A FinalShell alternative in English, without losing your hosts

Language is the commonest wall. FinalShell has no English interface and no language switch, and the vendor's site, docs and FAQ are Chinese throughout. Two requests for an English build sit open and unanswered on the community Flathub tracker, from October and December 2024, answered only with the note that it is up to upstream. If you cannot read the settings dialog, the rest of the feature list does not matter. Conchshell's interface comes in English, Russian and Simplified Chinese, picked in settings or taken from the system, which also makes it a reasonable landing place for a team that mixes languages.

Distribution is the second. Checked directly on 20 August 2026, the vendor serves one unversioned download rather than per-release files, so the Homebrew cask has to run with sha256 :no_check, and nothing has shipped on the vendor's side since May 2025. Homebrew disabled the finalshell cask on 1 September 2026, so brew install is no longer the answer. All five official downloads carry a Last-Modified of 29 May 2025 and the changelog stops at 21 May 2025 — about sixteen months of quiet, as of 24 September 2026, on a closed-source client that stores private keys. The vendor has not said the project is finished, so read it as a gap rather than an ending.

Linux packaging is the third. The vendor ships .deb and nothing else: no .rpm, no AppImage, no tarball, no official Flatpak. The Flathub build is a community repackage that states plainly it is not affiliated with or supported by the developers, and HiDPI scaling has been broken there since 2024.

Before you touch a new client, deal with the folder. Every server password you saved in FinalShell sits in that connection's own JSON under conn/, wrapped in single DES whose key travels in the same file — a format public tooling has unwrapped on demand since 2021. In practice it is a plaintext password list with an extra step, and the vendor's documentation does not mention it at all.

So: search the machine for copies of ~/.finalshell/ or ~/Library/FinalShell/ in Dropbox, OneDrive, iCloud, backup images and git checkouts, then rotate every password that folder has ever held. Old backups count — an image from last year is still a working password list. Five minutes, and it is worth doing whether or not you change client.

Their cloud sync is a different and much better piece of engineering, and that deserves saying. Data is encrypted on your machine under a password you choose, AES-256 and HMAC-SHA256 are named, and the vendor says it cannot recover that password. It also costs ¥49 a year on top of a paid tier you must already hold, at the prices listed on 20 August 2026.

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.

Conchshell puts the same things in one window: an SSH terminal on a real PTY with four-way splits and tab groups; a two-pane file manager with local and remote side by side, drag and drop, a transfer queue with speed and ETA, and directory compare; RDP; and a monitoring panel.

It speaks SFTP and FTPS. FTPS is FTP over TLS — a different protocol from SFTP, and the one FinalShell has at no tier — so if that is what pushed you out, this is the specific thing that fixes it. FTPS runs over rustls and pins the server's certificate on first use; a certificate your system already trusts for the name you typed is accepted without a question and pinned all the same (Android has only the pin); for any other, compare the fingerprint on the first connection. A changed certificate is not used until you confirm the replacement in the same OS warning dialog, and closing that dialog without pressing a button counts as a refusal, on every platform. In version 2.16.0 and earlier, closing it on Windows or Linux, or pressing Back on Android, counted as trust, which 2.17.0 fixed. On the FinalShell side, file transfer is SFTP over SSH plus Zmodem, and the feature list, the changelog back to 2016 and the FAQ never mention FTP or FTPS.

Remote desktop runs on macOS, Windows and Linux, which is the other common reason people leave, since the vendor's FAQ says the Mac build does not do it. On FinalShell's Windows build RDP is first-class and free; for Linux its documentation says nothing either way. The limit here belongs before the download: Conchshell's RDP speaks CredSSP with NLA and nothing else, so a host with NLA turned off will not connect, and this is not mstsc parity.

Saved credentials go into an XChaCha20-Poly1305 vault. On a Mac, iPhone, iPad or Android phone the system keychain opens it, with no master phrase to type; Windows and Linux have no keychain support, so there it opens with a master phrase of at least 12 characters, keyed by Argon2id and asked at every launch, plus a recovery code shown once when the vault is created. Until you accept the vault, saved passwords sit unencrypted in the app's local data, and the app offers to create it each time it starts while any remain. The interface can write a credential and delete it but cannot read one back, because no such command exists.

Version 2.16.0 is a 9.3 MB download for Apple silicon, and version 2.10.1 took 18 MB on disk on Apple silicon and 20.6 MiB for the Intel build, measured on 3 August 2026, against official FinalShell installers of 67 to 107 MB for a Java application carrying its own runtime. The Windows installer pulls Microsoft Edge WebView2 from the network when the machine has none.

The application is free on macOS, Windows and Linux. There is no account to create, no subscription, and no vendor cloud holding your host list. One feature is paid: syncing saved connections between your own machines, $19 once at the introductory price, then $29. Updates are included and the licence is checked on your own machine, offline.

FinalShell's free tier is not crippled either: SSH with no host limit or timer, the SFTP browser, host monitoring and remote desktop on the Windows build, all without registering. Its paid tiers are cheap and perpetual, ¥35 for Advanced and ¥128 for Professional on the pricing page as read on 20 August 2026. The one recurring charge is cloud sync at ¥49 a year, which cannot be bought alone, so syncing hosts starts at ¥35 plus ¥49 in year one and ¥49 every year after, in yuan only.

Sync works by mirroring the encrypted vault into a folder you already sync — iCloud Drive, Dropbox, a git checkout — and the second machine reads it there. Devices linked by a code read off the desktop screen also sync directly over your own network while the app is open on both, so the folder matters only for machines that are rarely on the same network at the same time.

