Best Terminal Emulators for Startups
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Compare the Top Terminal Emulators for Startups as of July 2025
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What are Terminal Emulators for Startups?
Terminal emulators are software programs that replicate the functionality of a traditional terminal or command-line interface (CLI) within a graphical environment. These tools allow users to interact with their computer's operating system using text-based commands, offering access to system functions, file management, and programming tasks. Terminal emulators are commonly used by developers, system administrators, and power users for running scripts, managing servers, or debugging applications. They often support features such as tabbed windows, color schemes, customizable key bindings, and integration with remote systems through protocols like SSH. By providing a flexible and efficient way to work with the command line, terminal emulators enhance productivity in both local and remote computing environments. Compare and read user reviews of the best Terminal Emulators for Startups currently available using the table below. This list is updated regularly.
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1
ZOC
EmTec
ZOC is professional terminal emulation software for Windows and macOS. Its impressive list of emulations and powerful features makes it a reliable and elegant tool that connects you to hosts and mainframes via secure shell, telnet, serial cable, and other methods of communication. With its modern user interface, this terminal has many ways of making your life easier. In its own way, ZOC is the Swiss army knife of terminal emulators, versatile, robust, and proven. Tabbed sessions with thumbnails, address book with folders and color-coded hosts, highly customizable to meet your preferences and needs, scripting language with over 200 commands, compatible with Windows 10/11 and macOS 12 Monterey, and administrator friendly (deployment, configuration). Extensive logging, full keyboard remapping, scrollback. User-defined buttons, automatic actions, macro recorder. Emulations are xterm, VT220, TN3270, TN5250, Wyse, QNX.Starting Price: $79.99 one-time payment -
2
Commander One
Electronic Team, Inc.
Commander One is the all-in-one file dual-panel file management application for Mac. It fully supports Mac M1 and M2 silicon and comes with a great interface that’s easy to maneuver and productivity-driven. The app is packed with features designed to increase the speed and ease of working with files. The ability to customize hotkeys, select specific files, show hidden files and view the entire work history and favorite files makes it amazing for those working with a lot of content. Moreover, Commander One also comes with an operation queue section, where users can see all of their files being processed, full support for archives, and a built-in viewer for text files of all kinds. Users can also choose to encrypt their files, with the super secure encryption feature that is built in and easy to set up. Power users can use the terminal emulator which also comes with the application to set up specific tasks and have full control over their workflow.Starting Price: $29.99 -
3
iTerm2
iTerm2
iTerm2 is a replacement for Terminal and the successor to iTerm. It works on Macs with macOS 10.14 or newer. iTerm2 brings the terminal into the modern age with features you never knew you always wanted. iTerm2 has a lot of features. Every conceivable desire a terminal user might have has been foreseen and solved. And these are just the main attractions! Divide a tab up into multiple panes, each one showing a different session. You can slice vertically and horizontally and create any number of panes in any imaginable arrangement. Register a hotkey that brings iTerm2 to the foreground when you're in another application. A terminal is always a keypress away. You can choose to have the hotkey open a dedicated window. This gives you an always-available terminal at your fingertips. iTerm2 comes with a robust find-on-page feature. The UI stays out of the way. All matches are immediately highlighted. Even regular expression support is offered! -
4
Rio Terminal
Rio Terminal
Rio is a terminal application that’s built with Rust, WebGPU, Tokio runtime. It targets to have the best frame per second experience as long you want, but is also configurable to use as minimal from GPU. The terminal renderer is based on redux state machine, lines that has not updated will not suffer a redraw. Looking for the minimal rendering process in most of the time. Rio is also designed to support WebAssembly runtime so in the future you will be able to define how a tab system will work with a WASM plugin written in your favorite language. Rio uses WGPU, which is an implementation of WebGPU for use outside of a browser and as backend for Firefox’s WebGPU implementation. WebGPU allows for more efficient usage of modern GPU’s than WebGL. -
