Conchshell vs Royal TSX

Royal Apps calls it Shareware Mode, and it is not a trial: no time limit, no key, no registration. The ceiling is three lines in their documentation. No more than 10 connections, no more than 10 credentials, one open document. Those are object counts, and nothing in the documentation withholds a protocol, so SSH, RDP and file transfer all work inside the ten.

Past ten hosts you buy. On 20 August 2026 the buy page listed Royal TSX Individual at €49.00 excluding VAT, covering macOS only. Conchshell has nothing to unlock: the application is free on macOS, Windows and Linux, there are no tiers and no trial, and exactly one feature is paid, syncing saved connections between your own machines, $19 once. Host eleven is added the same way as host one.

The licence is perpetual for the version you bought and carries a year of maintenance on most tiers. When it lapses nothing switches off: you keep the last version released while it was active. Newer releases are not covered, and resuming costs 50% of list price, up to six months after expiry.

Royal Apps stated plainly in April 2026 that it is not moving to subscriptions, which deserves credit, and a lapsed maintenance never takes the application away. The friction is at the seam. One MacUpdate reviewer describes installing an update and only afterwards being told the licence did not cover the new version. That is a single account rather than a measured pattern, but it is the shape of the risk you carry with dated maintenance.

The $19 here is a purchase rather than a rental: updates are included, and the key is checked on your own machine with no network involved.

Royal TSX is macOS. The Windows client is Royal TS: separate product, separate licence, €49.00 each or €79.00 for the pair on 20 August 2026, and they are not feature-identical, with Performance View, External Applications and the in-app shortcut editor Windows-only. There is no Linux client at all, and Royal Connect Desktop, the rewrite that would bring one, had no public beta and no date on 20 August 2026.

What is genuinely portable there is the file: one .rtsz opens in Royal TS, Royal TSX, Royal TSi and Royal TSD. Conchshell answers the same question the other way round, from one codebase: macOS on Apple silicon and Intel, Windows, and Linux as .deb, .rpm and .AppImage, with the same shortcuts and the same JSON bundle on each of them.

A Royal document is XML underneath. Sensitive fields are encrypted inside it, but full document encryption is something you switch on, and without a document password Royal Apps says its built-in protection should not be considered equivalent to password-based encryption. A third-party GitHub tool that decrypts Royal TS password fields shows what that means in practice. Where the crypto is written down, in a knowledge-base answer rather than on the security page, it is XTS-AES-128 with PBKDF2, and no iteration count is published.

The Conchshell vault is XChaCha20-Poly1305, keyed by Argon2id from your master phrase, and it is not optional. Independent key slots sit over a single data key — the passphrase, the operating system keychain, a recovery code — so adding or revoking one method rewrites a slot instead of re-encrypting the vault. The interface can write a credential and delete it; no command reads one back. Credentials are bound to host, port, user, proxy chain and jump host, so change any of those and the password is not offered. Host keys go into a TOFU fingerprint store, with the confirmation drawn by the operating system rather than by the application, and RDP and FTPS certificates are checked the same way against the system roots. Certificate pinning is not there yet.

Import into Royal TSX is broad: .rdp files, CSV, mRemote, RDCMan, Remote Desktop Manager, KeePass, LastPass, 1Password, iTerm2, AWS EC2. Export is the thin half. Their own knowledge base says the All Objects export really only exports the Name and the Description, and a usable CSV needs the RoyalDocument.PowerShell module.

Conchshell writes connections, folders, profiles and settings to a JSON bundle you can read in a text editor, with credentials deliberately left out. Leaving does not require a script, and the same file is what an import expects, so the list travels between your own machines by hand if you never buy sync at all.

One feature is paid, and it is worth being exact about it. The encrypted vault is mirrored into a folder you already synchronise yourself: iCloud Drive, Dropbox, a git working copy. There is no Conchshell cloud, and that is the limitation as much as the feature. Without such a folder only the first copy travels, by typing a code shown on the desktop screen.

It is $19 once at the introductory price and $29 later, not a subscription, with updates included and no limit on how many of your own machines take part. Everything else in the application stays free whether you buy it or not.

• You are past ten hosts and would rather not buy your way past a counter. The application is free on all three desktop platforms and there is no tier to unlock.
• Your machines are not all Macs. The same application, the same shortcuts and the same JSON bundle run on Windows and Linux, with nothing bought per platform.
• You want the vault encrypted by default rather than by remembering to switch it on, with no command in the interface that reads a stored password back out.
• Size matters. 9.1 MB to download and 18 MB on disk on Apple silicon, 20.6 MiB for the Intel build, and 286 MB across 7 processes for four SSH sessions against 1388 MB and 15 processes for an Electron client, measured on 3 August 2026 on macOS 26.5.2.

