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Termuna vs Warp, Tabby, Termius and Ghostty.
Five terminals people actually install in 2026, put side by side on the things that decide a switch: what survives a closed lid, whether the session reaches your phone, whether an account is required to type at all, and what the vendor can read. Including where each of them is the better pick.
The matrix
We have measured Termuna and nothing else. A cell about another tool is a fact from that vendor's own pages, linked where it matters, and a cell we have no measurement for says so instead of guessing.
| What you need | Termuna | Warp | Tabby | Termius | Ghostty |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Session keeps running when the lid closes | Yes, a local daemon owns the shells. An SSH link that drops keeps its pane and its scrollback and redials the same target, eight attempts by default (the rule), once for every pane on that host: panes and the file lane share one SSH connection, so a new split opens at once and a 2FA host asks once, not once per pane (how) | No, the shells end with the window. Session Restoration reopens tabs and panes, not processes | No. Restoring tabs on start reopens the tabs and reconnects SSH | No, a session is one connection | No, and it does not try to. Pair it with tmux |
| Pick up the same live session on a phone | Yes, built in: same scrollback, same cursor, and typing goes back to your machine | No mobile client | No mobile client. Tabby Web is a browser build you host yourself, with connections of its own | A phone app, yes, but every device opens its own connection: hosts sync, the shell does not | No mobile client |
| Type in the terminal without an account | Yes, forever. Sync is the opt-in part | Yes since November 2024. AI, Warp Drive and sharing need sign-in | Yes | First launch asks you to sign in or create an account; you can log out and use it locally | Yes |
| Can the vendor read your scrollback | No. The relay stores ciphertext it cannot open (how) | The AI features send console input to Warp's servers, with secret redaction; telemetry is on by default (their privacy page) | No cloud mirror. Config sync only if you set up a server | Vault sync is end to end encrypted; sessions are not mirrored | No cloud component at all |
| Leaving with your data | One JSON archive, every blob verbatim, on every plan (the format) | Settings are files on disk. What you saved to Warp Drive lives on Warp's servers | One YAML config file on disk | Import is documented, export is not: the community wrote its own exporters | One plain text config file on disk |
| Memory with tabs open | Under 100 MB: GUI plus daemon, three tabs, shared pages excluded1 | Not measured by us. Native Rust app, GPU rendered | Not measured by us. Electron app | Not measured by us. Electron app | Not measured by us. Native, one process, no daemon: expect it lighter than us |
| Cold start to a usable prompt | Under 300 ms, cold daemon spawn included1 | Not measured by us. Native | Not measured by us. Electron boots first | Not measured by us. Electron boots first | Not measured by us. Native, and nothing to spawn: expect it faster than us |
| Price | Terminal free forever. Cloud continuity from $6 a month | Free plan; paid plans are priced by AI credits | Free, open source | Free Starter with a local vault; Pro from $10 a month for sync | Free, open source |
| Vendor facts checked on 6 September 2026 against the pages linked in each cell. Warp's client has been open source since April 2026; its cloud side is not. Prices are the vendors' own on that date and change without telling us. If a cell is out of date, say so and we will fix it. | |||||
Our numbers, and what they are up against
The four numbers we publish are budgets we hold every build to, not a benchmark of anyone else. Each one is measured on one Linux workstation, release build, one shell and no plugins. Here is how, and who it is standing next to.
- Cold start, under 300 ms. Launch to a usable prompt, the cold spawn of the session daemon included, measured on every build; CI asserts the daemon half of it on its own. Warp and Ghostty are native too, and Ghostty has no daemon to spawn, so expect it to beat us here. Tabby and Termius boot an Electron runtime before they draw a prompt. We have not timed any of the four, so the matrix says so.
- Memory with tabs open, under 100 MB. The GUI and the daemon together with three tabs open, counted as proportional set size so pages shared with the GPU driver are not double counted, on a real desktop session. An Electron terminal carries a browser engine per window; Ghostty runs one native process and no daemon. Our extra process is the price of shells that outlive the window.
- Keystroke, under 20 ms. Key press to glyph on screen, measured on a GPU session and never waiting on the renderer. Warp and Ghostty draw on the GPU as well; Tabby and Termius draw through a browser engine. No figure of theirs is ours to quote.
- Installer, under 30 MB. The Windows installer people actually download, asserted in CI on every build. There is no browser runtime in it, which is the whole reason it is that small; an Electron download ships one. We have not weighed theirs.
Where each of them wins
No tool wins everything, and pretending otherwise would waste your time.
- Pick Warp if you want the AI in the terminal: blocks, generated commands, agents that run your commands for you. It is the best version of that idea, and the client is open source now. Your prompt context leaves the machine when you use it.
- Pick Tabby if you want a hackable, plugin rich, open source terminal on all three desktops and the Electron memory does not bother you.
- Pick Termius if what you need is a polished cross platform SSH client with a synced host vault, and a session that is per device is fine for you.
- Pick Ghostty if you want the fastest possible local terminal and nothing else: no cloud, no vault, no phone. We are heavier because we run a daemon that keeps your shells alive.
Where Termuna wins
Pick Termuna when the thing you care about is the session itself: it keeps running on your machine when the lid closes, continues on the web or your phone exactly where it stopped, survives network drops with a replayed gap, and resurrects the whole workspace after a reboot. All of it mirrors end to end encrypted, so the relay in the middle can route your session without ever being able to read it (how that works). The local terminal is free forever; only the continuity is paid.
The one on one comparisons
Three pages, one competitor each, with the honest "pick them if" block on every one and the migration step at the end.
Termuna vs Termius
The mandatory account, the vault, and what you can take with you when you leave.
Read the comparisonTermuna vs Warp
We are not an AI terminal. What you get instead, and what you give up.
Read the comparisonTermuna vs Tabby
The same features without Electron, and where Tabby's plugins still win.
Read the comparisonAnd the classics
The tools that solved a piece of this before any of us. They are still the right answer often enough to name.
tmux
Pick it if you live on one server, want zero cloud involvement and are happy attaching over SSH. It is free, everywhere and battle-tested; Termuna's daemon plays the same role locally.
Mosh
Pick it if your only problem is a flaky link to one host and you want nothing new on your other devices. Roaming and local echo are excellent, but there is no multiplexing, no mirror and no phone. Termuna predicts locally too, on the phone and in the browser, over the mirror rather than a transport of its own, so switching to us does not mean giving up the instant paint.
Eternal Terminal
Pick it if you want SSH that reconnects transparently and nothing more. Pair it with tmux for persistence.