ConchshellA free Cyberduck alternative for the wall you hit
You did not go looking for a Cyberduck alternative because of the price. It is free, it is GPLv3, and it has been both for two decades. People leave over something else: no shell inside the window, no remote desktop, no Linux desktop application, and a donation prompt that has been on their tracker for years. If one of those is what put you here, this page is about that specific thing.
The handoff you stopped noticing
Cyberduck's answer to a shell is to hand you off. Open in Terminal starts whatever else is installed, Terminal.app or iTerm2, PuTTY, ssh.exe, WSL bash, and Send Command runs a single command in a dialogue their documentation limits to FTP and SFTP. Neither is a session: no tabs, no split panes, no scrollback to search.
The cost is not the click. It is that the same twenty hosts now exist in two applications, and only one copy has the right port on it after somebody changes a port. Move a bastion in one place and you have moved it in one place.
Conchshell is built the other way round: the file panel and the shell read one host entry, one proxy chain, one jump host. Connect once and both halves are already pointed at the same machine, with the transfer queue on one side and a real PTY on the other.
No window on Linux, no RDP anywhere
The search suggestions give the first wall away, cyberduck linux, cyberduck ubuntu, cyberduck for linux, and comparison articles muddy it further by saying Cyberduck runs on Linux. As a desktop application it does not. What Linux gets is duck, the command-line tool, and it is a good one: 9.5.3 in the official APT repository when checked on 20 August 2026, the same version as the desktop release, reading the same bookmarks and connection profiles. The window never came, and a 2023 request for one was closed by the maintainer as a duplicate.
The second wall is Windows servers. The documented protocol index is nineteen entries long, none of them a remote-desktop protocol, and Cyberduck has never hidden that. Conchshell puts RDP beside the terminal, with the caveat to read before downloading: authentication is CredSSP (NLA) only, with no fallback path, so a host with NLA switched off will not connect. Nobody here is claiming parity with mstsc.
On Linux, Conchshell installs from .deb, .rpm or .AppImage, and it is the same application as on macOS and Windows rather than a reduced build.
What does not come across with you
Bookmarks do not migrate. Conchshell reads no .duck files, so hosts, ports and usernames are retyped, or arrive in a JSON bundle from another client. Passwords were never in the bookmark to begin with, they were in the macOS Keychain or Windows Credential Manager, and they get entered once more.
Nor does your ~/.ssh/config come across. Cyberduck reads it and honours IdentityFile, IdentitiesOnly and ProxyJump; Conchshell has its own jump host settings, does not look at that file, and has no ssh-agent support, so a key that lives only in an agent needs its file on disk.
The buckets stay behind as well. S3, Google Drive, OneDrive, SharePoint, Box, Dropbox, WebDAV, SMB, Cryptomator vaults: none of that exists here and none of it is planned. If any of it is a real part of your week, the honest plan is two applications rather than one.
The donation prompt, and what a store build buys
The prompt appears when you quit, and again after an update. It comes back on their own tracker repeatedly: issues #3937, #4029, #4005 and #4507 all circle it, and a user-group thread asks how to remove it from office machines. Per their donate page, a donation of $10 or more returns a registration key that switches it off; whether it stays off through every update is what some of those issues dispute.
Buying in a store is the other route, $23.99 one-time in both, confirmed on 20 August 2026 through Apple's lookup API and Microsoft's catalogue API. It buys silence and a receipt, not features. One detail matters if you take that route on a Mac: their documentation notes that the sandboxed App Store build keeps SSH host key fingerprints in its own preferences instead of ~/.ssh/known_hosts, so its idea of which servers you trust is separate from your OpenSSH one.
What one window costs
Conchshell is free on macOS, Windows and Linux, and one feature is paid: syncing saved connections between your own machines, $19 once, an introductory price that becomes $29 later, updates included and the key checked offline. There is no account to make because there is no server behind it. Syncing mirrors the encrypted vault into a folder you already sync, iCloud Drive, Dropbox or a git checkout; without such a folder only the first copy travels, by a code read off the desktop screen.
What the free part covers: an SSH terminal on a real PTY with four-way splits and tab groups, the two-panel SFTP and FTPS browser with its transfer queue and directory sync, RDP, and live monitoring of the host you are on, down to processes, per-interface bandwidth, latency and several logs tailed at once with level filters and regular expressions. Proxies are HTTP CONNECT, SOCKS4, SOCKS4a and SOCKS5, a jump host carries its own credentials, and shortcuts are editable in settings.
Saved credentials go into a vault encrypted with XChaCha20-Poly1305, the key derived from your passphrase with Argon2id, with independent slots for a passphrase, the OS keychain and a recovery code. Each credential is bound to host, port, user, proxy chain and jump host together, so change any one of them and the password is not offered. The interface can create a credential and delete it; it cannot read one back.
Switch if this is your week
- Cyberduck and a terminal are open at the same time, with the same hosts typed into both.
