Slowpoke vs Laravel Pulse
Pulse is free, first-party, and takes about five minutes to add. Everybody with a Laravel app should probably have it. It is also a live wall for a single application, and it will not give you a backlog to plan from.
The short answer
Which one you should pick
These are not really rivals, and both are free. Each one does a different job, and most teams want both.
Choose Laravel Pulse if
You want a live view, in five minutes, for free
- You want to glance at what is slow right now inside one Laravel app.
- You want slow queries, slow jobs, slow outgoing requests and server load on one local route.
- You do not want to run any extra infrastructure at all.
- You are happy writing custom Pulse cards for anything else you need.
Choose Slowpoke if
You need history, priority and something that closes
- You need to know whether last month was better than this one, not only what is happening now.
- You need one ordered list across the app, the database server, the machines and the queues.
- You want EXPLAIN plans with the index to add, not just the slow statement.
- You need a page you can send to a CEO, with effort, return per hour and delivery health.
- You need the fix to be verified by the measurement rather than by someone ticking a box.
Side by side
Slowpoke and Laravel Pulse, line by line
Written to be fair, including where Laravel Pulse is the better tool. If a row here is wrong or out of date, that is a bug: open an issue and it gets corrected.
| Aspect | Slowpoke | Laravel Pulse |
|---|---|---|
| Price | €0, self-hosted | €0, first party |
| Effort to install | One command per machine, about 15 minutes | A composer install |
| What it shows | History, trends and an ordered backlog | A live wall of the recent window |
| Scope | App, database server, machines, caches, queues, schedules | One Laravel application |
| Prioritised by cost | Seconds of waiting per day, deduplicated | Slowest first, per card |
| Query plans with a fix | Real EXPLAIN, twelve named diagnoses | No |
| Code origin of a query | File and line | Available for some cards |
| Multiple applications | Any number, any language, one scale | One app per dashboard |
| Deploy verdicts and regressions | Every deploy judged; bosses from regressions | No |
| Report for non-engineers | Effort, return per hour, budget, DORA | No |
| Work that verifies itself | Missions closed by measurement | No |
| Storage cost in your app's database | None: a separate server | Writes to your database |
A wall tells you about now. A backlog tells you about the quarter.
Pulse is designed to be glanced at. It samples recent activity and shows you the slowest queries, jobs and requests in the current window, which is genuinely useful when something is happening.
The question a new technical lead has to answer is a different one: over the last thirty days, where has the time actually gone, is it getting better or worse, and what is the single change with the best return? That needs retained history, a stable fingerprint for each statement, and a cost model: duration multiplied by frequency, divided by the period genuinely observed. That is what Slowpoke keeps, on a separate server, so it does not write to the database it is watching.
Everything, not just the application
Pulse lives inside your Laravel app, so its view stops where the app stops. Slowpoke's agent sits on the machine and reads the access log, the php-fpm slow log, the MySQL or PostgreSQL statistics with real plans, Redis, /proc, queued jobs and scheduled commands. It does the same on the database server and the queue box.
It also draws what is there. slowpoke-agent detect reads the machine and reports the nginx server blocks, the PHP-FPM pools, the databases and the applications with their framework, then says which of them it cannot read yet and gives you the lines that fix it. For someone who did not build the system, that is often worth more than the metrics.
Then somebody has to do the work
Both tools can tell you a query is slow. Neither of them gets a pull request opened.
Slowpoke turns the expensive items into missions with an owner, an effort estimate and a finish line, and will not close one until the measured cost has stayed down for three windows. A deploy that makes something twice as slow becomes a boss linked to that commit, with a deadline. The team gets a speed index out of 100 that moves when they fix things. And the mission is readable over MCP, so Claude Code, Cursor or Copilot can pick it up with the query, the plan, the file and the line already in hand.
Can you run both?
Yes, and it is a good combination that costs nothing. Keep Pulse as the live wall on the app, and let Slowpoke keep the history, the priority and the work. They read different things and neither sits in your request path.
FAQ
Slowpoke and Pulse, asked plainly
Should I use Pulse or Slowpoke?
What about Laravel Telescope?
Does Slowpoke write to my application's database?
Do I need the Laravel package to use Slowpoke?
Find out what you inherited
Give it fifteen minutes on one server and the first number is yours. Finding out costs nothing.