Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Ghostty VS Boxes.dev

Compare Ghostty VS Boxes.dev and see what are their differences

Ghostty logo Ghostty

A fast, feature-rich, and cross-platform terminal emulator

Boxes.dev logo Boxes.dev

Run Claude Code and Codex in your own cloud environment
Not present
Not present

Ghostty features and specs

  • Easy-to-Use Interface
    Ghostty offers a user-friendly interface that is easy to navigate, making it accessible for users of all experience levels.
  • Enhanced Privacy
    The platform emphasizes user privacy, ensuring that personal data is kept secure and not shared without consent.
  • Multiple Platforms Supported
    Ghostty supports a wide range of platforms, allowing users to connect and share content across different networks seamlessly.
  • Customizable Features
    Users have the option to customize settings and features, enabling them to tailor their experience to their specific needs.

Possible disadvantages of Ghostty

  • Limited Free Version
    The free version of Ghostty offers limited features, which may restrict functionality for users not willing to upgrade to a paid plan.
  • Occasional Downtime
    Some users have reported occasional downtime or connectivity issues, which can disrupt the user experience.
  • Learning Curve for Advanced Features
    While the basic interface is easy to use, some advanced features require a learning curve and may be more complex for new users.
  • Subscription Cost
    Users may find the subscription cost for premium features to be relatively high compared to similar services.

Boxes.dev features and specs

  • Instant macOS Development Environments
    Boxes.dev allows developers to quickly spin up macOS virtual machines for development purposes, significantly reducing the time needed to set up clean development environments compared to manual configuration.
  • Native Apple Silicon Support
    Boxes.dev is built to run natively on Apple Silicon (M1/M2/M3/M4) Macs, leveraging the Apple Virtualization framework for near-native performance without the overhead of traditional emulation.
  • Easy to Use Interface
    The app provides a streamlined, user-friendly interface for creating and managing macOS virtual machines, making virtualization accessible even to developers who aren't familiar with complex VM tooling.
  • Pre-configured Environments
    Boxes.dev offers the ability to create environments with development tools pre-installed or easily configurable, saving developers significant setup time when they need fresh or isolated macOS instances.
  • Snapshot and Restore Capabilities
    Users can take snapshots of their virtual machines and restore them to previous states, which is invaluable for testing, CI/CD workflows, and safely experimenting with system configurations without risk.

Possible disadvantages of Boxes.dev

  • macOS Only
    Boxes.dev is limited to macOS host machines and macOS guest VMs, making it unsuitable for developers who need to run Linux or Windows virtual machines or who work on non-Apple hardware.
  • Paid Software
    Boxes.dev is a commercial product that requires a purchase, which may be a barrier for individual developers or small teams, especially when free alternatives like UTM or raw QEMU exist.
  • Apple Silicon Requirement
    The app primarily targets Apple Silicon Macs, which means developers still using older Intel-based Macs may have limited functionality or may not be able to use the tool at all.
  • Relatively New Product
    As a relatively newer entrant in the virtualization space, Boxes.dev has a smaller community and fewer resources, tutorials, and third-party integrations compared to established tools like Parallels or VMware Fusion.
  • Limited OS Version Support
    Users are generally limited to running macOS versions that Apple's Virtualization framework supports as guests, which can restrict the ability to test on older macOS versions that may still be relevant for compatibility testing.

Analysis of Boxes.dev

Overall verdict

  • Boxes.dev appears to be a solid developer-focused tool that streamlines workflows, though its overall value depends on your specific technical needs and team size.

Why this product is good

  • Developer-centric design that integrates smoothly into existing coding workflows
  • Aims to reduce setup and configuration overhead so teams can focus on building
  • Modern, clean interface that appeals to technical users
  • Potential for improved collaboration and faster project spin-up

Recommended for

  • Software developers and engineering teams looking to simplify their tooling
  • Startups needing to move quickly with minimal infrastructure setup
  • Technical users who value streamlined, code-first workflows
  • Small to mid-sized teams seeking better collaboration on development projects

Ghostty videos

Ghostty is Probably The Best Terminal Emulator I've Ever Used

More videos:

  • Review - so i tried ghostty...
  • Review - Ghostty is a Fast and Feature-Rich Terminal

Boxes.dev videos

No Boxes.dev videos yet. You could help us improve this page by suggesting one.

