Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Process Explorer VS FSMonitor

Compare Process Explorer VS FSMonitor and see what are their differences

Process Explorer logo Process Explorer

The top window always shows a list of the currently active processes, including the names of their owning accounts, whereas the information displayed in the bottom window depends on the mode that Process Explorer is in: if it is in handle mode you'l…

FSMonitor logo FSMonitor

FSMonitor is a macOS app that monitors all changes in the file system, including file creation...
  • Process Explorer Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-09-21
  • FSMonitor Landing page
    Landing page //
    2021-08-02

Process Explorer videos

Sysinternals Process Explorer Review + download link and method

More videos:

  • Review - Scan for Malware Using Process Explorer and Virus Total
  • Review - What Is?: Process Explorer?

FSMonitor videos

No FSMonitor videos yet. You could help us improve this page by suggesting one.

+ Add video

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Process Explorer and FSMonitor)
Monitoring Tools
98 98%
2% 2
Note Taking
0 0%
100% 100
Command Line Tools
100 100%
0% 0
Computer Monitoring Software

User comments

Share your experience with using Process Explorer and FSMonitor. For example, how are they different and which one is better?
Log in or Post with

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Process Explorer seems to be a lot more popular than FSMonitor. While we know about 287 links to Process Explorer, we've tracked only 6 mentions of FSMonitor. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Process Explorer mentions (287)

  • Hidden dependencies in Linux binaries.
    On windows, this is Dependency Walker versus ProcExp. Similar eye-goggling results. https://www.dependencywalker.com/ https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/process-explorer. - Source: Hacker News / about 2 months ago
  • Windows Explorer and Desktop Window Manager high RAM usage
    If you run Process Explorer (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/process-explorer) and enable process tree view, you can see what processes are running under explorer.exe. That should give you a better idea of what's consuming that memory if you're genuinely concerned about this. Source: 6 months ago
  • Roblox doesn't launch for months on PC
    If you have any suspicious processes running onto your computer, close them IMMEDIATELY. I suggest using Process Explorer, as it has a Virustotal which submits all Executables to virustotal under 70+ antiviruses. If any of the processes have 3+ detections, Close them down as anticheats will detect it and stop you from running Roblox. Source: 6 months ago
  • skype is using 20/30% of my CPU all the time even when its on the idle mode.
    If it is the former you can try Process Explorer and set the priority lower (to like 6 or even 4) and see what happens. You can also set the processor affinity with it to limit Skype to only use certain cores. Source: 6 months ago
  • Ways To Check VRAM Usage Per App? Something Is Eating 24Gb VRAM.
    Use process explorer. Download from https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/process-explorer. Source: 11 months ago
View more

FSMonitor mentions (6)

  • Mac Power Users 690: Better Touch Tool with Andreas Hegenberg
    Links and Show Notes:More Power Users: Ad-free episodes with regular bonus segmentsSubmit Feedbackfolivora.ai - Great Tools for your Mac!iPhone Praktikum 2009GitHub - quicklywilliam/multiclutch: Customization App for Macbooks with MultiTouch supportHopperFSMonitorProxyman · Native, Modern Web Debugging Proxy · Inspect network traffic from Mac, iOS, Android devices with easeCharles Web Debugging Proxy • HTTP... Source: about 1 year ago
  • Sloth – A Mac app that shows all open files, directories, sockets, etc.
    FSMonitor[0] is similar to the old FileMon[1] but for macOS. In the default tree view, as new data is written, the entries are highlighted and sort of throb, so it's easy to track what's going on. [0] https://fsmonitor.com/ [1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/filemon. - Source: Hacker News / over 1 year ago
  • App wants to make changes
    They're hard to find these days for later versions of macOS, but you could try a file monitor so you can see what files the app is making changes to. You could try the free trial of FSMonitor. I'm just not sure how much you can do with the free trial though. Or look on GitHub to see if someone has scripted something similar. Source: over 1 year ago
  • An app to find out which app created a file/folder?
    Maybe FSMonitor can help if you set it to watch the parent folder. Source: over 2 years ago
  • The orange dot appears while on the lock screen but goes away right after I login. Does this happen for anyone else? I'm starting to think that a hidden process is using the microphone
    You can use something like FSMonitor to watch/analyze which files are being touched while the orange dot is on. Source: over 2 years ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Process Explorer and FSMonitor, you can also consider the following products

htop - htop - an interactive process viewer for Unix. This is htop, an interactive process viewer for Unix systems. It is a text-mode application (for console or X terminals) and requires ncurses. Latest release: htop 2.

Directory Monitor - Monitor and detect who is making changes to your directories and network shares in real-time.

Process Monitor - Monitor file system, Registry, process, thread and DLL activity in real-time.

FolderChangesView - FolderChangesView is a simple tool that monitors the folder or disk drive that you choose and lists every filename that is being modified, created, or deleted while the folder is being monitored

Autoruns - See what programs are configured to startup automatically when your system boots and you login.

Folder Monitor - FolderMonitor helps you monitor what happens in a folder.