Conchshell vs FinalShell, feature by feature

FinalShell's free tier is not crippled: SSH with no host limit or timer, the SFTP browser, host monitoring, and remote desktop on the Windows build, all without registering. Most of its users never pay anything, and a page arguing against it on price alone is arguing badly.

The paid tiers are cheap and perpetual: on the pricing page as read on 20 August 2026, ¥35 for Advanced and ¥128 for Professional, both one-off. The one recurring charge is cloud sync at ¥49 a year, and it cannot be bought alone — the same page says you must hold a paid tier first, so syncing hosts starts at ¥35 plus ¥49 in year one and ¥49 every year after, in yuan only. Conchshell charges for the same one thing and charges once: the application is free on macOS, Windows and Linux, and syncing saved connections between your own machines is $19, introductory, then $29.

FinalShell keeps one folder per connection under conn/ — ~/.finalshell/conn/ on Linux, ~/Library/FinalShell/conn/ on macOS — with the credential in a password field, and documents nothing about how it is protected. Reverse engineering public since 2021 shows the format: single DES, with the key derived from eight bytes stored beside the ciphertext in the same file. No master password, no OS keychain. Read access to that directory is read access to every server password you have saved.

Conchshell's vault is XChaCha20-Poly1305, keyed by Argon2id from a master phrase, with the phrase, the OS keychain and a recovery code as independent slots over one data key. The interface writes and deletes credentials but cannot read one back, because no such command exists. Each is bound to host, port, user, proxy chain and jump host.

Credit where it is due: FinalShell's cloud sync is a better story than its local storage. The vendor documents encryption on your machine under a password you choose, names AES-256 and HMAC-SHA256, and says it cannot recover that password. The right shape, and still an unaudited claim about closed code — and it is your connection store that goes up.

There is no FTP and no FTPS in FinalShell, on any tier. FTPS is FTP over TLS, a different protocol from SFTP and a different server: the feature list, the changelog back to 2016 and the FAQ never mention either, and file transfer here is SFTP over SSH plus Zmodem. Conchshell's FTPS runs over rustls and checks the system root store; certificate pinning is not implemented yet.

Remote desktop is what comparison pages get wrong most often. It is first-class and free on the Windows build. On macOS it is absent and the vendor's FAQ says so in one line; for Linux the documentation says nothing either way. Conchshell's RDP runs on all three desktops, and its limit belongs before the download rather than after: CredSSP with NLA only, so a host with NLA switched off will not connect, and this is not mstsc parity.

Three things sit in FinalShell's own FAQ. It opens three SSH connections per session — terminal, file browsing, transfers — so you may authenticate three times and the server shows three times the sessions. It runs set +o history on connect. And the monitoring sidebar works over the SSH Exec Channel, which a published hands-on comparison found costing the remote sshd noticeable CPU; switching Exec Channel off fixes that and breaks directory syncing between terminal and file pane.

All five official FinalShell downloads carry a Last-Modified of 29 May 2025 and the changelog stops at 21 May 2025 — about fifteen months of quiet on a closed-source client that stores private keys. Neither installer is signed, and Homebrew has deprecated the cask for failing Gatekeeper and disables it on 1 September 2026.

Conchshell has its own rough edges: the Windows installer pulls Microsoft Edge WebView2 from the network when the machine has none, the Android build is in no store, and there is no iOS build at all. It publishes SHA256SUMS, and detached .sig files for the packages the updater installs — the .dmg is not one of them. It is a 9.1 MB download and 18 MB on disk on Apple silicon, 20.6 MiB for the Intel build, against official installers of 67 to 107 MB for a Java application carrying its own runtime.

• You do not read Chinese. There is no English interface and no language switch, and two requests for one have sat unanswered on the community tracker since 2024.
• Your week includes an FTPS server, which FinalShell cannot reach at any tier.
• You need remote desktop from a Mac, which the vendor's FAQ says its Mac build does not do.
• You would rather saved passwords sat behind Argon2id and the OS keychain than DES.

• The file browser and the terminal share a working directory: cd in the shell and the pane follows. Conchshell's two panes you steer yourself, and for people who live in that workflow the argument ends there.
• Free monitoring of the box you just connected to, with nothing installed on it: CPU, memory, disk, processes, ping and traceroute, through ordinary commands.
• A free relay network: FinalShell runs its own overseas acceleration servers and gives SSH and RDP acceleration away on the free tier, exposed as a port forward any client can use.
• A Linux build for LoongArch64 alongside x86-64 and arm64. Conchshell has nothing for that hardware.
• Ten years of releases and a Chinese-language support ecosystem where any problem you hit is already written up, usually with a screenshot.

