What Each Tier Includes
A feature by feature comparison of the OSS, Sponsor, Pro, Pro Enterprise and Pro Legacy tiers of Wintty.
Every tier is the same terminal. The paid tiers add to it and never take anything away, so moving up a tier never costs you a feature and dropping back down never breaks a file you wrote.
The table below is grouped to make the two separate questions easy to keep apart. The first group is the terminal itself. The second is what sponsoring buys, which is distribution rather than features. The third is the paid feature set.
| Feature | OSS | Sponsor | Pro | Pro Enterprise | Pro Legacy |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| In every tier | |||||
| The terminal itself Tabs, splits, quick terminal, command palette, settings, themes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| DirectX 12 renderer | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No |
| What sponsoring adds | |||||
| Prebuilt binary No toolchain, no build step | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Code signed and timestamped | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Automatic updates | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Stable and tip channels Tip tracks development, stable does not | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Sponsors only Discord channel Linking your GitHub account grants the role automatically | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| MSI installer For SCCM, Intune and Group Policy deployment | No | No | No | Yes | No |
| What Pro adds | |||||
| Persistent sessions Detach from a session and reattach later, including after a restart | No | No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Terminal multiplexer | No | No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Read aloud Speaks selected terminal output, with voice and language selection | No | No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Streamer mode On screen keycast, plus password prompt detection and secret redaction | No | No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Guided SSH setup | No | No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Agent detection and project icons Recognises coding agents and repository hosts, and labels tabs accordingly | No | No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Group Policy templates ADMX and ADML for centrally managed settings | No | No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Register as the default terminal | No | No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| ConPTY bypass Talks to the shell directly, so sequences Windows would otherwise strip survive | No | No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Remote Desktop adaptation | No | No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| DirectX 11 renderer Pro Legacy only. The other tiers render with DirectX 12 | No | No | No | No | Yes |
OSS has no distribution row ticked. That is the whole shape of the model. The source is complete and free, and what you are paying for higher up is a build you did not have to make, signed so it can be trusted, that updates itself.
Sponsor adds nothing to the terminal. It is deliberately the same binary the OSS tree produces. If a feature is missing from Sponsor it is missing from OSS too.
Pro Desktop and Pro Enterprise are the same build. In the build pipeline they are two packaging profiles of one tier, and they differ only in the package identity and the update channel they are served on. The MSI is the real difference, and it is what makes fleet deployment possible. Enterprise is about how the software reaches your machines and how you pay for it, not about extra features.
Wintty identifies you by your GitHub account, and access follows your sponsorship. That works well for an individual and badly for an organisation: your people should not have to hold personal sponsorships to run software the company bought, and a build pushed out by Intune or SCCM should not be waiting for each user to sign in.
So Enterprise is where that gets sorted out properly. It ships an MSI for deployment with SCCM, Intune or Group Policy, and it is arranged directly rather than through GitHub Sponsors, which cannot express invoices, VAT or seat counts.
If the GitHub account model does not fit your organisation, get in touch and we will find an arrangement that works. That includes organisation-wide entitlement instead of per-person sponsorships, deployment from a package source you control, and purchasing on your terms rather than ours. Tell us what your environment requires and what your procurement process needs to see.
To start that conversation, reach out to @polyMatto on X, or by email, which is easy enough to find.
Pro Legacy trails Pro. It is cut from a snapshot of Pro roughly six months behind, and only picks up security fixes between cuts. That is the trade for running on hardware the DirectX 12 renderer cannot support. If your machine can run Pro, run Pro.
Each row is derived from the contents of builds/<tier>/overlay/ in
the release repository. That directory is what gets layered onto the
source tree when a tier is built, so a feature is listed for a tier
only when the files implementing it are actually present in that
tier's overlay. Nothing here is derived from a marketing plan.
Two consequences worth stating plainly, because they are the kind of thing a comparison table usually hides:
- The Pro Legacy overlay is identical to the Pro overlay apart from build artifacts. Legacy really is Pro on an older renderer, not a reduced edition.
- The Desktop and Enterprise variants differ only in package identity. Enterprise is a packaging and purchasing arrangement rather than a larger feature set, and the table says so rather than padding the column out.