Guide · October 23, 2026 · 5 min read

Feather Wallet or Biscuit: which Monero desktop wallet?

The same Monero underneath, two different ideas of a wallet

Short answer: if you only hold Monero and want the smallest, longest-tested desktop wallet, use Feather. If you also hold other cryptos, or want to swap between them without leaving your wallet, use Biscuit. Biscuit is built on Feather, so the Monero part works the same way in both, and a wallet moves from one to the other in a minute.

We make Biscuit, so read this knowing that. We also owe Feather a great deal, and we’d rather send you to it when it fits you better than pretend it doesn’t.

Feather and Biscuit at a glance

What is the same in both?

Biscuit started as a fork of Feather, and its Monero wallet is Feather’s, which we try hard not to change. In both you get:

• Polyseed, the 16-word Monero seed that holds its own date, and restoring from 25-word and old 14-word seeds;
• subaddresses and accounts, coin control, freezing outputs, paying many addresses at once;
• transaction proofs, view-only wallets, signed messages;
• Ledger and Trezor devices, and offline signing with QR codes on a computer that never goes online;
• your own node, or public ones, over Tor or I2P;
• releases built with Guix, so anyone can rebuild them from the source and compare, and signed updates.

The wallet files are the same too: a Feather wallet opens in Biscuit, and the other way round.

What does Biscuit add?

• Other cryptos, in the same window. You add only the ones you want, each with a standard seed that restores in other wallets. Monero works on its own. See which coins Biscuit supports.
• Exchange swaps between any two of your coins, ranked by what you receive, only from exchanges that say they will never ask for ID. You send from your wallet and get paid into your wallet.
• Atomic swaps from Bitcoin to Monero, with a market maker and no exchange in the middle, using eigenwallet’s protocol. See how they work.
• More of the app inside Tor. In Tor mode, prices, the Journal, updates and exchange swaps come from our onion address, and Biscuit checks that its connections really come out of Tor. See how to swap over Tor.
• A different look: a light and a dark theme, and icons drawn pixel by pixel.

When is Feather the better choice?

• You only hold Monero. Feather is Monero and nothing else. Biscuit carries the code for its other coins and swaps even if you never turn them on, and less code means less that can go wrong.
• You want a long track record. Feather has been used and reviewed by the Monero community since 2020. Biscuit is new: its first release came out in October 2026.
• You run Linux on ARM or RISC-V, a Raspberry Pi for example. Feather builds for them; Biscuit builds for x86_64 only.

Feather releases less often than it used to: its latest version, 2.8.1, came out in April 2025, and its development continues in public on GitHub.

How do they handle Tor?

Both include Tor, so there is nothing else to install, and both use the system’s Tor on Tails and Whonix. The defaults differ. Feather’s default is to sync the wallet over a direct connection and switch to Tor afterwards, because syncing over Tor is slow. In Biscuit’s Tor mode, Monero nodes are reached over Tor from the start by default, at .onion addresses; you can choose Feather’s behaviour instead in Settings › Network › Proxy. Either way, a node only learns your IP address, never your addresses or your balance. See Tor mode.

How do I move from Feather to Biscuit?

1. Close Feather. Don’t open the same wallet in both programs at once.
2. In Biscuit, choose Open wallet file and pick the wallet from Feather’s folder, or restore it from its seed: a Polyseed or an old 14-word Feather seed both work.
3. Enter the wallet’s password. It opens as it was in Feather.
4. If you want other cryptos, add them with the + on the Receive tab. They get their own 12 words: write them down too.

Going back works the same way: Feather opens the Monero wallet; the other coins stay in Biscuit, or restore from their 12 words in any wallet that supports them. See Restore a wallet.

Quick answers

Is Biscuit made by the Feather developers?

No. Biscuit is a separate project built on Feather’s code, under the same license. The Feather developers aren’t involved, so please send Biscuit problems to us, not to them.

Does Feather support Bitcoin?

No. Feather is a Monero-only wallet. If you need Monero and Bitcoin in one desktop app, that is what Biscuit was made for.

Is Biscuit less private than Feather?

Not for Monero, which works the same way and reaches the same kinds of nodes. Like Feather, Biscuit has no account, no analytics and no crash reports. The other coins have weaker privacy than Monero on their own blockchains, in any wallet: that is their design, not the wallet’s.

Can I use the same Monero seed in both?

Yes. The 16-word Polyseed restores in both, as do 25-word seeds. Use one program at a time for the same wallet.

Which one is better for a beginner?

Both are made to be easy, with sane defaults. If you only hold Monero, Feather has fewer things to learn. If you are coming with other coins, Biscuit saves you a second wallet and a trip to an exchange.

Learn more

• Everything Biscuit does
• Monero in Biscuit
• Wallet files, and opening them in other wallets
• Feather Wallet, on its own site
• How to get Monero without KYC

Questions? Write to us through the contact page.

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