Software Alternatives & Reviews

Cygwin VS BusyBox

Compare Cygwin VS BusyBox and see what are their differences

Cygwin logo Cygwin

Cygwin is a set of tools that provide Linux and POSIX functionality to Windows.

BusyBox logo BusyBox

BusyBox is a single binary that provides several stripped-down Unix tools in a single executable.
  • Cygwin Landing page
    Landing page //
    2021-09-27
  • BusyBox Landing page
    Landing page //
    2019-04-14

Cygwin videos

Cygwin Review Part 1: Running Linux programs... on Windows?

More videos:

  • Review - Cygwin Review Part 2 - it didn't quite go to plan, again!
  • Review - What is Cygwin? | How does Cygwin work?

BusyBox videos

What is BusyBox | Busybox demo

More videos:

  • Review - What Is Busybox and Why do we need it for Android?

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Cygwin and BusyBox)
SSH
87 87%
13% 13
Server Management
86 86%
14% 14
Terminal Tools
74 74%
26% 26
Tool
100 100%
0% 0

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Cygwin and BusyBox

Cygwin Reviews

10 Termux Alternatives
Cygwin is open-source software with a collection of GNU and provides all functions similar to the Linux shell environment on windows. This software also has the functionality of API manager that has premium packages to have complete control on your files and move them to other software based on your requirement. This app also has the functionality of editing different files...

BusyBox Reviews

Top 10 Best Apps To Use Linux Terminal on Your Android Device
BusyBox is an excellent option for Android users who want to have control in the internal Linux command-line shell. This terminal emulator for Android requires a rooted device to function properly. It is one of the most popular among its competitors. There is a pro version, but the vanilla edition is more than enough for casual users. It will provide you with numerous Unix...
Best Terminal Emulator for Android in 2021
BusyBox is a famous terminal emulator for quick and reliable performance. It needs the device to be rooted for executing the app. The emulator can work well with Linux kernel with GNU Core applications. It offers plenty of standard Unix tools with backup features to retrieve all data. The app provides the user to choose the desired applets for quick installation. It also...

Social recommendations and mentions

BusyBox might be a bit more popular than Cygwin. We know about 14 links to it since March 2021 and only 10 links to Cygwin. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Cygwin mentions (10)

  • Groovy 🎷 Cheat Sheet - 01 Say "Hello" from Groovy
    Alternatively, you can use sdkman. A great tool to install your Software Development Kit. The downside is that it only works on *nix systems. So for Widnows users, you will have to use WSL or Cygwin as the official page suggests. It is really simple to use sdkman. After a successful installation, just type those commands into your *nix shell:. - Source: dev.to / about 2 months ago
  • How do you even get started programming in c++ on Windows?
    You could try Cygwin. I never leave home without it. Source: about 1 year ago
  • What exactly IS gitbash?
    It's launching MSYS2, which is in turn based on cygwin, which is a collection of common Linux utilities built for windows and an incomplete POSIX abstraction layer. Source: over 1 year ago
  • Kind of an obvious design flaw
    IME, not really? Git for Windows or MSYS2 are both pretty solid. I used Cygwin for years, but MSYS2 seems to integrate a bit more smoothly (plus MSYS uses pacman instead of Cygwin's fiddly gui for package management). Source: over 1 year ago
  • WSL - Ubuntu 22.04 LTS using a ton of memory?
    Try Cygwin or Msys2, they are not running virtual machines. For Bash and Neovim only you probably don't want to run a whole virtual machine. Source: over 1 year ago
View more

BusyBox mentions (14)

  • The Awk Programming Language, Second Edition
    AWK runs everywhere. Perl and Python do not. Busybox has their own independent AWK implementation. https://busybox.net/ https://frippery.org/busybox/ Also see the first edition of the AWK manual online here: https://archive.org/details/pdfy-MgN0H1joIoDVoIC7. - Source: Hacker News / 10 months ago
  • This would have made my life so much easier in the beginning....
    A majority of routers are already based on the Linux kernel. Many are just BusyBox. The most common Linux firewalls are iptables and nftables. With the latter being the most popular one due to being around longer. They are really fine grained and powerful. Source: 12 months ago
  • So Im working on making my own OS from scratch. Im using a linux based os for reverse engineering but I need help in understanding how to use the tools that are in rar/zip files. If anyone can direct me to some tutorials or resources to read that would be a big help.
    Https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/arm64/booting.rst This was my guiding light for a project a while back. It describes what Linux expects "time zero" looks like for the system; whatever operating system is going to boot needs that kind of contract between the boot environment and its own entry point. You can develop a lightweight linux-based OS with that document and a package like https://busybox.net/. Source: about 1 year ago
  • Do you think Linux will become more supported and eventually be able to play every game that windows can? If so, how far in the future?
    For libc, we have musl as an alternate implementation. For most coreutils, we have busybox and the BSD coreutils. For desktop environments, you can use something like xfce. Source: over 1 year ago
  • Hello Embedded World - booting a minimal Linux with Busybox on RISC-V, from source
    Head over to busybox.net for the BusyBox source code. The latest release at the time of writing (2022-08-14) is 1.35.0. - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Cygwin and BusyBox, you can also consider the following products

MobaXterm - Enhanced terminal for Windows with X11 server, tabbed SSH client, network tools and much more

Toybox (Linux command line utilities) - Toybox combines common Linux command line utilities together into a single BSD-licensed executable...

PuTTY - Popular free terminal application. Mostly used as an SSH client.

Termux - Terminal emulator and Linux environment for Android

PowerShell - Download WMF. Windows Management Framework contains the latest versions of PowerShell, DSC, WMI, and WinRM for older versions of Windows. PowerShell Module Browser. Search for PowerShell modules and cmdlets.

MinGW - MinGW ("Minimalistic GNU for Windows") is a port of the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) and...