The four walls people hit in FileZilla

The Windows panel of FileZilla's download page still carries the line “This installer may include bundled offers.” The clean installer and the plain .zip are one click deeper, under “Show additional download options”. It has been written up before — BleepingComputer on 25 June 2018, a Hacker News thread on 6 March 2024 — and it is usually the first thing a security team asks you about.

Conchshell bundles nothing. The Windows installer pulls one dependency, Microsoft's WebView2 runtime, and only when the machine does not already have it. Every file is listed in SHA256SUMS, and the .deb, .rpm, .AppImage, .msi, -setup.exe and .app.tar.gz have detached .sig files. The two .dmg files do not, so on macOS the checksum is all you have to check the download against. The phone client is an APK from this site: it is not in Google Play, and there is no iOS build yet. That is friction of its own; it is just not a sponsored one.

Before exporting anything, find out what you have been storing. Edit > Settings… > Interface > Passwords shows which of the three modes you are in, and the knowledge base spells out what the default one means: “By default, FileZilla and FileZilla Pro save the passwords you enter in the Site Manager in plain text.” Base64, readable out of any export, with the decoding steps in the same article.

The master password has existed since 2017 and the cryptography under it is sound — PBKDF2-SHA256, at least 100,000 iterations, a 32-byte salt, an X25519 key — but it is opt-in, unrecoverable if forgotten, and nothing in it uses Windows DPAPI, the macOS Keychain or libsecret. The 2010 ticket asking for exactly that was closed by pointing at the master password.

None of it travels. Conchshell's vault is XChaCha20-Poly1305 with an Argon2id-derived key and three independent slots over one data key — passphrase, system keychain, recovery code — and there is no weak mode left to forget about. The cost of that is real: credentials are excluded from Conchshell's own JSON bundle and the interface has no command that reads one back, so every password you keep gets typed once more, by hand.

Every FileZilla edition ships without a terminal — their own comparison page prints “Built-in terminal emulator: No” about FileZilla Pro. No port forwarding, no jump host, no SCP. For most people that is fine for years, and then stops being fine on the day a deploy needs one command run straight after the files land.

Conchshell puts the file panel and the shell against a single connection definition: a real PTY, xterm.js drawing through WebGL, four-way splits, tab groups, sessions restored at launch, shortcuts you can remap, and the host's CPU, memory, disk and network on live graphs while the queue runs. RDP is in the same window, CredSSP (NLA) only, so a host with NLA switched off will not connect. ssh-agent is not supported: keys are files, encrypted ones opened with a passphrase.

WebDAV and every cloud connector are FileZilla Pro, and so is Site Synchronization, the feature that carries your Site Manager between machines. On 20 August 2026 Pro is listed under “Subscription plans and prices”: 12.99 euro a year for one device, 29.99 euro for three.

Credit where it is owed. Their Site Synchronization is built the way a careful person would want it: it writes to a server and path you nominate, over any protocol the client speaks, encrypted with a key derived from your own passphrase, and it deliberately refuses to sync OAuth tokens and the master password. No vendor cloud anywhere in it.

Conchshell answers the same problem with the same shape and a different bill. The app is free; one feature is paid — syncing saved connections between your own machines, $19 once at the introductory price, later $29, updates included, no machine limit, licence checked on your own machine — and it works by mirroring the encrypted vault into a folder you already sync. Without such a folder only the first copy travels, by reading a code off the desktop screen. If what you actually need is an S3 bucket in a file panel, Pro is the product and this one is not.

• You are tired of explaining the bundled offer to a security team.
• Half your FileZilla sessions end with you opening a terminal anyway.
• You would rather saved passwords be encrypted by default than by a setting you have to know exists.
• There is an RDP box in the estate and a third application open for it, and CredSSP (NLA) is all it needs.
• You move hosts between two machines of your own and would rather pay $19 once than a subscription every year.

