Alternatives to Zenith
A terminal system monitor like top or htop, with zoomable charts for CPU, memory, network and disk. The listings below can replace it for an important use case. Each note says what changes if you switch.
The original
Zenith
A terminal system monitor like top or htop, with zoomable charts for CPU, memory, network and disk.
Replacements
Listings that take over the same core job as Zenith.
btop++
A terminal resource monitor that looks good enough to leave open, with processes, CPU, memory, disks, network and GPUs.
btop++ is an Apache-licensed terminal monitor for Linux and macOS with graphs, a mouse-driven process list and GPU monitoring, but no historical logging.
bottom
A graphical system monitor for the terminal, with charts for CPU, memory, network, temperature and disk over time.
bottom is also Rust-based and MIT-licensed with zoomable charts for CPU, memory, network, temperature and disk, and adds Windows support including an MSI installer.
htop
Interactive process viewer for the terminal.
htop is a GPL-licensed interactive process viewer with per-core meters and tree view on Linux and macOS, but has no historical graphing.
Glances
A cross-platform system monitor that runs in a terminal, in a browser, or as an API feeding a dashboard.
Glances runs in a terminal or browser on Linux, macOS and Windows with APIs and exports, but is Python-based and heavier on small machines.
atop
A full-screen Linux performance monitor that reports and logs system and per-process resource usage.
atop is a full-screen Linux monitor that also logs per-process usage daily for long-term analysis, including processes that finished during the interval.
nmon
A terminal performance monitor for Linux and AIX showing CPU, memory, disks, network and processes.
nmon shows many metrics on one terminal screen for Linux and AIX and can record to CSV, with keyboard toggles to learn.
Similar software
Related functionality, not a direct replacement.
procs
Inspect processes with a more readable command-line listing.
iotop-c
A top-like Linux terminal tool that shows disk read and write activity for each process.
NetHogs
Linux terminal tool that shows network bandwidth usage grouped by process, like top for traffic.
nvtop
Watch GPU activity in a terminal interface.
below
A Linux resource monitor that records system, cgroup and process statistics and replays them later.
s-tui
Terminal tool that graphs CPU frequency, utilization, temperature and power and can run a stress test.