5
Tera Term
Tera Term
Tera Term is the terminal emulator for Microsoft Windows, that supports serial port, telnet and SSH connections. Among many other features it also has built-in Macro scripting language. Tera Term is often used to automate tasks related to remote connections initiated from PC. Tera Term is a free software terminal emulator (communication program) which supports serial port connections, TCP/IP (telnet, SSH1, SSH2) connections, log replaying, named pipe connection, and IPv6 communication. It also supports VT100 emulation and selected VT200/300 emulation, TEK4010 emulation, file transfer protocols (Kermit, XMODEM, YMODEM, ZMODEM, B-PLUS and Quick-VAN), and scripts using the "Tera Term Language". Supports Japanese, English, Russian, Korean and UTF-8 character sets, UTF-8 character encoding, and message catalog (in Japanese, English, German, French, Russian, Korean and Chinese). -
6
WhippyTerm
WhippyTerm
WhippyTerm is a modern terminal application designed for use on contemporary operating systems like Windows and Linux. It features a sleek, user-friendly interface and supports communication protocols commonly used by embedded developers. The software supports serial communication standards such as RS232, RS485, RS422, and TTL UART, as well as TCP/IP and UDP. Unique capabilities include built-in hex dumps, bookmarks, and extensibility through plugins. WhippyTerm also offers native support for binary protocols and can send blocks of binary or ASCII data. It supports terminal emulations like ANSI by default, with options to add others such as VT100 via plugins.Starting Price: $0 -
7
MobaXterm
MobaXterm
MobaXterm is your ultimate toolbox for remote computing. In a single Windows application, it provides loads of functions that are tailored for programmers, webmasters, IT administrators and pretty much all users who need to handle their remote jobs in a more simple fashion. There are many advantages of having an All-In-One network application for your remote tasks, e.g. when you use SSH to connect to a remote server, a graphical SFTP browser will automatically pop up in order to directly edit your remote files. Your remote applications will also display seamlessly on your Windows desktop using the embedded X server. When developing MobaXterm, we focused on a simple aim: proposing an intuitive user interface in order for you to efficiently access remote servers through different networks or systems. You can download and use MobaXterm Home Edition for free. If you want to use it inside your company, you should consider subscribing to MobaXterm Professional Edition.Starting Price: $69 per user per year -
8
PuTTY
PuTTY
PuTTY is a free implementation of SSH and Telnet for Windows and Unix platforms, along with an xterm terminal emulator. PuTTY is a client program for the SSH, Telnet, Rlogin, and SUPDUP network protocols. These protocols are all used to run a remote session on a computer, over a network. PuTTY implements the client end of that session, the end at which the session is displayed, rather than the end at which it runs. In really simple terms, you run PuTTY on a Windows machine, and tell it to connect to (for example) a Unix machine. PuTTY opens a window. Then, anything you type into that window is sent straight to the Unix machine, and everything the Unix machine sends back is displayed in the window. So you can work on the Unix machine as if you were sitting at its console, while actually sitting somewhere else. All of PuTTY's settings can be saved in named session profiles. You can also change the default settings that are used for new sessions.Starting Price: Free -
9
MacTerm
MacTerm
Powerful replacement for macOS Terminal, supporting 24-bit color, standard graphics protocols and iTerm2 image sequences and color schemes. MacTerm is one of the few emulators in the world that allow terminal-based programs to set up to 8 bits per RGB component (for a total of 24 bits), allowing for a large number and large spectrum of colors on the screen. The terminal is capable of preserving incoming text perfectly: whether you copy it to the Clipboard, capture it to a file, print it, or drag and drop, any special characters will be present. You can also use the floating command line window to input any kind of character. (In 4.1.0, there are limits on which Unicode characters can actually be displayed by the terminal; these limitations are being removed in 5.0.) Finally, Unicode is supported for file names, preference collection names, and macros.Starting Price: Free -
10
Muon SSH Terminal
Subhra Das Gupta
