Learn how Alacritty and Ghostty differ in their key features, development activity, technology stack and community adoption, so you can decide which of these terminal emulators is best for you.

Both Alacritty and Ghostty have their unique strengths and serve similar purposes effectively. Consider your specific needs regarding popularity, growth, activity, technology, maturity, licensing and features when making your decision.
Both Alacritty and Ghostty show comparable community engagement with 65,383 and 59,679 stars respectively. In terms of developer contributions, Alacritty has 3,561 forks, indicating strong developer engagement.
Ghostty is growing faster, adding 1,411 stars in the last 30 days (+2.4%) against adding 453 stars for Alacritty (+0.7%). Ghostty is the smaller project of the two, so it is closing the gap rather than extending a lead.
Both projects show recent activity, with Alacritty last updated 13 days ago and Ghostty 8 hours ago.
Both tools share common technology foundations, being built with Bash, GLSL. However, they differ in their additional technology choices: Alacritty uses Rust while Ghostty leverages CSS, Python, C, Objective-C, Swift, C++, MATLAB, Zig.
Alacritty has been in development longer, starting 10 years ago, compared to Ghostty which began 4 years ago. This 6.2-year head start suggests Alacritty may have more mature features and established processes.
Ghostty uses the MIT license, which is more permissive than Alacritty's Apache-2.0 license, potentially offering greater flexibility for commercial use and integration.
Both tools serve similar use cases in Terminal Emulators.

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