head to head · open source
Warp vs Ghostty
Warp has 65,830 GitHub stars, 5,752 forks, 5,218 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Ghostty has 63,286 stars, 3,827 forks, 251 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Warp leads on adoption by 4% (65,830 vs 63,286 stars). Warp is written in Rust under AGPL-3.0; Ghostty is written in Zig under MIT. Warp has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, Ghostty 6%. Warp was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee.
Two open source projects, one decision. Both are free and self-hostable — the differences are community size, license terms, language stack and release pace.
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Side by side
| Warp | Ghostty | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 66K | ★ 63K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Rust | Zig |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 5.8K | ⑂ 3.8K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Warp if
- You weight community size — 66K stars and counting
- You want the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick Ghostty if
- You want the Ghostty feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Zig
- You evaluated both and Ghostty fits your workflow better
About Warp
Website · Code · Agents · Terminal · Drive · Docs · How Warp Works [!NOTE] OpenAI is the founding sponsor of the new, open source Warp repository, and the new agentic management workflows are powered by GPT models. About Warp is an agentic development environment, born out of the terminal. Use Warp's built in coding agent, or bring your own CLI agent (Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI, and others). Installation You can download Warp and read our docs for platform specific instructions. Warp Contributions Overview Dashboard Explore build.warp.dev to: Watch thousands of Warp Factory agents triage issues, write specs…
About Ghostty
Ghostty Fast, native, feature rich terminal emulator pushing modern features. A native GUI or embeddable library via libghostty . About · Download · Documentation · Contributing · Developing About Ghostty is a terminal emulator that differentiates itself by being fast, feature rich, and native. While there are many excellent terminal emulators available, they all force you to choose between speed, features, or native UIs. Ghostty provides all three. libghostty is a cross platform, zero dependency C and Zig library for building terminal emulators or utilizing terminal functionality (such as style parsing). Anyone…
read the full Ghostty overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Warp or Ghostty more popular?
Warp has 65,830 GitHub stars and Ghostty has 63,286. Warp has the larger community by that measure.
Are Warp and Ghostty free?
Both are open source. Warp is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and Ghostty under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Warp and Ghostty?
Warp is written in Rust and Ghostty in Zig. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, Warp or Ghostty?
Choose Warp if you want the larger community (65,830 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose Ghostty if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.