# Glitchless vs Micromegas: ready answers versus raw traces for Unreal games

> Glitchless (glitchless.gg) and Micromegas compared for Unreal developers: performance data from players, hitch causes, crashes, analytics, what you have to run, MCP for coding agents and cost, checked October 2026.

Website: https://www.glitchless.gg/glitchless-vs-micromegas.html · The Glitchless team, October 23, 2026 · Checked against Micromegas' docs and GitHub on October 23, 2026

Micromegas is open-source (Apache-2.0) observability for Unreal and Rust: logs, metrics and full CPU traces from game clients in production, in one store you query with SQL. It's built for teams that run their own infrastructure: ingestion services, PostgreSQL and object storage, with no hosted offer.

Glitchless is lighter to start: a hosted free tier or one container. It gives ready answers (each hitch's cause, findings ranked by impact, crashes, funnels, retention, heatmaps, bug reports) across eight engines, and an MCP server for coding agents.

Pick by team and appetite for running servers. Both instrument the same Unreal client, so you'd normally choose one.

## Side by side

| | Glitchless | Micromegas |
| --- | --- | --- |
| **Engines** | | |
| Unreal Engine | 5.7 and 5.8 plugin | Plugin for UE 4.27 and 5.x; its install edits the engine's Core module |
| Unity | 6.3 LTS and later | No |
| Godot | 4.5 and later | No |
| Web games (Three.js, Phaser, Babylon.js, PlayCanvas) | Yes | No |
| Rust and OpenTelemetry sources | No | Yes |
| **Performance and crashes** | | |
| Frame times from players' devices | Every frame, merged across players | Frame and thread times, draw calls, memory |
| Each stutter's likely cause | Shader and PSO compiles, GC, loads, streaming | Full CPU trace of sampled hitching frames, no cause labels |
| Deep per-session traces (every function, memory, GPU passes) | No | Full CPU traces of sampled frames |
| Errors and crashes | With callstacks and the events before | Unreal crashes with stacks on Windows and Linux; UE_LOG |
| **Players** | | |
| Custom events and funnels | Yes | Custom metrics, spans and logs; funnels are your own SQL |
| Retention (D1, D7, D30) | With install mode | No |
| Revenue and purchases | Yes | No |
| Level death heatmaps | Yes | Positions plotted on a 3D model in a notebook |
| In-game bug reports with a screenshot | Yes | No |
| **Agents** | | |
| MCP server for coding agents | 16 tools | No MCP server; a Claude Code skill runs SQL through its CLI |
| Autoplay runs that check a fix | Web games; any build can measure itself | No |
| **Running it** | | |
| Open source | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Self-host | Docker or Node, no other services | Its services plus PostgreSQL and object storage |
| Free hosted tier | 5,000 play sessions a month, 14 days of data | No hosted service |
| Paid hosted plans from | $19 a month | No paid tier; you pay for the infrastructure |

## Which one should you choose?

### Choose Micromegas if

- You're a studio that already runs servers, and you want raw logs, metrics and CPU traces from players' machines in your own store.
- You want to look at the full CPU trace of the exact frame a player hitched, in a flame graph or Perfetto.
- Your team writes SQL and uses Grafana or notebooks, or also instruments Rust services and tools.

### Choose Glitchless if

- You're a small team or a jam team, and you want answers without running PostgreSQL and object storage.
- You want each hitch named (a PSO compile, garbage collection, a load, a streamed level) and problems ranked for you.
- You want the player side too: funnels, retention, revenue, death heatmaps and bug reports with screenshots.
- Your game isn't only Unreal, or your coding agent does the fixing over MCP.

### Choosing between them

Both are open source and self-hostable, and both collect performance data from Unreal players. Micromegas keeps more raw detail and expects you to run it and query it; Glitchless does the reading for you and can be hosted. Running both on one Unreal client would duplicate the instrumentation, so most teams will pick one.

## Frequently asked questions

### Is Micromegas free?

The software is free under Apache-2.0, with no paid tier; you pay for the infrastructure it runs on. Its docs give a reference of about $1,100 a month for around 400 machines with 90 days of data.

### What does installing Micromegas in Unreal involve?

Its install copies its tracing module into the engine's Core module (`Engine/Source/Runtime/Core`), so you need an engine you can change. Glitchless is a normal project plugin.

### Does Micromegas support Unity or Godot?

Not that its docs list: it covers Unreal, Rust (with a Bevy example), a C interface and anything that speaks OpenTelemetry. Glitchless has its own [Unity](https://www.glitchless.gg/unity.md), [Godot](https://www.glitchless.gg/godot.md) and [web](https://www.glitchless.gg/web.md) SDKs.

### Which works with coding agents?

Micromegas ships a Claude Code skill that queries it with SQL through its CLI, and has no MCP server by design. Glitchless has an MCP server with 16 tools.

## Sources

- [Unified observability for Unreal Engine games (Micromegas blog, January 2026)](https://micromegas.info/docs/blog/2026/01/08/unified-observability-for-unreal-engine-games/)
- [Micromegas for Unreal (docs)](https://micromegas.info/docs/unreal/)
- [Micromegas Unreal installation (docs)](https://micromegas.info/docs/unreal/installation/)
- [Micromegas architecture (docs)](https://micromegas.info/docs/architecture/)
- [When to use Micromegas (docs)](https://micromegas.info/docs/when-to-use/)
- [Micromegas and SaaS vendors: cost reference (docs)](https://micromegas.info/docs/when-to-use/saas-vendors/)
- [Micromegas on GitHub](https://github.com/madesroches/micromegas)