A free MobaXterm alternative that runs on a Mac

This is not an oversight anyone is about to fix. Every product on mobatek.net is a Windows product, and MobaXterm has shipped Windows-only since 2008. There is no iOS or Android app either, and the sites offering a MobaXterm APK are not Mobatek's.

To Mobatek's credit the Wine route is supported rather than tolerated: the changelog carries Wine, PlayOnMac and CrossOver fixes as recently as April 2026. It is still a compatibility layer rather than a port, and you inherit whatever your Wine prefix believes about DPI, fonts and the clipboard.

Conchshell is built for each system: macOS on Apple silicon and Intel, Windows, Linux as .deb, .rpm and .AppImage, Android as an APK from this site, and iPhone and iPad as a free app in the App Store. Two caveats before you download. The Windows installer pulls Microsoft Edge WebView2 down from the network when the machine does not already have it, so the first install needs a connection. And the Android build is not in Google Play or any other store.

MobaXterm is a Windows workstation in a box. It carries an X.Org-derived X server with automatic X11 forwarding, a Cygwin-derived local shell with bash, grep and rsync, roughly forty plugins, packet capture, a network scanner, and TFTP, NFS, HTTP and syslog daemons you can start from the toolbar. Nothing on this page competes with that list. It is also proprietary in both editions: the source archive on download.mobatek.net publishes third-party components only, such as the terminal fork, SynEdit and MinGW, and the old claim that MobaXterm is GPLv3 traces back to a version 7 source drop, not to the product today.

Conchshell is narrower on purpose. One window holds an SSH terminal, a two-pane SFTP and FTPS manager, RDP, and live monitoring of the host you are logged into: CPU, memory, disk and processes, bandwidth per interface, latency, active connections, and a log viewer that tails several files at once with level and regex filters.

Version 2.16.0 was a 9.3 MB download for Apple silicon. Version 2.10.1 took 18 MB on disk on Apple silicon and 20.6 MiB for the Intel build, and four SSH sessions measured 286 MB across seven processes on 3 August 2026 — macOS 26.5.2, Apple silicon, median of three probes — against 1388 MB and fifteen processes for an Electron-based client.

Those numbers are Mobatek's own, printed on their download page as "Max. 12 sessions", "Max. 2 SSH tunnels", "Max. 4 macros" and "Max. 360 seconds for Tftp, Nfs and Cron" for the embedded daemons. They do not say whether twelve counts saved sessions or open ones, and reviews sometimes call the free build a trial, which it is not.

The ceiling usually arrives on an ordinary Tuesday, as a thirteenth host. At that point you are weighing $69, or 49 euros, per user excluding tax, the price on their page on 20 August 2026 and falling to $41 at 501 seats, against features you may never touch, since Professional mostly adds deployment tooling, unlimited counters and support rather than protocols.

It is closer to a perpetual licence than a subscription: their conditions grant an irrevocable right to use the version you bought, and it is the year of updates that renews. When that year ends you keep the version you have; updates and support stop, and access to the Customer Area holding your download link and licence key goes with them, so keep your own copy of both. The renewal price is published nowhere on their site, so the second year's cost is not knowable before you buy.

There is no equivalent ceiling here, because there are no tiers for one to live in. Saved connections are not counted, nothing switches itself off after a while, and SSH, SFTP, FTPS and RDP are all in the free application on all three systems. The single paid thing is syncing saved connections between your own machines, $19 once at the introductory price and $29 after it.

One exception, stated plainly: if the cap you hit is the two SSH tunnels or the four macros, Conchshell is not the answer. It has no SSH tunnels, no port forwarding and no macros at all.

MobaXterm's answer is that file. Export the sessions from a folder, carry it, import it on the other side. For something closer to automatic you put MobaXterm.ini on a share or a web server and launch against it, which makes you the person hosting and securing a file full of your own session data.

The free answer here is also a file, but a documented one: Import and Export writes connections, folders, profiles and settings as a JSON bundle. Credentials are deliberately not in it.