• Anyone who cannot read the interface — not a preference, and not a small group.
• Anyone on a Mac who needs remote desktop, or on Fedora, RHEL or Arch where a .deb is not an answer.
• Anyone with an FTPS server in the week, which FinalShell cannot reach at any tier.
• Anyone who has looked inside conn/ and would rather their passwords sat in an XChaCha20-Poly1305 vault, opened by the Mac keychain or, on Windows and Linux, by an Argon2id passphrase.
• Anyone who wants their host list in a file they can open, diff and take somewhere else.

• You read Chinese and the free tier already does what you need. It has no host limit, no timer and no registration, and most of its users pay nothing at all.
• You depend on the acceleration relay: FinalShell runs its own overseas servers and gives SSH and RDP acceleration away free, exposed as a port forward any client can use. There is no equivalent here and there is not going to be one.
• You use the terminal and the file pane as one thing. Their directory syncing is the feature people stay for, and Conchshell's two panes are steered by hand.
• Your machine is LoongArch. FinalShell ships a loong64 build and there is nothing here for that hardware.
• You lean on the monitoring sidebar with nothing installed on the remote box: CPU, memory, disk, processes, ping and traceroute through ordinary commands, with ten years of polish on it.
• You want ten years of releases and a Chinese-language support ecosystem where any problem you hit is already written up, usually with a screenshot.

1. Open ~/.finalshell/conn/ or ~/Library/FinalShell/conn/ and look at one connection's JSON: that folder is your host list and your password list at once.
2. Install Conchshell: .dmg on macOS, an installer on Windows, .deb, .rpm or .AppImage on Linux. On a Mac with Apple silicon, Conchshell opens with no extra step. On an Intel Mac with macOS 13 or later the first launch goes through System Settings, Privacy and Security, Open Anyway; on macOS 12 the path is System Preferences, Security and Privacy, General.
3. Type the hosts in once. Host, port and user are all in those per-connection JSON files, and no converter exists between the formats, because FinalShell has no export to convert from.
4. Re-enter passwords once: they are deliberately excluded from Conchshell's export file and go into the local vault once you accept the offer the app makes at start-up; in the vault each is bound to that host, port, user, proxy chain and jump host. Private keys stay where they are and are named as files; on macOS, Linux and Windows a connection can sign in through ssh-agent instead (on Windows the built-in OpenSSH agent; Pageant does not work yet).
5. Export the JSON bundle from settings — connections, folders, profiles, settings — and carry that one file to the second machine. Then delete FinalShell's conn/ folder and every copy of it.

Download Conchshell

Is there a FinalShell alternative with an English interface?

Yes, several. FinalShell has no English UI and no language switch, and the two requests for one on the community tracker have gone unanswered since 2024 beyond a note that it is up to upstream. Remmina, MobaXterm, Termius and Conchshell are all readable options; Conchshell's interface is in English, Russian and Simplified Chinese. This page is obviously arguing for one of them, so compare the feature tables rather than the adjectives.

Is Conchshell actually free, or free to start?

Free, on all three desktop platforms, with no account, no trial timer and nothing that stops working. One feature costs money: syncing saved connections between your own machines, $19 once at the introductory price, then $29. It is a purchase rather than a subscription, so nothing renews, updates are included, and the licence is verified on your own machine with no network call.

Do I need an account to move off FinalShell?

Not on this side: there is no account to create and nothing to sign into before the first connection. On the FinalShell side you only needed one if you paid, since the purchase page redirects to a hostbuf.com login and activation and cloud sync both require it. On the pricing page as read on 20 August 2026, Advanced and Professional are perpetual and the ¥49-a-year sync add-on is the part that renews.

How do I export my connections from FinalShell?

There is no export command. What people do instead is copy the config directory: conn/ with one folder per connection, plus config.json, tconfig.json, fileattribute.json, ClientConfig.xml, cnf/ and knownhosts.json. That is ~/.finalshell/ on Linux and ~/Library/FinalShell/ on macOS. Read host, port and user out of the per-connection JSON, and do not put that folder on a shared drive.

Can I still install FinalShell with Homebrew?

No. Homebrew disabled the finalshell cask on 1 September 2026, so brew install no longer installs it and the .pkg has to come from hostbuf.com by hand. The cask had already been running with sha256 :no_check, because the vendor serves one unversioned download, and nothing has shipped on the vendor's side since May 2025, re-checked on 24 September 2026.

Will I lose the built-in server monitoring if I switch?

No, but it is a different implementation. Conchshell has its own panel: CPU, memory, disk and processes with live graphs, per-interface bandwidth, latency, the active connection list, and a log viewer with level filters, regex and live tail. What you lose is FinalShell's Exec Channel behaviour, which is also what made the remote sshd burn CPU in a published hands-on comparison.

What happens to my saved passwords when I uninstall FinalShell?

They stay on disk. Uninstalling on Linux is described as deleting the directory, and the Homebrew zap paths on macOS are ~/Library/FinalShell and ~/fsdownload. Remove those yourself, and remember any backup or synced copy. Because the local format is DES with the key stored beside the ciphertext, an old copy in a backup is still a working password list.

Install the new client, rebuild the host list, connect to two or three servers, and only then remove FinalShell. Nothing here needs an account, so running both for a week costs nothing.

And whichever client you end up on, the conn/ cleanup stands on its own: it is the one genuinely urgent thing on this page, and it does not depend on you switching at all.

Download Conchshell

• What Conchshell is
• Download for macOS, Windows and Linux
• Conchshell for Linux: .deb, .rpm and AppImage
• A MobaXterm alternative that runs on a Mac
• A Termius alternative that charges once
• An Xshell alternative, if that was the other candidate