iterm2 vs ghostty, compared

Both are free, open source, actively maintained, and excellent. The real difference is temperament: iTerm2 is twenty years of features built into the terminal itself, and Ghostty is a deliberately lean, very fast pane of glass that expects the features to live in your shell and your tools. Pick iTerm2 if you use tmux integration, triggers, or session restore. Pick Ghostty if you want speed, a text config you can version, or Linux. And if the reason you are shopping for a terminal is that AI agent sessions are piling up, neither one solves that; more on that at the end.

at a glance

Versions and dates from iterm2.com/downloads and ghostty.org release notes on August 15, 2026.

what iterm2 gives you

iTerm2 is the feature-complete option, and it is still moving: 3.6.11 shipped June 2, 2026, and the repository had commits within days of this page being checked. It is one maintainer's long-running project, GPL-2.0, macOS only. The features that keep people on it are the ones Ghostty deliberately does not have:

• tmux integration. tmux -CC control mode turns tmux windows into native macOS windows and tabs, no prefix key. If you live in tmux on remote machines, this alone can decide the comparison.
• Session restore and Instant Replay. Window arrangements survive restarts, and Instant Replay can recover text that was already erased from the screen.
• Triggers. Regex patterns on terminal output that fire actions: highlight, notify, run a command. There is no equivalent in Ghostty.
• Shell integration. Command history, directory tracking, and automatic profile switching by hostname, user, or directory.
• A password manager with keychain encryption and 1Password integration.
• GUI settings. Everything is in a Settings window, with profiles, and dynamic profiles in JSON when you need hundreds of them.

The cost of all this is surface area. iTerm2's own documentation is candid about the tradeoffs: unlimited scrollback can consume all available memory, the Metal renderer uses more energy and conflicts with transparency, and ligatures force a fall back to slower CPU rendering. None of these are dealbreakers. They are the price of a terminal that does this much, and the docs let you tune every one of them.

what ghostty gives you

Ghostty is Mitchell Hashimoto's post-HashiCorp project, MIT licensed, at roughly 59,700 GitHub stars with around 635 contributors and daily commits. Version 1.0 shipped December 2024, so it is young, but the release cadence is steady: 1.2.0 in September 2025, 1.3.0 in March 2026. What it optimizes for:

• Speed with a native feel. GPU rendering (Metal on macOS, OpenGL on Linux) inside a genuinely native app: Swift with AppKit and SwiftUI on macOS, GTK4 on Linux. Tabs and splits are system UI, not a custom toolkit.
• Zero config that still works. It ships good defaults, embedded fonts, and hundreds of built-in themes with automatic light/dark switching. When you do configure it, it is one plain text file you can put in dotfiles. There is no settings GUI yet; the docs say one is planned.
• Modern terminal protocols. Kitty graphics for in-terminal images, synchronized rendering, progress bars, and with 1.2.0 a command palette and opt-in SSH integration.
• Linux. The same terminal on your Mac and your Linux box. iTerm2 will never be that. Windows is not available yet; as of April 2026 the maintainers describe Windows GUI work as possible late 2026, explicitly not a commitment.

The lean philosophy has real gaps, and you should know which ones are recent fixes. Scrollback search only arrived in 1.3.0, in March 2026; before that, searching your own terminal output meant piping to another tool. There is still no tmux-style session persistence: closing a window ends the session, with only macOS window-state restore and an undo-close timeout as recovery. If those absences read as clean design to you, Ghostty will feel right. If they read as missing features, that is your answer too.

speed, and whose numbers say so

Ghostty's README claims it and Alacritty are usually within a few percentage points of each other and something like 100x faster than Terminal.app and iTerm2 on various benchmarks. That is Ghostty's own claim about its own benchmarks, so treat it accordingly; the project's about page is more careful and just aims for the same class as the fastest emulators. What is fair to say: Ghostty is built around rendering speed, iTerm2 is built around features with an optional Metal renderer, and for most day-to-day work either is fast enough that you will stop noticing. If you regularly dump megabytes of build output or logs to the screen, Ghostty's headroom is real.

the ai question

Since a lot of terminal time in 2026 is spent running agents like Claude Code or Codex, it is worth knowing where each project stands.

iTerm2 has built-in AI features and learned a hard lesson shipping them. Version 3.5 in 2024 included ChatGPT integration in the core app; after the reaction, 3.5.1 moved all AI-provider code into a plugin you must download separately, made it opt-in behind an admin-protected setting, and added enterprise kill switches. Today the AI plugin is a separate download, keys live in the system keychain, and 3.6.0 added an AI chat that can act on the terminal with your permission. If you never install the plugin, no terminal data can leave over the network through those features.

Ghostty ships no AI features. Its relevance to agent work is quieter: fast rendering under heavy streaming output, and the 1.3.0 release notes list a fix for a significant memory leak that affected long Claude Code sessions. Both terminals run CLI agents perfectly well, because to a terminal an agent is just another process printing text. That is also the limitation, which brings us to the last section.

how to choose

• You use tmux -CC, triggers, session restore, or a password manager in the terminal: iTerm2.
• You want the fastest rendering and a native app on macOS and Linux: Ghostty.
• You want settings in a GUI: iTerm2. You want config in a dotfile: Ghostty.
• You are on Windows: neither. Ghostty's Windows build does not exist yet, and iTerm2 is macOS only.
• You cannot decide: both are free. Install both, use each for a week, keep the one you stopped thinking about.

when neither is the right tool

Disclosures first: crystl is our product, it is macOS only, it is closed source, and while the free tier covers a lot, the orchestration features cost $170 a year. iTerm2 and Ghostty are free and open source and, if you are choosing a general-purpose terminal, this page's answer is above and it does not include crystl.

But some people land on this comparison for a different reason: the terminal they have stopped scaling once they started running several AI agent sessions a day. That is not an iTerm2-vs-Ghostty problem. Both treat every session as the same untyped stream of text, so neither can tell you which of your six sessions is blocked on an approval, which finished twenty minutes ago, or which has been sitting on a question for an hour. Approval prompts scroll past inline. Two agents in one working directory will overwrite each other unless you wire up git worktrees yourself. Close a tab and the conversation is gone.

crystl is built for exactly that gap: every session's state visible at once, approval prompts as floating panels instead of scrolled-past text, each agent in its own git worktree, and conversation history that survives a reboot. It runs the agent subscription you already pay for, locally. If that is your actual problem, the iTerm2 vs crystl write-up covers what changes in detail. If it is not, pick between the two excellent free terminals above and move on.

further reading

• Claude Code in iTerm2 vs. crystl
• Warp vs Ghostty compared
• tmux vs git worktrees for running multiple agents
• The best UI for Claude Code, compared
• Git worktrees with Claude Code
• Running multiple Claude Code instances