The paid answer is the $19. The encrypted vault is mirrored into a folder you already sync, such as iCloud Drive, Dropbox or a git checkout, and the other machine reads it from there. Nobody hosts anything on this side. 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.

Both keep your sessions on your own machine. Neither has a vendor account you must create before you may connect, and neither has a cloud your hosts pass through. If that is why you chose MobaXterm, you are not giving it up. MobaXterm keeps everything in a single MobaXterm.ini, and its FAQ is blunt: no background internet connection, and no update check unless you click the menu entry. On an air-gapped network that is not a preference but the requirement, and MobaXterm meets it.

The difference is how much is written down. MobaXterm has offered a master password since v20.0 and can encrypt the whole configuration file since v25.2, but Mobatek does not publish the algorithm behind its stored passwords, and the static initialisation vector of the older scheme, CVE-2025-0714, fixed in v25.0, was found by someone reverse-engineering it. Here the answers are on the page: XChaCha20-Poly1305 for the vault, its key kept in the system keychain on macOS, iOS and Android or derived by Argon2id from a master passphrase on Windows and Linux, curve25519-sha256 at the head of the SSH key exchange, Ed25519 host keys preferred over RSA, FTPS through rustls with the server's certificate pinned on first use, and a trust-on-first-use fingerprint store whose prompt is drawn by the operating system rather than by the application. No command in the interface reads a password back out, and each credential in the vault is bound to its host, port, user, proxy chain and jump host.

• The desktop became a Mac or a Linux box, and a Wine prefix's opinions about fonts and DPI are not how the morning should go.
• Two panes with drag and drop, a transfer queue with speed, ETA, cancel and retry, directory compare and synchronise in four explicit steps, and a remote file opened in your own editor that saves straight back.
• The route is complicated: HTTP CONNECT, SOCKS4, SOCKS4a or SOCKS5, or an SSH jump host with credentials of its own, for RDP as well as SSH, and automatic reconnection when the link drops.
• You want the host's state beside the shell: CPU, memory, disk and process graphs, per-interface bandwidth, latency, active connections, and several logs tailed at once with level and regex filters.
• Buying a fleet-deployment toolbox to move a counter from twelve to thirteen was never the trade you wanted.

• X11. A graphical application started from an SSH tab simply appears, with no DISPLAY to set and no X server to install first. That is what people are really paying for, and nothing here reproduces it.
• RDP depth: console connect, drive, printer, port, clipboard and smart-card redirection, Restricted Admin, keyboard-shortcut forwarding. Conchshell does reach RDP through an SSH jump host, but speaks CredSSP (NLA) only, will not reach a host with NLA switched off, and redirects only the clipboard: no drives, printers, ports or smart cards.
• The five-minute jobs: a serial console for a switch, packet capture, the network scanner, and a TFTP, NFS, HTTP or syslog daemon started from the toolbar to push one image and stopped again, all beside a local Unix userland with a package manager.
• MultiExec, typing one command into every open tab at once. Conchshell runs each tab on its own and broadcasts nothing between them.
• SSH tunnels and port forwarding. MobaXterm has a graphical tunnel manager, two tunnels in the free edition and no limit in Professional. Conchshell has no port forwarding or tunnels of any kind.
• Key handling. A connection here uses a key file on disk, a key kept in the encrypted vault, or ssh-agent on macOS, Linux and Windows (on Windows, the built-in OpenSSH agent; Pageant does not work yet); an encrypted key file is unlocked with its passphrase at connect time, and no agent is ever forwarded onward to the remote host.
• The single exe on a locked-down Windows box, with no installer and no admin rights, and the Customizer that turns it into a branded, policy-locked MSI for a fleet, from a company that credits the researchers who report bugs in its changelog. Conchshell ships ordinary installers and a SHA256SUMS file, and has nothing to offer a team writing a build standard.

