btop

Best for

Anyone who wants a readable system dashboard over SSH without installing a GUI monitor.

Why it deserves attention

btop draws live graphs for CPU cores, memory, disks, network, and processes in a single terminal window, with themes, mouse support, and per-process signals. It runs on Linux and macOS, is Apache-2.0 licensed, and is actively maintained with more than 30,000 GitHub stars. It is far more legible than top or htop on a modern terminal. It is still a local monitor: for fleet metrics you need Prometheus, Netdata, or a hosted service.

Can replace

• top

Related and alternatives

• Sniffnet
• tmux

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