Alacritty vs Ghostty
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.
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.
Alacritty
Last 30 days
Last commit
3 days agoRepository age
11 yearsVersion
v0.17.0License
Apache-2.0Repository
alacritty/alacritty
Ghostty
Last 30 days
Last commit
15 hours agoRepository age
5 yearsLicense
MITRepository
ghostty-org/ghostty
Detailed Comparison
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 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.
Community & Popularity
Both Alacritty and Ghostty show comparable community engagement with 66,115 and 63,587 stars respectively. In terms of developer contributions, Ghostty has 3,822 forks, indicating strong developer engagement.
Growth Momentum
Ghostty is growing faster, adding 1,683 stars in the last 30 days (+2.7%) against adding 221 stars for Alacritty (+0.3%). Ghostty is the smaller project of the two, so it is closing the gap rather than extending a lead.
Development Activity
Both projects show recent activity, with Alacritty last updated 3 days ago and Ghostty 15 hours ago.
Technology Stack
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.
Project Maturity
Alacritty has been in development longer, starting 11 years ago, compared to Ghostty which began 5 years ago. This 6.2-year head start suggests Alacritty may have more mature features and established processes.
Licensing
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.
Use Cases & Features
Both tools serve similar use cases in Terminal Emulators.
Capture – Capture screenshots, generate PDFs, scrape content, extract metadata, and automate browsers with one API.