1. Download Conchshell: .dmg for macOS, an installer for Windows, .deb, .rpm or .AppImage for Linux. The first launch on a Mac needs System Settings, Privacy and Security, Open Anyway.
2. Read your host list out of FinalShell's config folder: ~/.finalshell/conn/ on Linux, ~/Library/FinalShell/conn/ on macOS. Each connection is a folder with a connect_config JSON holding host, port and user. There is no export command, so this folder is the export.
3. Add the hosts in Conchshell and group them into folders — no converter exists, so this part is typing. Connections, folders, profiles and settings then export as one JSON bundle, which is how the second machine gets them.
4. Re-enter passwords once: credentials are deliberately left out of that export file and go into the local vault instead. Private key files do not move: point each connection at the path where the key already lives, and note that ssh-agent is not supported, so the key is named as a file.
5. Delete FinalShell's conn/ folder afterwards, including any copy in Dropbox, OneDrive or a git checkout, and rotate what was in it.

See what $19 covers

Is Conchshell really free, or is there a catch later?

The application is free on macOS, Windows and Linux, with no account, no trial timer and nothing that greys itself out. One feature is paid: syncing saved connections between your own machines, $19 once at the introductory price, then $29. It is a purchase and not a subscription, so nothing renews, updates are included, and the licence key is checked on your own machine without a network call.

Do I need an account for either of these?

Conchshell has no account to make. FinalShell does not ask for one to download or to run the free tier, but a hostbuf.com login is required to buy a licence, to activate Advanced or Professional and to use cloud sync; the purchase page redirects straight to a sign-in. Their FAQ also says the paid tier cannot be activated from a network with no route out.

Does FinalShell do RDP on a Mac?

No. The vendor's FAQ answers it in one line: the Mac version does not currently support remote desktop. RDP is a Windows-build feature, and free there. For Linux the documentation says nothing in either direction, so treat that as unknown. Conchshell's RDP runs on all three desktops, with the caveat that it speaks CredSSP with NLA only, so a host with NLA switched off will not connect.

Can FinalShell connect to an FTP or FTPS server?

No. FTPS is FTP over TLS, not SFTP, and the two are not interchangeable. File transfer in FinalShell is SFTP over SSH plus Zmodem, and nothing in the feature list, the changelog going back to 2016 or the FAQ mentions FTP or TLS-over-FTP once. Their own troubleshooting for a file pane that will not open is to switch on the server's SFTP service. Conchshell's FTPS goes through rustls and checks the system root certificates; pinning is not implemented yet.

Where does FinalShell store my server passwords?

In the connection's own folder under conn/, inside that connection's JSON, protected by single DES with the key derived from eight bytes stored beside the ciphertext. No master password and no OS keychain is involved, so anything able to read the folder can print the passwords, and public tooling has done exactly that since 2021. Keep that folder out of synced drives and repositories.

Is FinalShell still being updated?

The last release visible from outside is 4.6.x. The changelog's newest entry is 21 May 2025 and all five official downloads carry a Last-Modified of 29 May 2025, which is about fifteen months of quiet as of 20 August 2026. The vendor has not said the project is finished, so read it as a gap rather than an ending, on a closed-source tool holding SSH keys.

Can I import my FinalShell connections directly?

Not directly. There is no converter, and no export in FinalShell to convert from. You read host, port and user out of the per-connection JSON files under conn/ and add them once. After that Conchshell exports connections, folders, profiles and settings as a single JSON bundle, so the second and third machines are one file. Credentials are left out of that bundle by design.

If you read Chinese, live in one window with your file browser, and reach the occasional Windows box from a Windows desktop, FinalShell has earned its following, and its top tier is a one-off ¥128 at the price listed on 20 August 2026.

If the interface has to be in a language you read, if an FTPS server or a Mac RDP session is part of your week, or if that password file bothers you, the download costs nothing and the only thing that ever costs money is syncing between your own machines.

See what $19 covers

• What Conchshell is
• Download for macOS, Windows and Linux
• How the vault and host-key checking work
• Conchshell vs Xshell
• Conchshell vs MobaXterm