An easy and fun way to work with remote servers over SSH. Muon is a graphical SSH client. It has an enhanced SFTP file browser, SSH terminal emulator, remote resource/process manager, server disk space analyzer, remote text editor, huge remote log viewer, and lots of other helpful tools, which makes it easy to work with remote servers. Muon provides functionality similar to web-based control panels but, it works over SSH from the local computer, hence no installation is required on the server. It runs on Linux and Windows. Muon has been tested with several Linux and UNIX servers, like Ubuntu server, CentOS, RHEL, OpenSUSE, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, and HP-UX. The application is targeted mainly toward web/backend developers who often deploy/debug their code on remote servers and are not overly fond of complex terminal-based commands. It could also be useful for sysadmins as well who manage lots of remote servers manually.Starting Price: Free -
11
Mac Terminal
Apple
When you're connected to multiple servers, the unique background colors and window titles shown in profiles help you easily identify the correct terminal window. Use the built-in profiles in Terminal, or create your own custom profiles. Add markup and bookmarks as you work, then use them to quickly navigate through the vast output in the terminal window. Use the inspector to view and manage active processes, and change window titles and background colors. Use profiles to customize the colors, font, cursor style, background, and other elements of Terminal windows. A profile is a collection of style and behavior settings for a terminal window. Terminal comes with a set of predefined profiles, but it also allows you to create your own custom profiles. Change settings for terminal type (terminfo), input, prompt behavior, and international encodings. Change settings for function keys, the option key, and the alternate display.Starting Price: Free -
12
Royal TS
Royal Apps
Powerful connection management is compatible with a variety of connection types. Using RDP, VNC, SSH-based terminals, S/FTP, or web-based interfaces? No worries, Royal TS got you covered! Built-in credential management. Safe team-sharing features. Share a list of connections, without sharing your personal credentials. Command tasks and key sequence tasks make it easy to quickly automate repetitive tasks. SSH-based tunneling (secure gateway) support is tightly integrated into Royal TS. Dynamic Folders allow you to dynamically import data from external sources. You can assign a credential to connections by specifying the name of the credential. This allows you to share a document containing only connections while your personal credential is stored in a private document, protected by your password. Royal TS can handle documents opened by multiple users at the same time and allows you to synchronize document changes without the need for a SQL database back-end!Starting Price: $40 one-time payment -
13
Warp
Warp.dev
Warp is a blazingly fast, Rust-based terminal reimagined from the ground up to work like a modern app. Fully native, Rust-based terminal. No Electron or web-tech. All cloud features are opt-in. Data is encrypted at rest. Warp works out of the box with zsh, fish, and bash. Input that feels like a code editor. Writing code in your terminal shouldn’t feel like 1978. Edit your commands like in a modern code editor with selections, cursor positioning, and completion menus. Our GPT-3 powered AI search will convert natural language into executable shell commands. It's like GitHub Copilot, but for the terminal. Navigate through your terminal, command by command. Copy the output with one click and zero scrolls. Access common workflows with a simple GUI. You can create your own workflows, and share them with your team.Starting Price: Free -
14
Wave Terminal
Command Line Inc
Wave is an open-source, AI-native terminal built for seamless developer workflows with inline rendering, a modern UI, and persistent sessions. Features Include: - Render almost anything in line with plugins for images, Markdown, audio/video, and more. - Edit code quickly with the same editor that powers VSCode locally and remotely. - Persistent sessions, searchable universal history, and workspaces across local and remote sessions. - Native AI integration with ChatGPT, with plans to allow users to bring their own AI (BYOLLM) in the future. - Licensed under the Apache 2.0 license, with packages available for both macOS and Linux.Starting Price: $0 -
15
Alacritty
Alacritty
Alacritty is a modern, cross-platform terminal emulator powered by OpenGL that delivers GPU-accelerated performance with sensible defaults and extensive configuration. Rather than reimplementing functionality, it integrates seamlessly with other applications to provide a flexible feature set without sacrificing speed. Supported on BSD, Linux, macOS, and Windows, Alacritty is considered beta and still under active development, yet it already serves many users as their daily driver terminal. Key features include Vi Mode for moving around and creating selections using vi bindings; a Search function for querying text within the scrollback buffer; Regex Hints that mark patterns for mouse or keyboard interaction; and Multi-Window support to improve resource usage by running on a single process.Starting Price: Free -
