FileZilla transfers files. Conchshell also opens the shell.

Both speak SFTP and FTPS, and that overlap is where the comparison starts. FTPS is FTP over TLS, not SFTP; in Conchshell it runs through rustls and is checked against the system root certificates, with no certificate pinning yet. FileZilla adds plain FTP, and in the paid Pro build WebDAV and a dozen-odd cloud back ends, from S3 to SharePoint. Conchshell has none of those and will not pretend otherwise.

What Conchshell adds sits on the other side of an SSH connection: a real PTY terminal with four-way splits and tab groups, RDP, live CPU, memory, disk and network graphs for the host you are already on, and a log viewer that takes several sources at once with level filters, regex and live tail.

Neither list contains the other. Which half of your day is bigger decides it.

FileZilla has no terminal in any edition, free or paid. That is not our reading of a feature list — FileZilla Pro's own comparison page prints “Built-in terminal emulator: No” about itself. There is no port forwarding, no jump host and no SCP either; SSH exists there only as the transport underneath SFTP.

So PuTTY or Terminal.app sits open beside it with the same host typed in twice. Conchshell keeps one connection definition — host, port, user, proxy chain, jump host — and opens a terminal, a file panel or an RDP session against it. Jump hosts carry their own credentials; the proxy list is HTTP CONNECT, SOCKS4, SOCKS4a and SOCKS5.

Two limits, before you find them yourself. RDP here authenticates through CredSSP (NLA) with no fallback path, so a host with NLA switched off will not connect and none of this is parity with mstsc. ssh-agent is not supported at all — keys are files, and an encrypted key is opened with its passphrase.

FileZilla's knowledge base is blunt about its default: “By default, FileZilla and FileZilla Pro save the passwords you enter in the Site Manager in plain text.” The encoding is Base64, and the same article shows how to decode a Pass element out of an export. The master password is real cryptography — PBKDF2-SHA256, at least 100,000 iterations over a 32-byte salt, deriving an X25519 key — but it is opt-in, a forgotten one cannot be recovered, and nothing in the design touches Windows DPAPI, the macOS Keychain or libsecret.

Conchshell has one storage path and no weaker mode to pick. The vault is XChaCha20-Poly1305 with its key derived by Argon2id, opened through three independent slots over one data key: a passphrase, the system keychain, or a recovery code. The interface can create a credential and delete it; it cannot read one back, because no such command exists. Each one is bound to its route — change the host, port, user, proxy chain or jump host and it is not offered.

Host identity works the same way underneath: a trust-on-first-use fingerprint store, with the confirmation drawn by the operating system rather than by the application, and RDP and FTPS certificates checked against the same store.

The FileZilla client is free with no restrictions, personal or commercial: GPLv3, no key, no seat count, five hundred machines for nothing. What it leaves out is WebDAV, cloud storage of any kind, Site Synchronization, batch automation and a support channel. Those are FileZilla Pro, listed on 20 August 2026 under the heading “Subscription plans and prices” at 12.99 euro a year for one device and 29.99 euro for three. Their terms still describe one-off purchases, so older keys exist; what is on sale today renews.

Conchshell is free on every platform, with no account and no cloud. One feature is paid — syncing saved connections between your own machines, $19 once, an introductory price, later $29 — with lifetime updates, no limit on the number of machines, and a licence checked on your own machine. It mirrors the encrypted vault into a folder you already sync, because there is no server of ours in the path. Without such a folder only the first copy travels, by reading a code off the desktop screen.

Neither client is an Electron app and both are small. Conchshell 2.15.1 is a 9.1 MB download on Apple silicon, checked 20 August 2026, and 18 MB on disk, 20.6 MiB for the Intel build, measured on version 2.10.1 on 3 August 2026; FileZilla is native C++ in the same weight class. Between these two, size is not the argument.

One thing to know before you download this one rather than after: the Windows installer pulls Microsoft Edge WebView2 from the network when the machine has none, and the phone client is an APK from the site rather than a Google Play listing, with no iOS build yet. Every release ships a SHA256SUMS file, and the .deb, .rpm, .AppImage, .msi, -setup.exe and .app.tar.gz have detached .sig files; the two .dmg files do not.

• Your day holds an ssh session as well as an upload. FileZilla will never open one.
• You reach production through a bastion. FileZilla has HTTP and SOCKS proxies but no SSH jump host.
• There is a Windows box in the estate and you want it in the same window, with CredSSP (NLA) being all it has to speak.
• You want stored credentials encrypted by default rather than after you find the setting.
• You remap keyboard shortcuts. FileZilla's are fixed and the request has sat open in their tracker since 2005.

