When comparing Tilda vs Termite, the Slant community recommends Termite for most people. In the question“What are the best Linux terminal emulators?” Termite is ranked 9th while Tilda is ranked 12th. The most important reason people chose Termite is:
Termite is a minimalistic terminal emulator. It does not need too many resources to run and it's designed primarily to work with window managers.
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Highly customizable
There are tons of customizations you can make: from adding colors to text, turning backgrounds transparent, setting the size to be "maximized", toggling scrollbar on and off, adjusting orientation/borders/animation, etc.
Pro Few dependencies
Tilda is a very minimal and lean terminal emulator. It requires very few dependencies and the amount of resources needed is small.
Pro Easily accessible drop-down
The drop-down function in Tilda does not get in the way and can be accessed at any time with a keyboard shortcut.
Pro Supports transparency
You can monitor information displayed by applications under Tilda.
Pro Tabs support
Tilda supports tabs. By default: to open a new tab press Ctrl + Shift + t. To move through them: Ctrl + PgUp/PgDn.
Pro Minimal terminal emulator
Termite is a minimalistic terminal emulator. It does not need too many resources to run and it's designed primarily to work with window managers.
Pro Works great with a tiling window manager
Termite is most suited to a tiling window manager with a simple config file.
Pro Vim-like behavior
Termite supports a command mode which is very useful if you prefer to use Vim-like keybindings. It takes inspiration from Vim, one of the most popular text editors, so someone who is used to Vim's commands will find themselves at home.
Pro Simple configuration
Termite is easy to configure. Reconfiguration does not require logging out or rebooting.
Pro 24-bit "True Color" support
Termite supports true color palettes, meaning that it allows for up to 16,777,216 possible colors.
Cons
Con Contains some annoying bugs
Tilda can be buggy at times. For example, if you don't close it before shutdown, it may prompt you to reconfigure it all over again on the next boot.
Con Cannot set specific parameters through CLI arguments
Setting specific parameters through CLI arguments is not supported in Termite.
Con Difficult to install in some distros
Con Problem correctly displaying images while using compton
Images can sometimes not be displayed correctly in software such as ranger while using compton.
Con Limited documentation
There's only short manpages and a README on the front page of the repository which has few details on additional configuration and features.