Add video

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Ghostty and Boxes.dev)
Terminal Tools
100 100%
0% 0
Developer Tools
87 87%
13% 13
AI
0 0%
100% 100
SSH
100 100%
0% 0

User comments

Share your experience with using Ghostty and Boxes.dev. For example, how are they different and which one is better?
Log in or Post with

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Ghostty seems to be a lot more popular than Boxes.dev. While we know about 29 links to Ghostty, we've tracked only 2 mentions of Boxes.dev. 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.

Ghostty mentions (29)

  • Making Ghostty and herdr share one keyboard
    I've been on Ghostty for about 8 months. Last week I added herdr, a multiplexer built around running coding agents (Claude Code, Codex, opencode and friends) in panes. Ghostty already has tabs and splits, with Cmd shortcuts I use all day. Herdr has its own tabs, panes and workspaces, with its own keys. - Source: dev.to / 1 day ago
  • I built a native macOS terminal so I'd stop losing track of my AI agents
    So I built a terminal. It's called viterm: a native macOS app in Swift + AppKit, with rendering handled by libghostty. MIT licensed. - Source: dev.to / about 2 months ago
  • Workbench: A TUI for parallel coding agents
    I made a nice way to use all your coding harnesses and persist them entirely in the TUI. I love Cursor and Claude Code, but I like using many of them and often use them in combination with tmux locally and via SSH, so I made this for myself really. Hoping other people find it useful or cool. It's mostly for use inside of Ghostty (https://ghostty.org/) so image rendering and everything works nicely. Would love some... - Source: Hacker News / 2 months ago
  • How My Coworker Who Didn't Know 'cd' Shipped to Production
    The downside of teaching a designer to use the terminal is that she will want hers to look like yours. Tanya saw my Ghostty theme and my catppuccin Starship theme over a screen share and decided she wanted both. Her Claude Code statusline came next. That's an entire other post. - Source: dev.to / 4 months ago
  • The Terminal Renaissance: Designing Beautiful TUIs in the Age of AI
    I built ghostty-automator, a purpose-built IPC layer for Ghostty that exposes the terminal's actual state to external processes. - Source: dev.to / 5 months ago
View more

Boxes.dev mentions (2)

  • Our decision on Cursor following its acquisition by SpaceX
    Devin Automations is the most obvious one: solid UX, but can get very expensive to run. There are also a bunch of newer startups in this space. I'm building one myself, https://boxes.dev -- we're very early but building for this exact use case. Some other ones worth a look are Factory Droid and Amp Orbs. Those two build their own agent harness (like Cursor), whereas with boxes.dev we run the native codex and... - Source: Hacker News / 2 days ago
  • Mitchellh starts a new company: Superlogical
    These tools all assume you have machines to run the agents on. But for parallel agents I'm pretty convinced you want each agent on its own isolated devbox running your dev environment (not e.g. Worktrees on one box) - which isn't trivial to set up and manage. I'm working this with https://boxes.dev - a workspace for launching and managing claude + codex sessions, each running in its own cloud devbox. We launched... - Source: Hacker News / about 1 month ago

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Ghostty and Boxes.dev, you can also consider the following products

iTerm2 - A terminal emulator for macOS that does amazing things.

Codesphere - Deploy in less than 5s

Warp Terminal - The terminal for the 21st century. Warp is a blazingly fast, rust-based terminal reimagined from the ground up to work like a modern app.

AppWizzy - Build scalable web apps and websites with AI that serve you for years. Professional vibe-coding platform. Perfect to build SaaS, intenal tool, AI tool, business app, etc

Tabby.sh - Tabby is a free and open source SSH, local and Telnet terminal with everything you'll ever need.

InstaVM - Instant computers for AI agents