A free Termius alternative, with no account and no subscription

Both applications charge for the same thing: carrying your saved connections between your own machines. So the comparison is not free against paid — it is $120 every year against $19 once.

Termius Starter is free and allowed in commercial work: SSH, SFTP, Telnet, Mosh, port forwarding and a local vault, and since version 10.1.0 on 21 September 2026 also jump hosts, agent forwarding, SOCKS and HTTP proxies and serial connections. Pro adds the personal cloud vault, sync across desktop and mobile, session logs and host imports from AWS, DigitalOcean and Azure, at $10 a month billed yearly; monthly billing exists, but the pricing page quotes only the yearly rate. Team is $20 and Business $30 a seat a month, billed yearly, with a two-seat minimum. Paid plans are subscriptions only, and students get Pro and Team features free through the GitHub Student Developer Pack.

Four years of Pro is $480. The same four years here cost $19 at the introductory price ($29 later), because there is nothing to renew — see what costs nothing and what the $19 covers.

Termius asks you to sign in or create an account the first time it opens, and a new account starts a Pro trial. Their FAQ says you can then log out and keep using the app locally. What you give up is sync and backup: the local vault lives on that one device and is not backed up, and their documentation warns that logging out clears the data stored locally.

Conchshell has no account to create, so there is nothing to log in to and nothing to log out of. You install it and connect. The one paid feature is switched on by a licence key, sent to the email address you give at checkout and checked on your own machine.

People look for a self-hosted Termius because they want their host list off someone else’s servers. Termius’s documentation describes sync only through Termius Cloud, which runs on Amazon Web Services, and no server you can run yourself; with an account, sync cannot be switched off entirely, only kept away from credentials. The encryption is careful — Libsodium, Argon2id, a modified SRP6a for login — but the route is theirs.

Conchshell has no server of its own, so there is nothing to self-host. Sync writes the encrypted vault — XChaCha20-Poly1305, with the key derived by Argon2id — as one file into a folder you choose: iCloud Drive, Dropbox, Syncthing, a git checkout. Devices linked by a code from 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. If the folder is iCloud Drive or Dropbox, their servers carry that one encrypted file; with a git remote you run yourself, or the direct link over your own network, nothing leaves machines you control.

Conchshell keeps them on your own machine. Saved passwords go into a vault encrypted with XChaCha20-Poly1305. On a Mac, iPhone, iPad or Android phone its key sits in the system keychain and the vault takes one click to create; on Windows and Linux, where no system keychain is used, the key is derived by Argon2id from a master passphrase of at least 12 characters. The app offers to create the vault when it starts, and asks again at every start while any saved password is still unencrypted; until you accept, saved passwords stay unencrypted in the application’s local data.

Independent slots — passphrase, OS keychain (macOS, iOS and Android only), recovery code — sit over one data key, so adding or revoking a method rewrites a slot instead of re-encrypting the store. The interface can create a credential and delete it, and has no command to read one back. Credentials in the vault are bound to the route: change the host, port, user, proxy chain or jump host and the password is not offered.

Host keys go into a TOFU fingerprint store, and the confirmation prompt is drawn by the operating system rather than by the application. RDP and FTPS certificates are checked the same way.

Sign-in is a password, a private key (with its passphrase if it is encrypted) or a key held by ssh-agent on macOS, Linux and Windows (the OpenSSH agent, not Pageant); if an OpenSSH certificate sits beside the key file as <key>-cert.pub, it is presented first. Keyboard-interactive is answered only with the saved password, so one-time codes cannot be entered, and the agent is never forwarded to the server.

Termius connects over SSH, Mosh, Telnet, serial and SFTP. There is no FTP, no FTPS and no remote desktop on any tier; RDP has been a request on their ideas portal since 11 January 2021 and had 1,631 votes on 24 September 2026. If your day includes an FTP server or a Windows machine, those are separate applications next to the subscription. X11 forwarding is a request on the same portal, and it is not in Conchshell either.

Conchshell has both at no extra cost: a two-pane file manager for SFTP, FTP and FTPS in the same window as the terminal, and RDP, where each remote desktop opens in a window of its own. The limits, stated plainly. RDP speaks CredSSP with NLA only, so a host with NLA switched off will not connect. Plain FTP sends the password and the files unencrypted, and the connection dialog says so. FTPS accepts a certificate the system already trusts (a valid chain, the right name, in date) without asking, and pins it; any other certificate, and on Android every certificate, is shown in a prompt and pinned once you confirm it, after which its chain, name and dates are not checked, so the fingerprint on that prompt is the thing to compare. Closing that prompt without pressing a button counts as a refusal, on every platform; in 2.16.0 and earlier, closing it on Windows and Linux counted as trust, which was fixed in 2.17.0.

The rest of the window is the everyday part: an SSH terminal on a real PTY with four-way splits, tab groups and session restore; a transfer queue and directory comparison in the file pane; and live monitoring of the host you are on — CPU, memory, disk, processes, per-interface bandwidth, and a log viewer with regex filters and live tail.

The Termius desktop client is Electron: the 10.0.6 entry in their changelog, dated 17 September 2026, reads "Update to Electron 43 and other stability improvements".

The Conchshell 2.16.0 download was 9.3 MB for Apple silicon. On 3 August 2026, on macOS 26.5.2, version 2.10.1 occupied 18 MB on disk on Apple silicon, 20.6 MiB on the Intel build, and four open SSH sessions cost it 286 MB across seven processes, against 1,388 MB across fifteen for an Electron client measured the same way. That measurement was not run against Termius, so read it as native against Electron, not as a score between these two.

