What is Pyroscope used for?

Pyroscope is a continuous profiling platform that shows where applications spend CPU, memory and I/O, down to individual lines of code. It is a good fit for finding CPU hot spots in production, reducing memory and resource costs, and debugging performance incidents.

Is Pyroscope open source?

Yes. Pyroscope is open source under the AGPL-3.0 licence. Its source code is on GitHub at grafana/pyroscope and is written mainly in Go.

Yes. Pyroscope is open source, so the software itself is free to use.

Can I self-host Pyroscope?

Yes. Pyroscope can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure.

What is Pyroscope an alternative to?

Pyroscope is an open-source alternative to Datadog and Blackfire. Other open-source alternatives to Datadog include SigNoz, Coroot and Grafana Loki.

Is Pyroscope actively maintained?

Yes. The most recent commit to Pyroscope was on 2 October 2026, and the latest release is v2.3.1, published on 8 September 2026. The project has 12k stars on GitHub.

Pyroscope: open-source alternative to Datadog, Blackfire

About Pyroscope

This entry covers Grafana Pyroscope, an open-source continuous profiling platform. It collects profiles from running applications to show where CPU, memory and I/O are being used, helping teams find performance bottlenecks and cut resource consumption, either proactively or while resolving an incident with line-level detail.

Pyroscope has three main parts: a server that stores profiling data and serves queries, clients and instrumentation that send data using the Pyroscope SDKs, Grafana Alloy, or OTLP data from OpenTelemetry sources like the eBPF profiler, and Grafana Profiles Drilldown, a queryless interface for visualizing and analyzing profiles. SDKs exist for several languages, including Go, Ruby and Python.

Pyroscope 2.0 makes a new architecture the default, in which profiles go directly to object storage, so in-memory ingesters and local disks are no longer required, which simplifies operations. Existing v1 deployments can opt in and migrate without data loss. Pyroscope is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and written in Go.

Key features

Continuous profiling of CPU, memory and I/O
Line-level performance insights
SDKs for pushing profiles from applications
Grafana Alloy and OTLP ingestion
Queryless Profiles Drilldown interface
Profiles stored directly in object storage

Good fit for

→Finding CPU hot spots in production
→Reducing memory and resource costs
→Debugging performance incidents

Built with: Go; Ruby; Python
Tags: continuous-profiling; profiling; performance; observability; grafana; golang; monitoring; opentelemetry

Pyroscope: questions and answers

What is Pyroscope used for?: Pyroscope is a continuous profiling platform that shows where applications spend CPU, memory and I/O, down to individual lines of code. It is a good fit for finding CPU hot spots in production, reducing memory and resource costs, and debugging performance incidents.
Is Pyroscope open source?: Yes. Pyroscope is open source under the AGPL-3.0 licence. Its source code is on GitHub at grafana/pyroscope and is written mainly in Go.
Is Pyroscope free?: Yes. Pyroscope is open source, so the software itself is free to use.
Can I self-host Pyroscope?: Yes. Pyroscope can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure.
What is Pyroscope an alternative to?: Pyroscope is an open-source alternative to Datadog and Blackfire. Other open-source alternatives to Datadog include SigNoz, Coroot and Grafana Loki.
Is Pyroscope actively maintained?: Yes. The most recent commit to Pyroscope was on 2 October 2026, and the latest release is v2.3.1, published on 8 September 2026. The project has 12k stars on GitHub.