While I still think YourKit is a better profiler and has a better UX, the ability to start/stop/dump metrics collection on a running system without enabling an agent or adding JVM args is a killer addition to JFR, one that I don't think YourKit will be able to complete with.
There's really no comparison between them is there? Regular profiler has their usage but don't they change the runtime characteristic a lot specially in tight loop and cpu bound situations? The biggest advantage of JFR are two folds running it in production, problems that are hard to reproduce and secondly not getting wrong data because the profile has changed the characteristic, forced de-optimization on the code and such.
Exactly this. FR will allow APM vendors (and individual teams) to build solutions on top of a continuous lightweight, always on profiler. It's actually a bit of a game changer for Java / JVM performance
