Best Open Source Alternatives to Terminal

Compare the best free and open-source alternatives to Terminal — self-hosted and desktop replacements you fully control, ranked by GitHub stars, license and platform support.

Curated by open-source.store · Updated November 2026 · 3 alternatives

Terminal

Proprietary SaaS

Terminal alternatives compared

Open-source alternatives to Terminal, compared by stars, license and platform
Tool		License	Platforms	Self-hosted
Ghostty	63,387	MIT		No	Nov 2026	Visit
WaveTerm	22,643	Apache-2.0	LinuxmacOSWindows	No	Nov 2026	Visit
iTerm 2	18,248	GPL-2.0		No	Nov 2026	Visit

Top open-source Terminal alternatives

Ghostty63,387MIT

Ghostty is a GPU-accelerated terminal emulator replacing Warp and Terminal with native desktop UI, multithreaded Zig rendering, and standard Unix pipes.

vs Terminal: a free, open-source option you fully control, licensed MIT.

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Edgar Sipki

Go & gRPC engineer · founder of EasyP

Promoted

Mentoring for backend developers. Consulting for startups.

Go, gRPC and Protobuf done right, LLM agents in production, and the hard parts of shipping a first product.

GogRPCProtobufLLM agents

sipki.online

Speaker at HighLoad++, GolangConf, AI Conf, DevOpsConf
Helped launch 7+ startups
Maintainer of EasyP, the open-source Protobuf toolkit

WaveTerm22,643Apache-2.0

WaveTerm is an open-source terminal workspace replacing Warp with durable SSH sessions, inline file previews, and local AI support without user accounts.

LinuxmacOSWindows

vs Terminal: a free, open-source option you fully control, licensed Apache-2.0.

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iTerm 218,248GPL-2.0

iTerm 2 is an open-source macOS terminal emulator replacing Warp and Apple Terminal with native tmux integration, Python scripting, and shell hooks.

vs Terminal: a free, open-source option you fully control, licensed GPL-2.0.

Visit Details