What Each Tier Includes

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
DirectX 12 renderer Required, not preferred: there is no software fallback
What sponsoring adds
Prebuilt binary No toolchain, no build step
Code signed and timestamped
Automatic updates
Stable and tip channels Tip tracks development, stable does not
Sponsors only Discord channel Linking your GitHub account grants the role automatically
MSI installer For SCCM, Intune and Group Policy deployment
What Pro adds
Persistent sessions Detach from a session and reattach later, including after a restart
Terminal multiplexer
Read aloud Speaks selected terminal output, with voice and language selection
Streamer mode On screen keycast, plus password prompt detection and secret redaction
Agent detection and project icons Recognises coding agents and repository hosts, and labels tabs accordingly
Group Policy templates ADMX and ADML for centrally managed settings
Register as the default terminal
DirectX 11 renderer Pro Legacy only. Uses WARP, Microsoft's CPU rasterizer, in Remote Desktop sessions and where no supported adapter exists. Tested on Windows 11; Windows 10 is untested

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 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, message the founder. 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 the founder what your environment requires and what your procurement process needs to see.

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.

Remote Desktop is the one case that is not obvious. A Remote Desktop or Hyper-V Enhanced Session presents an indirect display driver, and Legacy skips the hardware probe entirely there: it renders through WARP whether or not the machine has a GPU. Pro renders the same way it does locally. Which is faster depends on the connection, so if you work over Remote Desktop, try both.

Each row is derived from what a tier actually builds and runs, so a feature is listed for a tier only when the code implementing it is in that tier's build. Nothing here is derived from a marketing plan.

Three consequences worth stating plainly, because they are the kind of thing a comparison table usually hides:

• Pro Legacy really is Pro on an older renderer, not a reduced edition. It is forked from Pro, so the two carry the same feature set and differ in which renderer they build. Rows here track what a tier actually builds and runs, not what happens to be on disk.
• The renderer rows are the one place the table is not cumulative. They say which renderer a tier uses, so Legacy ticks a row Pro does not. Everything else only adds.
• 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.

Note

Prebuilt builds are for sponsors. The source is free and always will be, and you can build it yourself. No build has been published yet either, so there is nothing to download today.

Sponsor at any amount, then sign in with the same GitHub account. Which tier you get follows the amount, and how access works says what each amount covers.