What is the difference between traceroute and mtr?

Question

I was working with someone on a project and I noticed they were using mtr (My Trace Route) instead of traceroute, is there some advantage to this? Why would they use that other tool instead?

Answer 1

Since this is Ubuntu-oriented site I have made a comparison of similar tools available on this distribution.

From their respective MAN pages:

Traceroute

traceroute tracks the route packets taken from an IP network on their way to a given host.

Example Output (trimmed):

$ traceroute 1.1.1.1
traceroute to 1.1.1.1 (1.1.1.1), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets
 1  192.168.1.1 (192.168.1.1)  0.265 ms  0.248 ms  0.239 ms
 2  * * *
 3  X-X-X-X.X.X.pl (X.X.X.X)  21.871 ms  22.061 ms  25.072 ms
 (more data here)
 10  one.one.one.one (1.1.1.1)  24.072 ms  22.439 ms  21.497 ms

MTR

mtr combines the functionality of the traceroute and ping programs in a single network diagnostic tool.

In short MTR does traceroute continuously and presents it in nice formatted table.

Example output:

$ mtr 1.1.1.1 -c 5 --report
Start: 2019-08-09T15:13:28+0200
HOST: blackhole                   Loss%   Snt   Last   Avg  Best  Wrst StDev
  1.|-- 192.168.1.1                0.0%     5    0.2   0.1   0.1   0.2   0.0
  2.|-- X-X-X-X.X.X                0.0%     5    9.7   9.0   8.4   9.7   0.5
  3.|-- X-X-X-X.X.X                0.0%     5    9.6   8.6   6.2   9.8   1.5
  (more data here)
  10.|-- one.one.one.one            0.0%     5   12.8  13.4  10.7  18.9   3.3