What are the differences between JVisualVM and Java Mission Control?

Solution 1:

One important point is that Mission Control is potentially not free to use on production environments. It is free for applications running in DEV & QA and Oracle are not currently enforcing the charges for production applications (as of Nov 2014). However, their executives have made it clear this may change in time.

Solution 2:

The JMX Console part of Java Mission Control is just like any other JMX console. I'm of course biased, but in my opinion it's one of the more feature rich consoles available. The more unique part of JMC is the Java Flight Recorder part.

JMC is targeting production systems, and is very careful to avoid introducing unnecessary overhead. With the Java Flight Recorder you can do production time profiling and diagnostics with an almost unmeasurable overhead.