16
Ghostty
Ghostty
Ghostty is a fast, feature-rich, cross-platform terminal emulator that uses platform-native UI and GPU acceleration to deliver speed, features, and familiarity without compromise. Ghostty provides fully standards-compliant emulation, drawing on ECMA-48 and xterm conventions, to ensure compatibility with existing shells and software, while its multi-renderer architecture leverages OpenGL (with ligature support) to sustain smooth rendering up to 60 fps under heavy load and minimal I/O jitter via a dedicated I/O thread. It offers modern windowing capabilities such as multi-window, tabbing, and splits, and embraces native platform experiences through SwiftUI and GTK4, all built atop a shared core written in Zig (“libghostty”) that can be embedded via a C API. Users benefit from basic customizability (fonts, backgrounds, colors), an opt-in feature set for interactive CLI tools, and performance competitive with leading terminal emulators.Starting Price: Free -
17
xterm
invisible-island
xterm is a terminal emulator for the X Window System, first released to emulate DEC VT102 and Tektronix 4014 hardware and provide a windowed interface for applications that cannot access X directly. Each xterm window runs as a separate process, locally or remotely, while sharing keyboard and mouse input with only the focused window receiving events. It implements ANSI/ISO color support via the “new” color model for background erase and recognizes most VT220 control sequences, along with select features from VT320, VT420, and VT520 devices. Over its history, xterm’s terminal description evolved from VT102 (pre-1996) to VT220 (1996–2012) and, since 2012, to VT420, ensuring compatibility with modern applications. Xterm remains actively maintained and extensible through companion tools like luit for encoding support and the X Toolkit for resource configuration, making it a complete, standards-compliant emulator for Unix-based environments.Starting Price: Free -
18
tmux
tmux
tmux is a terminal multiplexer that enables multiple terminals to be created, accessed, and controlled from a single screen. It allows sessions to be detached so they continue running in the background and later reattached exactly as left. tmux implements each window as a separate client process, supports ANSI/ISO color via VT220 (and later) control sequences, and is configurable through its example tmux.conf file and man page. Built atop minimal dependencies, libevent 2.x and ncurses, it requires only a C compiler, make, pkg-config, and a Yacc for building. tmux’s lightweight, single-screen architecture, extensive documentation, and cross-platform support make it a robust, standards-compliant solution for managing terminal workflows efficiently.Starting Price: Free -
19
WezTerm
WezTerm
WezTerm is a high-performance, cross-platform terminal emulator and multiplexer built in Rust that delivers GPU-accelerated rendering, including ligatures, color emoji, true color, dynamic color schemes, and hyperlinks, and modern windowing controls such as panes, tabs, and multiple windows on both local and remote hosts. Its single-process multiplexer provides scrollback, searchable history, mouse integration, Quick Select mode for rapid selection, Copy mode, shell integration, support for the iTerm image protocol, SSH connectivity, serial ports, Arduino devices, and workspace/session management via Lua-configurable scripts. Configuration is handled through a wezterm.lua file with hot-reload support, while a rich command-line interface (wezterm cli) lets you spawn programs, manipulate tabs and panes, and set domains. WezTerm adheres to ECMA-48 and xterm conventions for full ANSI/ISO compliance and offers native UI integration using platform-specific APIs.Starting Price: Free -
20
Zellij
Zellij
Zellij is a workspace aimed at developers, ops-oriented people, and terminal enthusiasts, designed around the philosophy that one must not sacrifice simplicity for power, delivering a great out-of-the-box experience together with advanced features. Geared toward both beginners and power users, it offers deep customizability and personal automation through layouts, true multiplayer collaboration, unique UX elements such as floating and stacked panes, and an innovative resizing algorithm that automatically places new panes in the optimal location. A plugin system enables creation of custom pane types in any language compiling to WebAssembly, while a comprehensive CLI introduces Command Panes for running and rerunning commands in dedicated panes and provides actions like run, edit, and rename-pane. Zellij’s single-process core ensures responsive performance, and its batteries-included approach gives users a terminal workspace with everything needed for modern development workflows.Starting Price: Free -
