Contour vs Warp

Contour is a free terminal emulator for everyday use, designed for people who want control over terminal workflows. It runs on Linux, macOS, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and Windows. GPU-accelerated rendering and high-DPI support accompany text features such as font ligatures, Unicode grapheme clusters, and colored emoji. Users can split panes, use vi-like modes for navigation and selection, and jump through history with vertical markers. Sessions can persist beyond a terminal window and be reattached locally or over a network. Contour interoperates with tmux control mode in both directions, but not its -CC mode. It also supports clickable links, inline Sixel images, OSC 52 clipboard setting, and profiles for color schemes and login shells. TCP connections use TLS encryption and require a token. Daemon mode is experimental, and its command-line flags and wire protocol may change. The project website remains in draft mode. Contour is licensed under Apache License 2.0.

Warp is a terminal application for macOS, Windows and Linux, with Warp Terminal and a separate Warp Agent CLI. It provides split panes, session sync, GPU acceleration, a scripting API and SSH support. Agents can be watched, steered or handed off from the web, mobile, terminal or IDE, and connect with Slack, Linear, GitHub, Jira and GitLab. Software factories are defined in factory.yaml with supporting agent files and can run from GitHub, Slack, webhooks or schedules. Factories can also run fully self-hosted inside a customer’s VPC. The Free plan costs nothing and includes core terminal features, with limited cloud agents, Warp Drive, collaboration and conversation storage. Build costs $20 a month billed annually with 1,500 credits; Max costs $200 a month billed annually with 18,000 credits. Business costs $50 a month billed annually for up to 25 seats.