Ora
Elegant terminal spinner library for Node.js. Ora provides animated loading indicators (spinners, progress indicators) with text updates, promise-based API, color support, and success/fail/warn finish states. Used in CLI tools and agent workflows to show that a long-running operation is in progress without printing repeated log lines.
Score Breakdown
⚙ Agent Friendliness
🔒 Security
Terminal UI library. Spinner text content should not include sensitive data as it appears on screen in plaintext.
⚡ Reliability
Best When
Building interactive Node.js CLI tools where operations take >1 second and you want visual feedback without cluttering the terminal with log lines.
Avoid When
Your output is going to CI logs or piped — spinners don't render in non-TTY environments and will produce messy output.
Use Cases
- • Show agent operation progress in CLI tools — display spinner while waiting for LLM API calls, file processing, or network operations
- • Provide visual feedback during agent workflow stages using spinner.text updates that replace the current line as work progresses
- • Use ora.promise(promise, text) to automatically start/stop spinner tied to promise resolution with success/fail state display
- • Build polished agent CLI outputs where each step shows progress status (spinning → success ✓ or fail ✗) for better UX
- • Display multi-step agent workflow progress by creating multiple ora instances and transitioning them through states
Not For
- • Non-TTY environments — Ora detects non-TTY and falls back to simple text output but animations won't work in CI logs or piped output
- • Concurrent operation spinners — Ora manages a single line; use cli-progress for multi-bar concurrent progress
- • Web applications — Ora is terminal-only; use CSS animations or loading components for web UIs
Interface
Authentication
No authentication — local CLI UX library.
Pricing
Ora is open source and free.
Agent Metadata
Known Gotchas
- ⚠ Ora 6+ is ESM-only — require('ora') fails in CJS projects; stay on Ora 5.x for CommonJS or migrate to ESM
- ⚠ console.log() while a spinner is active corrupts terminal output — use spinner.text to update text, or stop the spinner before logging
- ⚠ Spinner animations use ANSI escape codes that may not work in all terminals — Windows cmd.exe and old terminals may show raw escape characters
- ⚠ In non-TTY environments (CI, piped output), Ora automatically uses static text output — test both TTY and non-TTY rendering for your CLI
- ⚠ ora.promise() shows success check or fail X based on promise resolution — the spinner text before resolve is the 'in progress' state; plan text accordingly
- ⚠ Multiple concurrent ora instances writing to the same stdout will corrupt each other — use listr2 or log-update for multi-line spinner management
Alternatives
Full Evaluation Report
Detailed scoring breakdown, competitive positioning, security analysis, and improvement recommendations for Ora.
Scores are editorial opinions as of 2026-03-06.