ConchshellConchshell vs Termius, side by side
Both applications open a terminal on a server, and both charge for exactly one thing: carrying your saved connections between your own machines. After that they part company. Termius is a subscription, with published mobile apps and a company behind it. The Conchshell application is free, puts RDP and FTPS beside the terminal, asks $19 once for sync, and has no account to sign into.
Everything about Termius below was read from their own pricing page, documentation and ideas portal on 20 August 2026.
What each one is built to be
Termius has been terminal-first for more than a decade. SSH, SFTP, Mosh, Telnet and a local terminal are all on the free Starter tier, which they explicitly allow in commercial work. Pro adds jump hosts, agent forwarding, SOCKS and HTTP proxying and a serial console. SSH certificates and FIDO2 are free-tier features, and post-quantum key exchange is documented.
Conchshell is one window with four things in it. An SSH terminal on a real PTY, with four-way splits, tab groups and session restore. A two-pane SFTP and FTPS file manager with a transfer queue and directory comparison. An RDP session. Live monitoring of the host you are on: CPU, memory, disk, processes, per-interface bandwidth, and a log viewer with regex filters and live tail.
The access features Termius keeps behind Pro are in the free Conchshell application: HTTP CONNECT, SOCKS4, SOCKS4a and SOCKS5 proxying, and an SSH jump host that carries its own credentials rather than reusing the target's.
The money, and the shape of the bill
On 20 August 2026 their pricing page showed annual-equivalent figures: Pro at $10 a month paid annually, Team at $20 a seat and Business at $30 a seat, both with a two-seat minimum. Their documentation says paid plans are available only as subscriptions, so there is no perpetual licence at any price.
Conchshell's 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 and $29 later. No seats, no renewal, updates included, and the key is checked on your own machine with no network call.
So this is not free against paid. Both charge for the same feature. One bill arrives every year, the other arrives once.
Where your hosts and keys live
Termius documents its cryptography better than most vendors: Libsodium 1.0.20, X25519 with XSalsa20 and Poly1305, Argon2id for the encryption password, a modified SRP6a over TLS for login. What is not optional is the route. Sync means an account and their cloud on AWS, and there is no self-hosted server to point at instead.
Conchshell's vault is XChaCha20-Poly1305, the key derived by Argon2id from your master passphrase. Independent slots — passphrase, OS keychain, recovery code — sit over one data key, so adding or revoking a method rewrites a slot instead of re-encrypting the store. The interface can create a credential and delete it, and has no command to read one back. Credentials are bound to the route: change the host, port, user, proxy chain or jump host and the password is not offered.
Sync, if you buy it, mirrors that encrypted vault into a folder you already synchronise: iCloud Drive, Dropbox, a git checkout. The limit belongs to the same design. With no such folder, only the first copy travels, by reading a code off the desktop screen.
Host keys go into a TOFU fingerprint store, and the confirmation prompt is drawn by the operating system rather than by the application. RDP and FTPS certificates are checked the same way.
Two protocols on one side of the table
Termius has no RDP on any tier. It has been an open request on their own ideas portal since 11 January 2021 and stood at 1,621 votes on 20 August 2026. FTP and FTPS are missing as well, and FTPS here means FTP over TLS, not SFTP. Neither appears in the protocol row on the pricing page or in the documentation, and we found no request for either on the portal. X11 forwarding is not there.
Conchshell has both, in the window that is already open. Two caveats, not hidden in small print. The RDP client speaks CredSSP with NLA and nothing else, with no fallback path, so a host with NLA switched off will not connect and it will not stand in for the built-in Windows client everywhere. FTPS runs on rustls and validates against the system root certificates, and that is the whole of it.
The gaps run the other way too. There is no Mosh here, no Telnet, no serial console and no post-quantum key exchange. Authentication is a password, a private key, or an encrypted key with a passphrase, and nothing else — if your keys are held by a separate agent process, that alone is a reason to stay where you are.
What it costs the laptop
The Termius desktop client is Electron: the 9.43.0 changelog of 17 August 2026 reads "Stability improvements and Electron update".
Conchshell downloads at 9.1 MB and occupies 18 MB on disk on Apple silicon, 20.6 MiB on the Intel build. On 3 August 2026, on macOS 26.5.2, four open SSH sessions cost it 286 MB across seven processes, against 1,388 MB across fifteen for an Electron client measured the same way. That measurement was not run against Termius, so read it as native against Electron, not as a score between these two.
When Conchshell is the better fit
- You need RDP or FTPS in the same day as SSH and would rather not run three applications to get through it.
- The only paid feature you use is sync, and you would rather pay for it once than every January.
