Glances
by Glances · Cross-platform system monitoring in the terminal or a browser
BenchRank score
Screenshots of Glances
Homepage
Overview
Glances is a cross-platform system monitoring tool written in Python. It reports CPU, memory, load, processes, network interfaces, disk I/O, sensors, filesystems and Docker or Podman containers in a curses terminal interface or a built-in web UI. It also exposes an XML-RPC server and a RESTful JSON API, and exports statistics to InfluxDB, Cassandra, StatsD and other backends.
- Best for
- Sysadmins wanting per-host CPU, memory, disk and container stats from a terminal or browser.
- Pricing
- The captured page shows no prices; it only describes installation from PyPI with pip.
Strengths and trade-offs
Strengths
- Runs on GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, OS X and Windows
- XML-RPC server and RESTful JSON API for other clients
- Built-in web UI for monitoring from any device
- Exports to InfluxDB, Cassandra, StatsD, ElasticSearch and more
Trade-offs
- Installed per machine via pip; no hosted or managed option shown
- Minimal pip install omits plugins; needs the glances[all] extra
- Support is community-only: mailing list, chat and Twitter
How Glances markets itself
A structured read of the promise, proof and page design on Glances’s captured homepage.
Homepage capture
“An Eye on your system”
- Angle: Developer-first
- Hero: Typography only
Pricing
Published plans and prices from Glances’s own pricing page.
How this score is made up
Each dimension is scored out of 100 and combined into the headline score using fixed weights.
MCP support
Whether an agent can drive the product through the Model Context Protocol, and how much setup that takes.
API quality
Public API surface: machine-readable spec, official SDKs, documented auth, errors, rate limits and versioning.
Documentation
Publicly reachable docs — coverage, freshness, code samples and machine readability.
Agent friendliness
How readable the site is to an automated client: llms.txt, structured data, server-rendered content, crawler access.
Changelog
A public, dated record of what shipped and when — the clearest signal that a product is still alive.
Marketing site structure
Whether the site answers a buyer's questions: clear positioning, the pages that matter, and accessibility.
Page speed
How fast the site loads for real visitors: Chrome UX Report 75th-percentile LCP, INP and CLS, with a Lighthouse mobile run standing in where a site has too little traffic for field data.
Operational trust
Status page and incident history, security disclosure, compliance and data-processing documentation.
Measured, but not part of the score
Useful to know, but not a mark for or against the product — so these do not affect the ranking.
Openness
Source availability, self-hosting, data export and open standards. Scored and shown, but not part of the composite — paid SaaS is not worse for being paid SaaS.
Maintenance
Release cadence and repository activity. Scored and shown, but not part of the composite — it is only measurable for open repositories.
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Where this comes from
The Glances pages BenchRank reads when it scores the product — its documentation, release notes, status and security pages, and its repository where there is one.
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Is this your product?
Claim Glances to manage its profile. Claiming lets you suggest edits to the descriptive fields — it never changes scores or rankings.