Compare/Pretty Fish vs Terrarium

AI tool comparison

Pretty Fish vs Terrarium

Which one should you ship with? Here is the side-by-side panel verdict, pricing read, reviewer split, and community vote comparison.

P

Developer Tools

Pretty Fish

Free, beautiful Mermaid diagram editor that works offline

Ship

75%

Panel ship

Community

Free

Entry

Pretty Fish is a free, open-source Mermaid diagram editor with live preview, 5 built-in themes, multi-page workspaces, and one-click SVG/PNG export. It works offline as a Progressive Web App (PWA) and requires no account, no login, and no installation. It supports all 14+ Mermaid diagram types including flowcharts, sequence diagrams, Gantt charts, entity-relationship diagrams, and Git graphs. The editor includes syntax highlighting, auto-completion, instant error feedback, and a clean split-pane layout. The multi-page workspace lets you manage entire diagram projects in a single session. Export quality is excellent — SVG output is clean and scaling-ready for use in presentations, docs, or design systems. Pretty Fish hit Hacker News front page today with 128 points and has the makings of the go-to Mermaid editor for developers who generate diagrams from AI-assisted documentation workflows. With LLMs increasingly generating Mermaid syntax in their outputs, having a polished renderer and editor matters more than ever.

T

Developer Tools

Terrarium

Evals that actually simulate real deployment — stateful, multi-turn, alive

Mixed

50%

Panel ship

Community

Paid

Entry

Terrarium is a multi-turn evaluation and optimization engine for LLM agents built by evolvent-ai. Unlike static benchmark suites that measure agents against fixed input-output pairs, Terrarium creates persistent, stateful "living environments" — simulated deployment contexts where agents operate over extended sessions, accumulate state, use tools, and interact with simulated external systems. You evaluate agents the way you'd test a car: by driving it, not by measuring its doors. The system supports configurable environment complexity, including simulated databases, APIs, file systems, and user personas. Agents are scored not just on final outputs but on trajectory quality — how efficiently they reached the answer, how often they hallucinated intermediate steps, and how well they recovered from dead ends. The engine also supports continuous optimization loops where poor-performing trajectories trigger automatic prompt refinement. With 17 stars and created April 14, Terrarium is extremely new. But it's addressing a genuine gap: the disconnect between how agents perform on static benchmarks versus how they behave in production. As enterprise AI deployments scale, the need for realistic pre-production evaluation is becoming critical.

Decision
Pretty Fish
Terrarium
Panel verdict
Ship · 3 ship / 1 skip
Mixed · 2 ship / 2 skip
Community
No community votes yet
No community votes yet
Pricing
Free
Open Source
Best for
Free, beautiful Mermaid diagram editor that works offline
Evals that actually simulate real deployment — stateful, multi-turn, alive
Category
Developer Tools
Developer Tools

Reviewer scorecard

Builder
80/100 · ship

The official Mermaid live editor is clunky and slow. Pretty Fish loads instantly, works offline, and the multi-page workspace means I can manage all my architecture diagrams in one place. Bookmarking this immediately as my default Mermaid editor.

80/100 · ship

Static evals are lying to us constantly — agents that ace benchmarks fall apart in production because benchmarks don't have state, side effects, or accumulated context. Terrarium's living environments model is the right approach to catching real failure modes before deployment.

Skeptic
45/100 · skip

It's a genuinely nice editor but it's solving a niche problem — most devs who need Mermaid diagrams already use VS Code extensions or embed them in Notion. And with no backend, there's no collaboration or sharing story, which limits its use in team workflows.

45/100 · skip

Building a realistic simulation of your production environment is often harder than just running the agent in staging. The value proposition assumes your eval environment is meaningfully closer to production than your existing test suite — which is a big assumption for complex deployments.

Futurist
80/100 · ship

As AI tools increasingly output Mermaid syntax to explain architectures and flows, the need for a great rendering environment grows. Pretty Fish positions itself at the intersection of AI-generated diagrams and human editing — that's a well-timed niche.

80/100 · ship

The eval-optimize loop is the missing piece in most AI agent development workflows. Tools that can automatically identify weak trajectories and suggest improvements will become as fundamental as unit tests. Terrarium is early, but the category is inevitable.

Creator
80/100 · ship

Five beautiful themes and clean SVG exports mean I can finally use Mermaid diagrams in client-facing presentations without them looking like developer scratch notes. This is the Mermaid editor I've always wanted and the zero-friction setup seals it.

45/100 · skip

This is deeply technical infrastructure that won't affect my daily workflow. The people who need this know they need it — but for most creators building with AI tools, static evals are already more than they use.

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