to see perfetto handles long durations well”
“it's not as seamless as it was with chrome://tracing”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.