- There is at least one RDP session in every working day.
- Your desktop runs Linux and a command-line tool was not what you wanted.
- You want the file panel and the shell to share a host list, a proxy chain and a jump host.
- You would like to rebind a shortcut without going through System Settings.
Stay on Cyberduck if
- Your files live in S3 or Backblaze B2. Versioning, lifecycle rules, Glacier restore, pre-signed URLs and a CloudFront panel have no counterpart here, because no bucket browser of any kind does.
- You open Google Drive, OneDrive, SharePoint, Box, Dropbox, WebDAV or an SMB share from the same window. Conchshell has none of them.
- You rely on Cryptomator vaults, or on the source being GPLv3 and readable before you trust it. Conchshell's source is not published.
- Your SSH setup lives in ~/.ssh/config, with IdentityFile, IdentitiesOnly and ProxyJump doing the work. Cyberduck reads that file; Conchshell does not, and it has no ssh-agent support either.
- You need a store receipt, an MSI for deployment, or an interface in one of roughly thirty-eight languages.
The first ten minutes
- Download Conchshell for your platform and install it beside Cyberduck; nothing gets uninstalled today. On macOS 13 and later the first launch goes through System Settings, Privacy and Security, Open Anyway; on macOS 12 the same switch is in System Preferences, Security and Privacy, General. On Windows the installer pulls Microsoft Edge WebView2 from the network if it is missing.
- Open your bookmarks in Cyberduck and pick the five hosts you actually touch. Those get retyped: address, port, username, and the jump host if you use one. The rest can wait until you need them, or arrive in a JSON bundle if another client gave you one.
- Enter each password once. They were never inside the .duck file, the macOS Keychain or Windows Credential Manager held them, and Conchshell keeps credentials out of its own JSON export for the same reason.
- Point at private keys where they already sit. Encrypted keys with a passphrase are handled; with no ssh-agent support, a key that only an agent holds has to exist as a file.
- Confirm each host key once. The confirmation is drawn by the operating system rather than by the application, and the fingerprint lands in Conchshell's own trust-on-first-use store; RDP and FTPS certificates are checked the same way.
- Give it a week with both installed and watch which window you reach for. Buckets and Cryptomator vaults will keep sending you back to Cyberduck; the SSH, SFTP and RDP work probably will not.
Questions people actually ask
Is this actually free, or is there a catch?
The application is free on macOS, Windows and Linux, with no account, no trial and no feature that stops working. One thing is paid: syncing saved connections between your own machines, $19 once rather than yearly, an introductory price that becomes $29 later, updates included and the key checked offline. If you never sync between two machines, you never pay anything at all.
Why does Cyberduck keep asking me to donate?
By design. Their FAQ says the prompt is shown when you quit and again after installing or updating, and a donation of $10 or more returns a registration key that switches it off. Whether the key survives every update is disputed across several issues on their own tracker, and there is a user-group thread about removing the prompt from office machines.
Do I have to create an account?
No, and there is nothing to create one with. Conchshell has no server, no cloud and no sign-in screen. Connection syncing, the one paid feature, works by mirroring the encrypted vault into a folder you already sync, such as iCloud Drive, Dropbox or a git checkout, so the data goes where you already send it and nowhere else. Without such a folder, only the first copy moves, by a code read off the desktop screen.
Will my Cyberduck bookmarks import automatically?
No. Conchshell does not read .duck files, so hosts, ports and usernames are retyped, or brought in through a JSON bundle if another client gave you one. It is dull for twenty hosts and quick for five. Passwords would not have travelled anyway: they live in the macOS Keychain or Windows Credential Manager, never in the bookmark itself.
Is Cyberduck slow with lots of small files?
That complaint has been on their tracker for years, filed over SFTP and over S3 alike: a folder of many small files taking far longer than a single file of the same total size. The reports we read are against older versions, the issue was closed without an explanation attached, and we have not measured 9.5.x ourselves. Treat it as something to test on your own files rather than a fact about the current build.
Can I keep Cyberduck installed alongside?
Yes, and you probably should. The two do not share configuration or fight over anything, and Cyberduck remains the better tool for buckets, Google Drive, SharePoint and Cryptomator vaults. Most people who switch keep it for storage and move the SSH, SFTP and RDP work into one window instead of three.
Is there a Cyberduck alternative that runs on Linux?
This one does: .deb, .rpm and .AppImage, the same application as on macOS and Windows. Cyberduck itself ships only the duck command-line tool for Linux, kept at version parity with the desktop release, and the 2023 request for a Linux GUI was closed as a duplicate by the maintainer.
Keep Cyberduck, move the sessions
The honest end of this page is that most people who reach it should run both: Cyberduck for the buckets and the shares, Conchshell for the shell, the RDP session and the SFTP panel that used to be a second window.
If the wall you hit was Linux, or a Windows server, or a file client that cannot give you a prompt, that part costs nothing to fix. The application is free; only syncing connections between your own machines is $19, once.