head to head · open source
effect vs parca
effect has 17,476 GitHub stars, 895 forks, 253 open issues and last shipped yesterday. parca has 5,006 stars, 271 forks, 206 open issues and last shipped yesterday. effect leads on adoption by 249% (17,476 vs 5,006 stars). effect is written in TypeScript under MIT; parca is written in TypeScript under Apache-2.0. effect has attracted 5% as many forks as stars, parca 5%. effect was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (javascript, observability), so they are genuine substitutes rather than adjacent tools.
Two open source projects, one decision. Both are free and self-hostable — the differences are community size, license terms, language stack and release pace.
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Side by side
| effect | parca | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 17K | ★ 5.0K |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-11-04 | 2026-11-04 |
| Forks | ⑂ 895 | ⑂ 271 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick effect if
- You weight community size — 17K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick parca if
- You want the parca feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and parca fits your workflow better
About effect
Effect Effect is a library for building robust, maintainable, type safe, and production grade applications in TypeScript. It helps you handle the hard problems at scale: typed errors, dependency injection, structured concurrency, scheduling, tracing, and unified schema validation. Effect V4 is currently a release candidate. The main branch contains v4 development. Install V4 RC Requirements TypeScript 5.9 or newer. TypeScript 7 is recommended for the best performance and compatibility with Effect's TypeScript tooling. Node.js 18 or newer is the general minimum for running Effect on Node.js. Some integration…
read the full effect overview →
About parca
Continuous profiling for analysis of CPU, memory usage over time, and down to the line number. Saving infrastructure cost, improving performance, and increasing reliability. Features eBPF Profiler : A single profiler, using eBPF, automatically discovering targets from Kubernetes or systemd across the entire infrastructure with very low overhead. Supports C, C++, Rust, Go, and more! Open Standards : Both producing pprof formatted profiles with the eBPF based profiler, and ingesting any pprof formatted profiles allowing for wide language adoption and interoperability with existing tooling. Optimized Storage &…
read the full parca overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is effect or parca more popular?
effect has 17,476 GitHub stars and parca has 5,006. effect has the larger community by that measure.
Are effect and parca free?
Both are open source. effect is licensed under MIT and parca under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between effect and parca?
effect is written in TypeScript and parca in TypeScript. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, effect or parca?
Choose effect if you want the larger community (17,476 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose parca if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.