Alternatives to Ironbar
A customisable GTK4 status bar for Wayland compositors, written in Rust. The listings below can replace it for an important use case. Each note says what changes if you switch.
The original
Ironbar
A customisable GTK4 status bar for Wayland compositors, written in Rust.
Replacements
Listings that take over the same core job as Ironbar.
Waybar
Add a customizable status bar to compatible Wayland desktops.
Waybar is a customizable Wayland status bar with workspace and system-status modules, custom styling and scripts, open source under the MIT license.
nwg-panel
Add desktop panels to Sway and Hyprland using GTK.
nwg-panel provides GTK panels combining launchers, workspace controls and status modules, designed specifically for Sway and Hyprland.
Eww
Create custom desktop widgets using declarative configuration and styling.
Eww builds panels and other widgets from declarative configuration and styling, and you maintain the scripts that feed it information.
Quickshell
A QtQuick toolkit for building your own status bars, widgets, lockscreens and desktop shells.
Quickshell is a QtQuick toolkit for building bars, widgets, lockscreens and whole shells, requiring QML or an adopted community configuration rather than a ready-made bar.
AGS
Scaffolding CLI for building custom Linux desktop shells and widgets.
AGS is a scaffolding CLI for building fully custom Linux desktop shells and widgets, requiring scripting instead of configuring a ready-made bar.
Zebar
A tool for building custom taskbars, desktop widgets and popups on Windows, macOS and Linux.
Zebar builds custom taskbars, widgets and popups on Windows, macOS and Linux, and custom widgets require some coding or borrowed configurations.
Also worth comparing
These listings name Ironbar as their own alternative, so the relationship runs both ways.
xmobar
A minimalist text-based status bar for X11, written in Haskell and often paired with xmonad.
Ironbar is a GTK4 status bar written in Rust for Wayland only, with no X11 support, scaling from minimal to feature-rich setups.
Similar software
Related functionality, not a direct replacement.
Sway
Use an i3-style tiling workflow on Wayland.
Hyprland
Arrange Linux application windows with a configurable tiling Wayland compositor.
niri
A scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor that places windows in columns on an endless horizontal strip.
rofi
A keyboard-driven window switcher, application launcher and dmenu replacement for Linux desktops.
Polybar
Build a configurable status bar for an X11 desktop.