• Breadth. VMware and Hyper-V consoles, TeamViewer, a WebKit browser tab, panels for Windows services, processes and event logs, all in one window. The Conchshell window holds an SSH terminal, an SFTP and FTPS file manager, RDP and host monitoring, and none of those tabs.
• Depth on RDP. FreeRDP with Remote Desktop Gateway, proxies, full-screen multi-monitor, HiDPI scaling, and drive, printer, clipboard, audio and microphone redirection. Conchshell speaks CredSSP only, with no fallback, so a host with NLA switched off will not connect at all, and no parity with mstsc is claimed.
• Corporate secrets. Royal TSX opens 1Password, LastPass and KeePass vaults directly, and Dynamic Credentials pull from Delinea Secret Server, CyberArk and Keeper at connect time. Conchshell reads none of them, and there is also no ssh-agent support, so an encrypted key is chosen and unlocked per connection.
• Team sharing with no infrastructure: a shared file document with multi-user edit and merge, no SQL back end, and per-person overrides. Conchshell shares nothing with anyone. The $19 sync moves your own connections between your own machines and stops there.
• Mobile apps and a company behind them. Royal TSi is in the App Store, Royal TSD in Google Play, and Royal Apps GmbH runs a support portal and issues VAT invoices. The Conchshell Android build is in no store, there is no iOS build, and its Windows installer fetches Microsoft Edge WebView2 over the network when the machine has none.

1. Leave the .rtsz where it is. Conchshell cannot read it, so keep Royal TSX installed until the new list is complete.
2. Get the inventory out. The All Objects CSV gives name and description only, so take host, port and username from the connection properties, or from RoyalDocument.PowerShell with Export-Csv.
3. Install Conchshell from the download page at /download/. On macOS 13 and later the first launch goes through System Settings → Privacy & Security → Open Anyway; on macOS 12 the same step lives in System Preferences → Security & Privacy → General.
4. Add the hosts, or import a JSON bundle in the shape Conchshell exports: connections, folders, profiles and settings travel in that one file.
5. Point each connection at the private key already on your disk. Encrypted keys with a passphrase work, and because there is no ssh-agent support the key is selected per connection.
6. Type the passwords once. They are in neither export by design, and the first save binds them to host, port, user, proxy chain and jump host.

See what the $19 covers

Is Conchshell really free?

The application is free on macOS, Windows and Linux. No account, no subscription, no trial that runs out, nothing that greys itself out later. Exactly one feature is paid: syncing saved connections between your own machines, $19 once at the introductory price and $29 afterwards. That is a purchase rather than a rental, updates are included, and the key is checked on your own machine with no network, with no limit on how many of your machines use it.

Do I need an account for either of them?

Neither. Royal TSX downloads, installs and runs with no key and no registration, and their knowledge base states that documents and credentials are not uploaded to any Royal Apps credential service. Conchshell has no account to create. One difference is worth knowing: a fresh Royal TSX install fetches its RDP, terminal and file-transfer plugins from the vendor before it can connect, so an offline machine needs their documented workaround.

Does Royal TSX do RDP?

Yes, and more thoroughly than most Mac clients. The engine is FreeRDP, with Network Level Authentication, Remote Desktop Gateway, HTTP and SOCKS proxies, full-screen multi-monitor, HiDPI scaling with zoom, keyboard-layout selection, and redirection of drives, printers, clipboard, audio and microphone. Smart-card redirection is marked experimental. Conchshell does RDP over CredSSP only, with no fallback, which is a real limitation rather than a wording choice.

How much does Royal TSX cost?

On 20 August 2026 the buy page listed Individual at €49.00, Site at €849.00, Global at €1,699.00 and Extended Global at €3,199.00, all excluding VAT, all perpetual with a year of maintenance, three years on Extended Global. Royal TS for Windows costs the same but is a separate licence, and the pair is €79.00. Prices for the next major version have been announced separately, so check the shop before you budget.

Can Royal TSX run on Linux?

No. Royal TSX is macOS only and Royal TS is Windows only. Linux appears in the plan for Royal Connect Desktop, the announced rewrite, for Ubuntu, Fedora and Debian, but on 20 August 2026 that had no public beta and no release date. Conchshell ships on Linux as .deb, .rpm and .AppImage, from the same codebase as the Mac build.

Will my .rtsz file open in Conchshell?

No. Conchshell reads its own JSON bundle and nothing else, so the host list moves across by hand or by a small script. The consolation is that the same is true in reverse: that JSON opens in any text editor, so nothing you own ends up held in a format only one application understands.

Is Royal TSX free after the ten-connection limit?

Not in any documented way. Shareware Mode never expires, but the three caps are fixed at 10 connections, 10 credentials and one open document, and only a licence key removes them. Conchshell has no equivalent gate to buy past: the free application is the whole application, and the only thing $19 changes is that saved connections follow you to your other machines.

If your estate is Windows servers, Hyper-V, VMware and passwords living in CyberArk, and your working machine is a Mac, this is not a close call. Royal TSX puts all of it in one window, and €49 at the price listed on 20 August 2026 is cheap for that much surface.

If you are past ten hosts, your machines run different operating systems, and what you need is a terminal, a file manager and a remote desktop, paying per platform buys nothing. The application is free, syncing is $19 once, and the JSON export keeps the decision reversible.

See what the $19 covers

• What Conchshell is
• Download for macOS, Windows and Linux
• What is free and what the $19 covers
• How the vault and host keys work
• Conchshell vs Termius