• Free at any scale, GPLv3, source published for every release, packaged in apt, dnf, pacman, Homebrew and winget. Conchshell's source is not published, and if that settles it, it settles it.
• Cloud storage. Pro speaks the real APIs of S3, B2, R2, Google Cloud Storage, Azure Blob and File, Drive, Dropbox, Box, OneDrive and SharePoint, and WebDAV besides. Conchshell speaks none of them, and nothing here should suggest it will.
• The old and the odd: 32-bit Windows and Linux, Intel Macs back to macOS 10.13.2, *BSD, an interface in more than forty languages. Conchshell asks for macOS 12 or later, ships Android only as an APK from the site, and has no iOS build.
• Twenty years of FTP behaviour: server-type settings for hosts whose paths are not POSIX, PASV quirks, per-site connection limits, a wizard that tests your router. Conchshell has no plain FTP at all, so if your one problem host is a shared-hosting FTP box from 2009, keep FileZilla for it.
• An organisation, a moderated forum, a public tracker since 2005, and a free AGPL server for the other end of the transfer. Conchshell is one person.

1. Find out what you have been storing: Edit > Settings… > Interface > Passwords shows which of the three modes you are in. If it says save passwords and you never set a master password, they are Base64.
2. File > Export…, tick Export Site Manager entries, and save the XML somewhere you will remember to delete afterwards.
3. Install Conchshell: .deb, .rpm or .AppImage on Linux, each with a detached .sig, and every file listed in SHA256SUMS. On macOS 13 and later, clear the first launch through System Settings, Privacy & Security, Open Anyway; on macOS 12 the path is System Preferences, Security & Privacy, General. Both are set out on /download/.
4. Type your hosts in from that export. Conchshell's own import and export is a JSON bundle of connections, folders, profiles and settings; it does not read FileZilla's XML, so this part is manual, and it is once.
5. Keys stay in ~/.ssh where they are — point at the file, passphrase-encrypted included. ssh-agent is not supported, so anything living only inside an agent needs a file again.
6. Re-enter the passwords you use, delete the XML, and keep FileZilla for the plain-FTP host that only it talks to properly.

Download Conchshell

Is Conchshell really free, or does it stop working later?

It does not stop. The app is free on macOS, Windows and Linux, with no trial clock, no expiry and no feature that greys itself out. One thing is paid: syncing saved connections between your own machines, $19 once at the introductory price and $29 later, with updates included, no limit on the number of machines, and the licence checked offline on your own machine.

Do I have to create an account?

There is no account to create. No sign-in screen, no cloud, nothing of yours held on a server of ours, because there is no server of ours in the path. Even the paid sync works through a folder you already sync yourself, such as iCloud Drive, Dropbox or a git checkout, with the vault encrypted before it lands there.

Does FileZilla have a built-in SSH terminal?

No, and it never has. Their own comparison page lists no built-in terminal emulator among the cons of FileZilla Pro. SSH exists in FileZilla only as the transport underneath SFTP: no console tab, no port forwarding, no jump host, no SCP. If you need a shell, it is a second application, which is the most common reason people go looking.

How do I download FileZilla without the bundled offers?

On the download page, ignore the big button and open Show additional download options, then take the plain installer or the .zip. Or install it from a package manager, which does not carry the offers: apt, dnf or pacman on Linux, Homebrew on macOS, winget or Chocolatey on Windows. Distribution packages usually lag the current release, which on 20 August 2026 is 3.71.0.

Can Conchshell connect to S3 or Google Drive?

No. There are no cloud connectors here at all: the file side is SFTP and FTPS, and that is the whole list — not even plain FTP. If a bucket has to appear in a file panel, FileZilla Pro genuinely does that better than anything Conchshell will offer, with the provider APIs rather than a WebDAV shim over them.

Is Conchshell open source like FileZilla?

No. FileZilla is GPLv3 with a source tarball for every release and a public bug tracker going back twenty years; Conchshell's source is not published. If reading the code is a requirement of yours, that is a real reason to stay, and no amount of feature comparison changes it.

What happens to my saved FileZilla passwords?

They stay in FileZilla until you remove it, and they travel inside any export you make. Nothing imports them here: credentials are deliberately excluded from Conchshell's JSON bundle, so each password is entered once by hand and then bound to its host, port, user, proxy chain and jump host.

You give up the cloud connectors, the published source, plain FTP and twenty years of corner cases, and you retype every saved password once. You keep SFTP and FTPS, and you gain a terminal, RDP against NLA hosts, live host graphs and a vault that is encrypted without being asked.

If none of the four is yours, close this page. FileZilla is free, it works, and nobody should change clients for the sake of changing clients.

Download Conchshell

• What Conchshell is
• Download for macOS, Windows and Linux
• How the vault and host keys work
• Looking at WinSCP instead
• Looking at Cyberduck instead