1. Start in MobaXterm: right-click the sessions folder, choose "Export sessions from this folder", and keep the result open on the second screen. It is a reading list, not an import file, because the format is an undocumented INI dialect, described by third parties as CP1252, and Conchshell does not parse it.
2. Download Conchshell for your platform. 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, System Preferences, Security and Privacy, General.
3. Enter the hosts from the list on whichever machine you use most, in one sitting. Folders and profiles come with them, so build the tree the way you actually work.
4. Point each connection at the private key file where it already lives. Nothing is copied into a keystore, and an encrypted key asks for its passphrase at connect time.
5. Re-type the passwords. Nothing decrypts MobaXterm.ini for you, so each one is entered once. Accept the vault when the app offers it: it asks when the app starts, at every start while a saved password is still unencrypted, and until you accept, saved passwords stay unencrypted in the application's local data. On a Mac it takes one click; on Windows and Linux it needs a master passphrase of at least 12 characters. Once in the vault, each password is bound to that host, port, user, proxy and jump host.
6. Carry the result to your other machines with Export and Import, a JSON bundle with credentials left out, and leave MobaXterm installed on the Windows box for X11 and the serial console.

Download it and see

Is there a MobaXterm for Mac?

No, and there never has been one. Every product on mobatek.net is Windows-only, and eighteen years of changelog contain no macOS build. Mobatek does maintain compatibility with Wine, PlayOnMac and CrossOver, with fixes as recent as April 2026, so running the Windows build through a compatibility layer is a supported route. It is not a native application, and the DPI, font and clipboard friction is yours to live with.

What does the free version of MobaXterm limit?

Mobatek prints four caps on its download page: "Max. 12 sessions", "Max. 2 SSH tunnels", "Max. 4 macros" and "Max. 360 seconds for Tftp, Nfs and Cron". They do not say whether twelve counts saved sessions or open ones. Protocols are not tiered: SSH, SFTP, FTP, RDP, serial and the X server are all in the free build. Professional adds the Customizer, deployment and support.

Is MobaXterm free for commercial use?

Yes, for the person who downloads and installs it themselves. The Home Edition licence says an individual may use it in a commercial or company environment, provided the user running it is the one who installed it. What it forbids is redistribution inside a company, IT deploying it, and several people sharing one installation. A solo engineer at work is licence-clean; a fleet is not.

Is this alternative really free, or is there a catch?

The application is free on macOS, Windows, Linux, Android, iPhone and iPad, with no account, no tiers, no trial and nothing counted. The catch, stated plainly, is that one feature is paid: syncing your saved connections between your own machines costs $19 once, $29 once the introductory price ends. Buy it or do not, because SSH, SFTP, FTPS, RDP, the file manager and the monitoring keep working either way, and no subscription sits behind it.

Is MobaXterm licensed per user or per host?

Per user. Mobatek's conditions for Professional, in the version dated 28 May 2022, grant the licence per end user, meaning a physical person, and not per computer: one person needs one licence even with MobaXterm on three machines, and fifty people sharing one computer need fifty. The servers you connect to do not count at all. Professional was $69 or 49 euros per user before tax on 24 September 2026, with twelve months of updates; the free Home Edition is capped at twelve sessions and two SSH tunnels instead.

Will it read my MobaXterm.ini?

No. The configuration file and the exported sessions file are an undocumented INI dialect that only community converters attempt, and reading credentials out of it is not something this application will do. Export your sessions to have the list in front of you, add the hosts once, then use the JSON bundle to copy them to your other machines.

Do I lose the X server if I switch?

Yes. There is no X server here and none is planned, so if a remote graphical application is part of your week, keep MobaXterm installed for it: the free edition costs nothing to keep and the two coexist happily. The same goes for its serial console, packet capture and the embedded TFTP or NFS daemons.

If you are on Windows all day and the X server is why you opened MobaXterm this morning, stay where you are and pay for Professional when the free caps run out.

If the wall you hit was the platform, the twelve sessions, or the file you shuttle between two of your own computers, the move costs you an evening of re-typing passwords. The application is free on macOS, Windows and Linux, with SSH, SFTP, FTPS and RDP in one window. Syncing those connections between your own machines is $19, once.

Download it and see

• What Conchshell is
• Download for macOS, Windows or Linux
• Conchshell on macOS
• A PuTTY alternative
• A WinSCP alternative
• An Xshell alternative, if that was the other candidate