• You need cloud storage. FileZilla Pro talks to S3, B2, R2, Google Cloud Storage, Azure Blob and File, Drive, Dropbox, Box, OneDrive and SharePoint through their own APIs, and to WebDAV. Conchshell talks to none of them, and nothing on this page is a promise that it will.
• The source matters to you. FileZilla is GPLv3, with a tarball for every release and a public tracker going back twenty years. Conchshell's source is not published, and if that decides it, it decides it.
• The far end is an ageing shared-hosting FTP box with odd path syntax and PASV quirks. Twenty years of server-type settings and per-site connection limits handle that; Conchshell's file side is SFTP and FTPS only, with no plain FTP and no such library of workarounds.
• You need 32-bit Windows or Linux, an Intel Mac back to macOS 10.13.2, *BSD, or an interface in one of forty-odd languages. FileZilla ships all of it and lives in apt, dnf, pacman, Homebrew and winget. Conchshell asks for macOS 12 or later, ships Android only as an APK from the site, and has no iOS build.
• You want an organisation behind the tool: security fixes funded through EU-FOSSA, a SHA-512 for every download, a moderated forum, and a free AGPL server for the other end. Conchshell is one person.

1. In FileZilla: File > Export…, tick Export Site Manager entries, save the XML. Open it in an editor — that is also how you learn whether the Pass values are Base64 or encrypted.
2. Download Conchshell and check it against SHA256SUMS. On macOS 13 and later the first launch goes through System Settings, Privacy & Security, Open Anyway; on macOS 12 the path is System Preferences, Security & Privacy, General. Both paths are written out on /download/ as well.
3. Add your hosts. Conchshell imports and exports its own JSON bundle — connections, folders, profiles, settings — but it does not read FileZilla's XML, so the first pass is typed in by hand.
4. Leave your keys where they are. Private keys and passphrase-encrypted keys are pointed at as files; ssh-agent is not supported, so a key living only inside an agent needs its file back.
5. Re-enter passwords once. Credentials are deliberately kept out of the JSON bundle, and each saved one is bound to host, port, user, proxy chain and jump host.
6. Delete the FileZilla export. If no master password was set, that file is a list of your servers with the passwords attached.

See what the $19 covers

Is Conchshell free?

The application is free on macOS, Windows and Linux. One feature is paid: syncing saved connections between your own machines, $19 once at the introductory price, $29 later. Nothing expires, nothing greys out, there is no trial clock and no limit on the number of machines. Updates are included for good, and the licence is checked on your own machine without a network call.

Do I need an account?

No, and there is not one to create. There is no sign-in, no cloud and no server of ours between your machines. Syncing works by mirroring the encrypted vault into a folder you already sync, such as iCloud Drive, Dropbox or a git checkout. Without such a folder only the first copy travels, by reading a code off the desktop screen.

Does FileZilla do RDP?

No. There is no remote desktop in any FileZilla product: not the free client, not Pro, not the command-line build and not their server. The line is a file-transfer line. Conchshell has RDP in the same window as the terminal at no extra cost, with one caveat worth knowing first: it authenticates through CredSSP, so a host with NLA disabled will refuse the connection, and that is not the same thing as mstsc.

Does FileZilla store passwords in plain text?

By default, yes. Their own knowledge base says the Site Manager saves passwords in plain text, Base64-encoded, and documents how to decode them out of an exported file. Switching on the master password fixes that with PBKDF2-SHA256 and an X25519 key, but you have to know to switch it on, and there is no recovery if you forget the passphrase.

Is FileZilla Pro a subscription?

What is on sale today is. On 20 August 2026 their price list is headed Subscription plans and prices and quotes yearly figures: 12.99 euro a year for one device, 29.99 euro for three. Their terms still describe one-off purchases carrying services for up to five years, so older perpetual keys exist, but new buyers are billed yearly.

Can I import my FileZilla sites into Conchshell?

Not directly. Conchshell reads and writes its own JSON bundle of connections, folders, profiles and settings; it does not parse FileZilla's site XML. In practice you keep the export open in an editor and type the hosts in once. Passwords would not have travelled anyway, since credentials are excluded from the bundle by design.

Which platforms does Conchshell run on?

macOS 12 or later on Apple silicon and Intel, Windows, and Linux as .deb, .rpm and .AppImage, plus Android 7.0 and newer as an APK from the site. It is not in Google Play, and there is no iOS build yet. FileZilla is desktop-only, so on a phone it is not an option at all.

If FileZilla covers your work, keep it. It is free in a way a paid product cannot argue with, it carries twenty years of protocol scar tissue, and the Pro build reaches clouds Conchshell has never touched.

Install Conchshell when the file panel is half the job: when the same host also needs a shell, a bastion in front of it, an RDP session against a machine that speaks NLA, or a vault encrypted before you go looking for the setting.

See what the $19 covers

• What Conchshell is
• Download for macOS, Windows and Linux
• What is free and what the $19 covers
• Conchshell compared with WinSCP
• Conchshell compared with Cyberduck