Blackfire.io vs TraceView: What are the differences?

Developers describe Blackfire.io as "Blackfire Profiler automatically instruments your code to gather data about consumed server resources like memory, CPU time, and I/O". Blackfire achieves a new level of accuracy by aggregating several profile samples and getting rid of non relevant data. Get even deeper and review the interactions with your entire stack (SQL database engines, cache servers, ...). On the other hand, TraceView is detailed as "Ridiculously Detailed Application Monitoring". Expose everything, from the webserver to database, cache and API calls. The core technology is based on X-Trace, a distributed tracing framework that’s served as the inspiration for companies like Google and Twitter.

Blackfire.io and TraceView can be categorized as "Performance Monitoring" tools.

Some of the features offered by Blackfire.io are:

• Profile a page at a mouse click thanks to the Blackfire web browser extension
• Browse through the function calls and identify performance bottlenecks thanks to the Blackfire intuitive UI
• Because Blackfire is only triggered when you profile a request, there is no overhead for other requests

On the other hand, TraceView provides the following key features:

• Track every machine involved in a transaction and identify bottlenecks in a single click.
• Isolate interesting calls and drill down to the line of code and machine it ran on.
• Tie together code and infrastructure metrics with database, service, and cache calls, all in the context of a single transaction.

"Deep insights into PHP request cycle" is the top reason why over 4 developers like Blackfire.io, while over 2 developers mention "The heatmap helped me isolate DB related issues" as the leading cause for choosing TraceView.