Software Alternatives & Reviews

Process Explorer VS Process Monitor

Compare Process Explorer VS Process Monitor 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…

Process Monitor logo Process Monitor

Monitor file system, Registry, process, thread and DLL activity in real-time.
  • Process Explorer Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-09-21
  • Process Monitor Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-03

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?

Process Monitor videos

Process Monitor, powerful tool to troubleshoot applications and Windows.

More videos:

  • Review - Process Monitor: Basic Operation
  • Review - Malware Analysis - Tools - Process Monitor Basic

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Process Explorer and Process Monitor)
Monitoring Tools
65 65%
35% 35
Command Line Tools
65 65%
35% 35
Performance Monitoring
59 59%
41% 41
Utilities
100 100%
0% 0

User comments

Share your experience with using Process Explorer and Process Monitor. For example, how are they different and which one is better?
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Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Process Explorer should be more popular than Process Monitor. It has been mentiond 287 times since March 2021. 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 / 10 days 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: 5 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: 5 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: 5 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: 10 months ago
View more

Process Monitor mentions (182)

  • DLLs in Rust🦀
    To be sure that our exe is actually looking for the DLL, fire up the SysInternals' Process Monitor. - Source: dev.to / 6 months ago
  • can't get PTAT to run on RPL-U i7-1365URE eval board
    Don't know what PTAT stands for, but whenever I have issues with windows software running properly I pull out Process Monitor to log what that program was doing at the time of the error message. Sometimes there is a clue such as not being able to find a particular file, or registry key, or something else crashing etc. Source: 10 months ago
  • Software developer looking to experiment with SCCM
    This might be a bit advanced but if it was me I would probably get frustrated and use SysInternals specifically procmon Https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/procmon. Source: 10 months ago
  • Browsers that are resource efficient?
    Used Procmon, Diskmon with a mix of CrystalDiskinfo in my testings to kinda figure out the browsers that did a lot of writing and reading to my old SSD in a ancient laptop I have. You can pretty much get estimates of the ones that use too much Disk resources. Source: 10 months ago
  • Windows Registry
    You can use something like Process Monitor (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/procmon) to see what processes are interacting with which registry keys. Source: 10 months ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Process Explorer and Process Monitor, 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.

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

Windows Task Manager - Need assistance with your Microsoft product? Find helpful articles for Windows, Office, Microsoft Account, Microsoft Store, Xbox, and more.

SystemExplorer - Homepage of System Explorer. Freeware Tool for displaying and managing system internals

Process Lasso - Process Lasso is NOT yet another task manager.

glances system monitoring - Glances is a cross-platform system monitoring tool written in Python. Written in Python, Glances will run on almost any plaftorm : GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, OS X and Windows.