
e2b
Replicate.com
Zerve AI
Hugging Face
fal
Cerebrium
DigitalOcean
Your end-to-end stack for cloud compute

Sway
dwm
Openbox
awesome
bspwm
Fluxbox
Hyprland
A dynamic tiling window manager designed for X11, inspired by wmii, and written in C.

Which is more popular?
Based on our record, i3 should be more popular than Modal. It has been mentioned 93 times since March 2021.
Website, pricing, platforms and company facts side by side.
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| Website | modal.com | i3wm.org |
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What each product offers, as listed by its team.


Possible disadvantages
Possible disadvantages
An editorial look at what each product does well and who it suits.


No analysis of Modal yet.
Overall verdict
Why this product is good
Recommended for
i3wm is recommended for advanced users, developers, and anyone who prefers a keyboard-centric interface. It is ideal for users who like to customize their environment extensively and are comfortable with configuring software via text files. New users with a willingness to learn may also find it rewarding.
Walkthroughs and reviews on video.
Scott's Synth Stuff Episode 6: Modal Electronics Cobalt8 Review
More videos
30k Miles with the BMW i3 - End of Lease Review
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How often each product is chosen within a category, 0–100% relative to the other.


Share your experience with using Modal and i3. For example, how are they different and which one is better?
External articles and on-site reviews we used to compare the two products.


We have no reviews of Modal yet. Be the first one to post
Sway is a tiling Wayland i3-compatible window manager that dynamically arranges app windows to rationally maximise desktop space. It is free, open-source, and lightweight. By default, it arranges windows in a grid and...
i3-wm is one of my most loved standalone window managers, qualifying it to easily fit under the desktop environment list! The configuration is just very easy, and you can change everything that you see on screen. This...
Sway is a free, open-source, and lightweight tiling Wayland i3-compatible window manager that automatically arranges app windows to logically maximize desktop space. It arranges windows into a grid by default and...
Recommendations tracked on public social media and blogs since March 2021.


GPU Availability: Not all cloud computers offer GPU access. If your agent is performing image processing, vision-based reasoning, or training local models, platforms like Modal are often better suited for these high-compute requirements. - Source: dev.to / about 1 month ago
I ended up using Modal for the actual media processing. What a pleasant surprise discovering Modal. The Thumbrella processing code (tier2 and tier3) have been super comfortable inside these containers. For my use cases I only need CPU... - Source: dev.to / about 1 month ago
ScribeToAny is a full-stack audio and video transcription platform built on React 19 and deployed to Cloudflare Workers at the edge. Heavy GPU workloads (Whisper transcription, diarization, translation) run asynchronously on Modal, while... - Source: dev.to / 2 months ago
In my case, I decided to go with a compositor instead of desktop environment. I have already used others windows tilling managers such as i3wm. This time, I want something that has more features out-of-the-box. - Source: dev.to / 2 months ago
I've been using Omarchy as my main setup since June 26, 2025, the day DHH released the first version. Before that I had my own custom Opinionated Linux, mclovin-ARCHived: an Arch + i3wm installer set up exactly the way I liked. It was... - Source: dev.to / 6 months ago
Then few years back, in 2015, I got shown i3wm and used it on my ubuntu-netinstall until 2020, then I switched to Budgie and my personal laptop has been using that ever since. - Source: dev.to / 10 months ago
When comparing Modal and i3, you can also consider the following products.


Sway is a drop-in replacement for the i3 window manager, but for Wayland instead of X11.
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Run open-source machine learning models with a cloud API
Compare Replicate.com to Modal or i3:

dwm is a dynamic window manager for X. It manages windows in tiled, monocle and floating layouts. All of the layouts can be applied dynamically, optimising the environment for the application in use and the task performed.
Compare dwm to Modal or i3:

Openbox is a highly configurable, next generation window manager with extensive standards support.
Compare Openbox to Modal or i3: