When comparing Conky vs htop, the Slant community recommends htop for most people. In the question“What are the best system monitors for UNIX-like systems?” htop is ranked 1st while Conky is ranked 3rd. The most important reason people chose htop is:
htop is a terminal application which displays all running processes in an ordered list view. There's just one view of htop which displays everything. This avoids needless navigation through different views which usually is very time consuming.
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Infinitely themeable
Conky is editable to the point that there is almost no limit to the designs one can use to display the type of information one wants. Not only are there thousands of themes available on sites like deviantart and gnome-look, but a user can create any type of look they like with a little bit of know-how and imagination.
Pro Many different sensor stats
Conky has a bunch of sensor stats that the user can choose to display such as CPU usage, memory, uptime, etc. Depending on what the user wants to display, most likely there is a way to display the needed info when using Conky.
Pro Runs on top of X
Pro Important information all in one place
htop is a terminal application which displays all running processes in an ordered list view. There's just one view of htop which displays everything. This avoids needless navigation through different views which usually is very time consuming.
Pro Easily kill any process
You can scroll down to any process that you want to kill and just press F9
or k
to kill it.
Pro Colorful
Pro Has process tree view
Toggle by F5
or t
.
Cons
Con Setup can be difficult
Being text based, the config file for Conky can be intimidating for those unfamiliar. Though there are configuration managers out there such as Conky Manager which can make the setup a bit easier.
Con Is system monitor but can't manage processes
Conky is a great system monitor, but can't e.g. kill (individual) processes like htop can.
Con Requires X
Cannot easily be used on a headless server or remotely (most people and servers support remoting via SSH).
Con Horrible GUI
Con No network activity details
Con Lacks VIM bindings
Navigation is difficult if you have VIM bindings in your muscle memory.
Con CPU overhead
