Termius alternatives, ranked honestly

Termius is a good SSH client, and its free Starter tier is more generous than its reputation: SSH, SFTP, Telnet, Mosh and a local terminal, port forwarding, and an AI autocomplete, all free and licensed for commercial use. What the free tier keeps on one device is the vault. Syncing hosts and keys between your phone and your desktop, the cloud vault, snippets automation and session logs are Pro, at $10 a month paid annually; Team ($20 a seat) adds shared vaults, Business ($30) adds access control, and SSO is an Enterprise conversation. All of it is on Termius’s pricing page.

So the search for an alternative is usually one of four searches. The sync paywall: you want your hosts on two devices and don’t want a subscription for it. The vault: you’d rather your private keys never sat in a vendor’s cloud, encrypted or not. The licence: Termius is closed source, and some people won’t put a client they can’t read between themselves and their servers. And the platform: you’re on an iPad with a keyboard, or an Android phone, or a Windows box, and the best client for that screen isn’t the one that runs everywhere.

Match the screen first. On an iPad with a keyboard, Blink; on an iPhone where files matter, ShellFish; across Apple devices with one purchase, Prompt 3. On Android, JuiceSSH if you want a GUI, Termux if you want Unix. On a desktop, Tabby if you want a Termius-like host manager for free, and the platform’s own OpenSSH if you’d rather have a config file than an app.

Then decide about sync, honestly. Sync is the feature the free tiers withhold because it is the feature that costs the vendor money and earns your loyalty. If you need hosts and keys on more than one device and won’t pay, the answer is not a client: it is an ~/.ssh/config you keep in a private repo, and a key per device. Every client above reads a config file or imports a key. The vault was always a convenience over that.

And remember what none of them change. An SSH client, however good, needs a server it can reach — a port open, a VPN, a tailnet — a key on each device that must be revoked when the device goes, and tmux at the far end if the session is to outlive the connection. Mosh survives the network changing, not the client disappearing. The app polishes the window; the plumbing behind it is the plumbing.

A lot of people searching for a Termius alternative don’t have forty arbitrary servers. They have a Mac mini, a home server, a workstation at the office — machines they own, that they want to reach from a phone to check on a build or answer a coding agent that’s waiting on a yes. For that job the SSH-client shape is more than you need.

The short version: spawnd puts one daemon on each host you own. It dials out, so nothing listens on the host — no open ports, no VPN. A worker process owns each session’s PTY, so the session survives the closed tab, the dropped connection, the laptop lid and a daemon restart, scrollback intact; there is no tmux to remember. Any browser is the console, and on a phone it installs to the home screen as a web app: no client app, no keys on the device. A new device is approved once against a short code, and revoking it is one click every host honors. Your browser talks to each daemon peer-to-peer, end-to-end encrypted; when a relay is unavoidable it forwards ciphertext it cannot decrypt. It is open source, MIT/Apache-2.0, and the daemon runs on macOS and Linux.

It is not an SSH client and doesn’t pretend to be one: it cannot reach a host that doesn’t run its daemon, it has no port forwarding, and if SFTP into a client’s box is your daily work you’ll keep one of the eight above beside it. But for the machines that are yours, it removes the client rather than replacing it.