head to head · open source
monaco-editor vs ghostty-web
monaco-editor has 46,944 GitHub stars, 4,167 forks, 859 open issues and last shipped yesterday. ghostty-web has 3,011 stars, 195 forks, 59 open issues and last shipped 3 days ago. monaco-editor leads on adoption by 1,459% (46,944 vs 3,011 stars). monaco-editor is written in JavaScript under MIT; ghostty-web is written in TypeScript under MIT. monaco-editor has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, ghostty-web 6%. monaco-editor was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (browser), so they are genuine substitutes rather than adjacent tools.
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
| monaco-editor | ghostty-web | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 47K | ★ 3.0K |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Written in | JavaScript | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-10-31 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.2K | ⑂ 195 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick monaco-editor if
- You weight community size — 47K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches JavaScript
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick ghostty-web if
- You want the ghostty-web feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and ghostty-web fits your workflow better
About monaco-editor
Monaco Editor The Monaco Editor is the fully featured code editor from VS Code. Check out the VS Code docs to see some of the supported features. Try it out Try out the editor and see various examples in our interactive playground. The playground is the best way to learn about how to use the editor, which features is supports, to try out different versions and to create minimal reproducible examples for bug reports. Installing You will get: inside /esm : ESM version of the editor (compatible with e.g. webpack) monaco.d.ts : this specifies the API of the editor (this is what is actually versioned, everything else…
read the full monaco-editor overview →
About ghostty-web
ghostty web Ghostty for the web with xterm.js API compatibility — giving you a proper VT100 implementation in the browser. Migrate from xterm by changing your import: @xterm/xterm → ghostty web WASM compiled parser from Ghostty—the same code that runs the native app Zero runtime dependencies, 400KB WASM bundle Originally created for Mux (a desktop app for isolated, parallel agentic development), but designed to be used anywhere. Try It Live Demo on an ephemeral VM (thank you to Greg from disco.cloud for hosting). On your computer: This starts a loopback only HTTP server with a real shell on The demo protects /ws…
read the full ghostty-web overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is monaco-editor or ghostty-web more popular?
monaco-editor has 46,944 GitHub stars and ghostty-web has 3,011. monaco-editor has the larger community by that measure.
Are monaco-editor and ghostty-web free?
Both are open source. monaco-editor is licensed under MIT and ghostty-web under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between monaco-editor and ghostty-web?
monaco-editor is written in JavaScript and ghostty-web in TypeScript. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, monaco-editor or ghostty-web?
Choose monaco-editor if you want the larger community (46,944 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose ghostty-web if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.