Its mobile applications are in the stores, on both platforms: the iOS client has shipped since 2012 and held 4.7 stars from about 19,200 US ratings on 24 September 2026. Our iPhone and iPad app did not reach the App Store until 27 October 2026, and on Android ours is an APK you install from this site, not from a store. Termius has Mosh, serial connections, agent forwarding, port forwarding, built-in FIDO2 and post-quantum key exchange, most of it on the free tier; Conchshell has none of those. It does sign in through ssh-agent on macOS, Linux and Windows (the OpenSSH agent, not Pageant), which on macOS and Linux is also the way to use a hardware key, and on a computer it uses an OpenSSH user certificate when a -cert.pub file sits beside the key file. Pro discovers hosts in AWS, DigitalOcean and Azure instead of making you type them, with Ansible inventory alongside.

It has team and enterprise tiers: shared vaults, real-time collaboration, session-log retention, SAML SSO and a SOC 2 Type II report — none of which exist here, and none of which are planned.

It also has a company behind it, a support organisation and years of a track record. Conchshell is one person, so judge it by what it does rather than by who wrote it: the vault design, the host-key checking and what leaves the machine are written out on the security page, in enough detail to be argued with.

If you work in a team that needs shared credentials and an audit trail, this is not a close call and you should stay where you are. This page is for the person paying $120 a year to move their own hosts between their own two computers.

1. Get your host list out of Termius first. Their documentation describes five import sources and no export workflow at all, so copy the list out of the app by hand, or go back to the ~/.ssh/config you originally imported into it: Conchshell offers the hosts it finds there on its first screen.
2. Install Conchshell. 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, then Privacy and Security, then Open Anyway; on macOS 12 the same step is System Preferences, Security and Privacy, General.
3. Set up the vault when the app offers it, at a launch after a password has been saved; it asks again at every start until you do. On a Mac it is one click and the key goes into your login keychain; on Windows and Linux it asks for a master passphrase of at least 12 characters and gives you a recovery code to keep somewhere else.
4. Add the hosts, or write them once into the JSON bundle Conchshell imports and exports. Folders, profiles and settings travel in the same file, so the second machine is one import away, and the file is yours to read and keep in git.
5. Point each connection at the key file it already uses; keys stay on disk where they are. Passwords are re-entered once, because the bundle carries no credentials by design, and once they are in the vault they are bound to that host, port, user, proxy chain and jump host.

Download Conchshell

Is there a free Termius alternative?

Conchshell is free on macOS, Windows, Linux, Android, iPhone and iPad, with SSH, SFTP, FTP, FTPS and RDP, no account, no trial to run out and nothing that greys itself out. One feature is paid: syncing saved connections between your own machines, $19 once at the introductory price and $29 later. It does not renew, updates are included, and it covers every machine you use yourself. Termius has a free plan too; what it charges for is the same feature, sync, at $10 a month billed yearly.

How much does Termius cost?

On 24 September 2026 their pricing page listed Starter free, Pro at $10 a month, Team at $20 and Business at $30 a seat a month, all at the yearly rate (monthly billing is also offered; the pricing page shows only the yearly figure), with a two-seat minimum on Team and Business, and Enterprise at a custom price. Paid plans are subscriptions only, and students get Pro and Team features free through the GitHub Student Developer Pack. Conchshell’s only paid feature is sync, $19 once.

Can I use Termius without an account?

Locally, yes. Termius asks you to sign in or create an account on first launch, and their FAQ says you can log out and keep using it without one. You lose sync, the local vault is not backed up, and logging out clears the data stored locally. Conchshell has no account at all, so there is nothing to log out of.

Can I self-host Termius sync?

Their documentation describes no way to: sync goes through Termius Cloud, which runs on Amazon Web Services, and with an account it cannot be switched off entirely. Conchshell has no server of its own, so there is nothing to host. Its encrypted vault syncs through a folder you choose, such as iCloud Drive, Dropbox, Syncthing or a git checkout, or directly between linked devices over your own network; with a git remote you run yourself, or that direct link, nothing leaves machines you control.

Is there an open-source alternative to Termius?

Not this one: Conchshell is free to use, but its source code is not published. If open source is a requirement, Tabby is free and MIT-licensed; the Tabby comparison covers what it does and what it leaves out.

Does Conchshell depend on your servers, and how do I pay?

Your connections go from your computer straight to your own servers, and sync runs through your folder or your local network, not through us. The licence key is checked on your machine; a copy with a key also downloads a signed revocation list once a day, and if our server cannot be reached it keeps the last list it accepted. Activating with the short code from the email needs conchshell.app once; the long key in the same email works with no network at all. The $19 is paid in crypto on this site; the Russian checkout also takes SBP and Russian bank cards, in roubles. The free Termius app, for comparison, was listed in the Russian App Store on 24 September 2026.

Can I move my hosts over from Termius?

Not from Termius itself: Conchshell does not read Termius data, and Termius documents no export of hosts to a file. Hosts you also keep in ~/.ssh/config are imported directly, and connections move between Conchshell installs as a JSON bundle. Credentials do not travel in that file by design — you re-enter those once, and nothing of yours is held in a format only this application reads.

• What is free and what the $19 covers
• Conchshell on macOS
• Conchshell on Windows
• Tabby, the open-source terminal, compared
• A MobaXterm alternative that runs on a Mac
• How the vault and host keys work