21
PowerTerm InterConnect
Ericom
The PowerTerm InterConnect Series is comprised of several robust terminal emulation applications supporting the host access needs of large and small organizations. It allows enterprises to standardize on a single host access solution. PowerTerm InterConnect products provides fast and reliable access to data residing on the broadest range of hosts, such as IBM Mainframe zSeries, IBM AS/400 iSeries, UNIX, OpenVMS, Tandem, HP. Each of the PowerTerm InterConnect products enables terminal emulation via various communication modes. PowerTerm InterConnect offers a flexible and extensive feature set to maximize users' time while providing a wide range of options. Using Power Script Language, users can automate tasks and increase efficiency. PowerTerm InterConnect's small footprint makes it a simple, fast and effective means of running legacy applications and it is easily installable on any PC. -
22
PowerTerm Pro
Ericom
The PowerTerm Pro Series is Ericom Software's premier terminal emulation solution for Windows that simplifies and extends legacy access functionality. Supporting a diverse range of hosts and emulation types, PowerTerm Pro enables corporations to standardize on a single host access solution. Featuring a customizable GUI, SSL, SSH and secure file transfer (SFTP), PowerTerm Pro and PowerTerm Pro Enterprise offer a number of options, so corporations can choose the PowerTerm Pro product that meets their host, security, server and productivity needs. Easy-to-use intuitive GUI (graphic user interface) enables users to do their work quickly and efficiently, with drag-and-drop tools for quick data accessibility and AS/400 DFT for easy file transfer between PC and AS/400 host. PowerTerm Pro terminal emulation software is installed on a central server and accessed via a Windows desktop with per-user licensing. -
23
kitty
kitty
kitty is designed for power keyboard users. To that end all its controls work with the keyboard (although it fully supports mouse interactions as well). Its configuration is a simple, human editable, single file for easy reproducibility (I like to store configuration in source control). The code in kitty is designed to be simple, modular and hackable. It is written in a mix of C (for performance sensitive parts) and Python (for easy hackability of the UI). It does not depend on any large and complex UI toolkit, using only OpenGL for rendering everything. Finally, kitty is designed from the ground up to support all modern terminal features, such as unicode, true color, bold/italic fonts, text formatting, etc. It even extends existing text formatting escape codes, to add support for features not available elsewhere, such as colored and styled (curly) underlines. One of the design goals of kitty is to be easily extensible so that new features can be added in the future. -
24
SecureCRT
VanDyke Software
SecureCRT client for Windows, Mac, and Linux provides rock-solid terminal emulation for computing professionals, raising productivity with advanced session management and a host of ways to save time and streamline repetitive tasks. SecureCRT provides secure remote access, file transfer, and data tunneling for everyone in your organization. Whether you are replacing Telnet or Terminal, or need a more capable secure remote access tool, SecureCRT is an application you can live in all day long. With the solid security of SSH, extensive session management, and advanced scripting, SecureCRT will help raise your productivity to the nth degree. Highlight individual words, phrases, or substrings in the session window to identify errors in log files or streaming output and to highlight prompts. Regular expressions are also supported, making it easier to highlight strings like IP addresses. Keyword display attributes (bold, reverse video, and color) can be combined. -
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Terminator
Terminator
Terminator Terminal Emulator is a powerful tool that allows users to manage multiple GNOME terminals within a single window. Originally developed in 2007 by Chris Jones as a compact Python script, it has evolved into a flexible terminal management application inspired by tools like Iterm2 and Tilix. Terminator lets users combine and rearrange terminal windows to suit their workflow, making it ideal for those who frequently work with multiple remote machines or command-line sessions. The emulator supports various themes, including light and dark modes, to enhance usability. It is well-suited for developers, system administrators, and command-line enthusiasts who need to manage several terminals simultaneously. Terminator streamlines terminal management, increasing productivity and reducing desktop clutter.Starting Price: Free -
