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, and Android as an APK from this site. 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, while there is no iOS app at all.

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 arrives on an ordinary Tuesday: a second tunnel to a database, a thirteenth host, a fifth macro. At that point you are weighing $69 excluding tax, the price on their page on 20 August 2026, against features you may never touch, since Professional mostly adds deployment tooling, unlimited counters and support rather than protocols.

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.

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, which is also the limitation: with no such folder, only the first copy travels, by reading a code off the desktop's screen.

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.

The difference is how much is written down. Mobatek does not publish the algorithm behind its stored passwords, and 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 with an Argon2id key, curve25519-sha256 at the head of the SSH key exchange, Ed25519 host keys preferred over RSA, FTPS through rustls against the system root store, and a trust-on-first-use fingerprint store whose prompt is drawn by the operating system rather than by the application.

• 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, 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.
• 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.
• MultiExec, typing one command into every open tab at once. Conchshell runs each tab on its own and broadcasts nothing between them.
• Key handling. A connection here points at a key file on disk and unlocks an encrypted key with its passphrase at connect time; nothing is held centrally and nothing is forwarded onward to the remote host.
• The single exe on a locked-down Windows box, and the Customizer that turns it into a branded, policy-locked MSI for a fleet. 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 macOS 13 and 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 and lands in the local vault, 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 and Linux, with 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.

Do I need an account to use it?

No. There is no account, no sign-in and no cloud service behind it. Your hosts live in a local encrypted vault, and if you buy sync it runs through a folder you already sync yourself, with no server of ours in the path. MobaXterm Home Edition needs no account either; its Customer Area belongs to Professional purchases. The licence key for sync is checked on your own machine, without a network.

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