Terminal privacy ratings
Terminal emulators.
9 terminals are rated against 4 public criteria, and 9 have enough evidence for a letter grade. Of the 3 with a known jurisdiction, 2 are based in a Five Eyes country, and 3 in the wider Fourteen Eyes.
Open-source terminals only · Criteria for this category · Suggest an addition · Markdown
| Name | Grade | Score | Data | Jurisdiction | Open source | No trackers or telemetry | No ads or data sales | Independent audit |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Cross-platform, GPU-accelerated terminal emulator configured through a TOML file, with a vi mode, regex search and hints for opening URLs. |
Grade B | 80 | 100% | – | Yes | Yes | Yes | No |
Lightweight terminal emulator for Wayland with a server mode, Sixel image support and low resource use. |
Grade B | 80 | 100% | – | Yes | Yes | Yes | No |
GPU-accelerated terminal emulator written in Zig, using native UI toolkits on each platform. |
Grade B | 80 | 100% | – | Yes | Yes | Yes | No |
Terminal emulator for macOS with split panes, search, autocomplete, tmux integration and a Python scripting API. |
Grade B | 80 | 100% | – | Yes | Yes | Yes | No |
Terminal emulator from KDE with tabs, split views, profiles, bookmarks and search. |
Grade B | 80 | 100% | Germany Fourteen Eyes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No |
GPU-accelerated terminal emulator and multiplexer written in Rust, configured in Lua, with tabs, panes and SSH and serial connections. |
Grade B | 80 | 100% | – | Yes | Yes | Yes | No |
Microsoft's terminal application for Windows, with tabs, panes, profiles for PowerShell, Command Prompt and WSL, and GPU-accelerated text rendering. |
Grade C | 65 | 100% | United States Five Eyes | Yes | Partial | Yes | No |
GPU-accelerated terminal emulator with tabs, split layouts, a graphics protocol for images in the terminal and extensions called kittens. |
Grade D | 50 | 100% | – | Yes | No | Yes | No |
Terminal from Warp with block-based command output, a built-in editor, AI agents and team features such as shared workflows. Some features require an account. |
Grade F | 20 | 100% | United States Five Eyes | No | No | Partial | Partial |
Questions
What is the most private option among terminals?
No pick has been made yet. The table above is sorted by score, based on public evidence.
How are terminals rated?
Each entry answers 4 questions: open source, no trackers or telemetry, no ads or data sales and independent audit. Answers need links to evidence. See the full criteria.
Does jurisdiction matter?
Jurisdiction decides which laws can compel a provider to hand over data. Each entry shows its country and whether it is in the Five, Nine or Fourteen Eyes. The data a provider can hand over depends mostly on what it stores and who holds the keys. Read about jurisdictions and the CLOUD Act.