26
OpenText HostExplorer
OpenText
Terminal emulation is the ability to make one computer terminal, typically a PC, appear to look like another, usually older type of terminal so that a user can access programs originally written to communicate with the other terminal type. OpenText HostExplorer is one of best terminal emulator software packages available for IBM® 3270 Mainframes, AS/400s, UNIX and FTP hosts. OpenText™ HostExplorer is a terminal emulator that provides fast, secure and reliable connections from Microsoft® Windows® PCs to a variety of enterprise hosts. HostExplorer enables organizations to benefit from the latest PC and web technologies while protecting their investment in data, information assets and systems. Easy migration preserves user experience, eliminates need for retraining and avoiding business workflow interruptions. Reduces maintenance cost and effort through automatic upgrades and centralized administration. -
27
StayLinked
StayLinked
StayLinked enables you to migrate to state-of-the-art devices, measure and optimize productivity with cutting-edge business intelligence, and interface with ground-breaking technologies in the areas of automation, robotics, augmented reality, and location-based services. Keeping employees on the job is a key part of productivity. The architecture of traditional terminal emulation solutions often leads to erratic application connectivity and performance. This results in end users spending time troubleshooting issues with the help desk rather than performing important application tasks. By eliminating dropped or lost sessions, providing centralized application configuration and management, and delivering highly efficient help desk tools, StayLinked keeps applications and end users running at peak performance. StayLinked Terminal Emulation (TE) is the fastest TE solution available for mobile devices. Traditional terminal emulation products send all telnet/SSH traffic to the mobile device. -
28
MacWise
Carnation Software
MacWise emulates ADDS Viewpoint, Wyse 50, Wyse 60, Wyse 370, Televideo TV 925, DEC VT100, VT220, and Prism terminals. Supports ANSI and SCO ANSI color. Esprit III color is also supported in Wyse 370 mode. MacWise allows a Macintosh to be used as a terminal, connected to a host computer directly, by modem, local area network, or over the Internet with telnet or ssh secure shell. The emulators support video attributes such as dim, reverse, underline, 132-column modes, protected fields, and graphic characters sent from the host computer, as well as enhanced Viewpoint mode. Features include a phone list and dialer for modems, on-screen programmable function keys, connection scripts, and more. Works with desktop Macs, MacBooks and PowerBook. You can scroll back to the past 50 pages of data. MacWise remembers the last 50 pages that appear on your screen, regardless of whether the data has scrolled across the screen or the screen has cleared.Starting Price: $95 per user one-time payment -
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Byobu
Byobu
It was originally designed to provide elegant enhancements to the otherwise functional, plain, practical GNU Screen, for the Ubuntu server distribution. Byobu now includes an enhanced profile, convenient keybindings, configuration utilities, and toggle-able system status notifications for both the GNU Screen window manager and the more modern Tmux terminal multiplexer, and works on most Linux, BSD, and Mac distributions. Byobu includes an enhanced profile, configuration utilities, and system status notifications for the GNU screen window manager as well as the Tmux terminal multiplexer. Byobu is developed and released as free software under the GPLv3.Starting Price: Free -
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Rocket Passport
Rocket Software
Rocket® Passport terminal emulation solutions includes Rocket Passport Web to Host® and Rocket Passport PC to Host. Rocket Passport Web to Host software is a feature-rich, browser-based IBM® 3270 emulator for host access, which can significantly reduce costs for organizations using other desktop terminal emulators. Passport Web to Host includes both enhanced IBM TN3270E emulation and basic TN3270 emulation, as well as IBM® i (TN5250), UNIX/DEC (VT), and secure File Transfer Protocol (FTP). With Passport Web to Host, remote or distributed Windows users get all the tools they need for secure, reliable, productive host connectivity. This includes support for SSL and SSH security, VB Script for macro development, HLLAPI and an Object API for IBM application integration, comprehensive Windows cut-and-paste, and more. Passport PC to Host gives Windows users all the tools they need to create secure, reliable, productive host connectivity.