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Ghostty: Pricing, Features & Alternatives

Ghostty tries not to make you choose between speed, features and a native feel. It renders on the GPU (Metal on macOS), uses SwiftUI on macOS and GTK on Linux so it behaves like a real app on each, and supports multi-window, tabs and splits without a multiplexer. The emulation core is published as `libghostty` so other apps can embed it. It is MIT-licensed, free, and sits around 60k GitHub stars within two years of its public release. The trade-off against iTerm2 is fewer knobs, and that is a deliberate choice.

Category

Terminals & CLI Tools

Pricing

Free tier available

Free tier

Yes

Best for

Terminals & CLI Tools — terminal, gpu

Ghostty Pricing Plans (2026)

PlanPrice
FreePopular$0 (MIT)

Pricing summary: Free. Always confirm current pricing on the official site.

Key Ghostty Features

  • GPU-accelerated rendering
  • Native UI on macOS (SwiftUI) and Linux (GTK)
  • Tabs, splits and multi-window
  • Embeddable libghostty core

Pros

  • +Very fast, with low input latency
  • +Feels native on each platform
  • +Sensible defaults with little configuration needed

Cons

  • −Fewer power-user features than iTerm2
  • −No built-in AI
  • −Younger project, so plugins and themes are still growing

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Ghostty FAQ

What is Ghostty used for?⌄

Ghostty is a terminals & cli tools tool. A fast, GPU-accelerated terminal with a fully native UI, from HashiCorp co-founder Mitchell Hashimoto. It is free and MIT-licensed.

Is Ghostty free?⌄

Yes — Ghostty has a free tier you can start with, and paid plans for more usage and features.

How much does Ghostty cost?⌄

Ghostty is free to use.

What are the best Ghostty alternatives?⌄

Popular Ghostty alternatives include iTerm2, Windows Terminal, Warp. Compare pricing and features on our Ghostty alternatives page.

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