- You do not want an account. There is none to create here, and no vendor cloud between your two machines.
- You want the connection list to be a file you own: a JSON bundle you can export, read and keep in git, with the credentials deliberately left out of it.
When Termius is the better tool
- You fix servers from a phone. Termius has shipped an iOS client for more than a decade and held 4.7 stars from roughly 19,000 US ratings on 20 August 2026; Conchshell's Android build is in no store and there is no iOS version at all.
- You are buying for a team. Shared vaults, real-time collaboration, session-log retention, SAML SSO and a SOC 2 Type II report exist there and do not exist here.
- Your SSH is exotic: Mosh over a bad link, Telnet to a switch, a serial console, agent forwarding, post-quantum key exchange. All of that is Termius; none of it is here.
- Your hosts live in AWS, DigitalOcean or Azure and you want them discovered rather than typed, with Ansible inventory alongside.
- You want a company answering the queue. Termius is a business with a support desk, a security programme and a roadmap; Conchshell is one developer's work, and a bad month for that developer is a bad month for the product.
Moving across in two minutes
- Get your host list out of Termius first. Their documentation describes importers from five other clients and no export workflow at all, so copy the list out of the app by hand, or rebuild it from the ssh_config you originally imported into it.
- Install Conchshell. On macOS 13 and later the first launch goes through System Settings, then Privacy and Security, then Open Anyway; on macOS 12 the same step is System Preferences, Security and Privacy, General.
- Set up the vault: a master passphrase or a slot in the OS keychain, plus a recovery code kept somewhere else. Argon2id derives the key, the store is XChaCha20-Poly1305.
- Add the hosts, or write them once into the JSON bundle Conchshell imports and exports. Folders, profiles and settings travel in the same file, so the second machine is one import away.
- Point each connection at the key file it already uses; keys stay on disk where they are. Passwords are re-entered once, because the bundle carries no credentials by design, and they are then bound to that host, port, user, proxy chain and jump host.
Questions people actually ask
Is Conchshell really free?
The application is free on macOS, Windows and Linux, with no account, no trial and nothing that greys out later. One feature is paid: syncing your saved connections between your own machines, $19 once at the introductory price and $29 afterwards. It is a purchase rather than a subscription, updates are included, and the key is checked on your own machine, offline.
Does Termius support RDP?
No, on any tier. It has been an open request on Termius's own ideas portal since 11 January 2021 and stood at 1,621 votes when this page was checked on 20 August 2026. Conchshell includes RDP in the free application, restricted to CredSSP with NLA, so hosts with NLA disabled will not connect.
Do I need an account for either of them?
Termius runs signed out, and their FAQ says so, but sync needs both an account and a paid plan, and there is no self-hosted alternative to their cloud. Conchshell has no account at all, because it has no cloud: the encrypted vault is mirrored into a folder you already synchronise, and the licence key is verified on your own machine.
Is Termius cheaper if I stay on the free plan?
It is free, and generously so: SSH, SFTP, Telnet, Mosh, port forwarding, snippets and the local vault, with commercial use explicitly allowed. The catch is that everything then lives on one device, because sync is what Pro sells. Jump hosts, agent forwarding, SOCKS and HTTP proxying and the serial console are also Pro-only.
Can I export my hosts out of Termius?
Their documentation describes importers from ~/.ssh, CSV, PuTTY, MobaXterm and SecureCRT, and no export of hosts, groups or keychain items to a file in any format; session logs are copied out by hand. Budget time for retyping. Conchshell exports connections, folders, profiles and settings as a JSON bundle, deliberately without credentials in it.
Does Conchshell run on iPhone?
No. There is no iOS version, and the Android build exists but is not in any store, so on mobile Termius simply wins: an iOS client shipped for more than a decade, and 4.7 stars from roughly 19,000 US ratings on 20 August 2026. Conchshell is macOS, Windows, Linux and Android, with .deb, .rpm and AppImage packages on Linux and an APK from the site.
Is the $19 per computer?
No. It covers every machine you use yourself, with no seat count and no activation limit, and it does not renew. What it buys is the sync feature: your encrypted vault mirrored into a folder you already synchronise, such as iCloud Drive, Dropbox or a git checkout, and read back by the other machine.
How to decide
If the job is a phone, a team, or a protocol like Mosh or a serial console, Termius wins and it is not close. Its mobile clients are more than a decade of work that one developer is not going to match, and there is a company standing behind them.
If the job is two or three desktops, servers you know by name, an occasional Windows box over RDP and an FTPS host that refuses to die, then $120 a year is buying one feature you actually use. Here that feature is $19, once, and the rest of the application asks you for nothing.