btop
A resource monitor with a modern, mouse-friendly terminal UI showing live CPU, memory, disk, network, GPU and battery usage, plus process management.
🔗 Visit btop
Description
Classic terminal monitors like top give you the numbers you need but look like they haven't changed since the 90s — dense text, no mouse support, minimal visual structure. btop is a full visual overhaul of the same idea: the same live system metrics, but presented with graphs, colors and a layout you can click and navigate with a mouse, not just the keyboard.
btop displays CPU, memory, disk, network and process usage, plus GPU monitoring for NVIDIA, AMD and Intel cards and battery status, with full mouse support, customizable themes and presets, and process sorting with a tree view. It's the C++ evolution of the earlier bashtop and bpytop projects, cross-platform (Linux, macOS, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD), free and open source under the Apache License 2.0, with 34.2k GitHub stars.
💬 Our review
The short version: btop gives top-level system monitoring the visual polish of a proper application — graphs, colors, mouse clicks — while staying entirely inside your terminal, no GUI framework needed.
Against htop, which focuses tightly on process management with a leaner interface, btop is more of a full dashboard: it adds GPU and battery monitoring that htop doesn't attempt, at the cost of a steeper learning curve for all its customization options. Against glances, which spreads itself across terminal, web and API access, btop stays terminal-only but with noticeably more visual polish and lower overhead thanks to its C++ implementation. Building it from source requires a genuinely modern compiler (GCC 14+ or Clang 19+), which can be a hurdle on older systems, though pre-built packages sidestep that for most users. For anyone who wants a monitor that's both comprehensive and pleasant to look at, it's one of the best free options available.
💰 Pricing
📊 Global score
🤖 AI-enriched data
Projet open source (licence Apache 2.0), aucune offre payante
Pros
Interface terminal moderne avec support complet de la souris
Monitoring GPU (NVIDIA/AMD/Intel) et batterie inclus
Thèmes et préréglages hautement personnalisables
Implémentation C++ légère et performante
34 200+ étoiles, communauté active
Cons
Nécessite un compilateur récent (GCC 14+ ou Clang 19+) pour compiler
Support GPU nécessite des bibliothèques spécifiques au fabricant
Courbe d'apprentissage plus raide que des alternatives simples comme htop