A Termius alternative without the account

What you are actually paying for

Let us be accurate about this, because a lot of comparison pages are not. The free Starter tier is not a crippled demo: it includes SSH and SFTP, port forwarding, a local vault and their AI autocomplete, and it is licensed for commercial use. If that is all you need, Termius is free and you can stop reading.

Pro costs $10 a month billed annually and adds three things: a personal cloud vault, sync between mobile and desktop, and snippet automation. So the money buys sync, and sync is the part worth thinking about. It works by keeping your hosts and keys in their cloud, encrypted behind a vault password they do not hold. The encryption is real and the design is defensible, but it has a consequence people meet at the worst possible moment: forget the vault password and there is nobody who can reset it. The keys are gone.

Termphin against Termius, honestly

Where Termius wins: if you need the same host list on a Mac, a Windows box and your phone today, Termius does that and Termphin does not. Desktop and iOS clients are coming, and sync with them, but shipped beats planned. If you need it now, pay them - it is good software.

Where Termphin wins: if the phone is the point, you want snippets and persistent sessions without a subscription, and you would rather no copy of your private keys existed anywhere but the device in your hand.

No account is a feature, not a missing one

It is easy to read "no account" as an unfinished product. It is a decision. An SSH client holds the credentials to everything you run. Every account, every cloud vault and every sync endpoint is another place those credentials can be reached, another password that can be phished, another company that can be breached, and another service that can shut down and take your data with it.

Termphin has no server. Not "we do not look at your data" - there is nothing to look at. Your profiles and keys are encrypted on the device under a key held by the Android Keystore, and the app never uploads them anywhere. When you connect, your phone talks to your server directly.

The cost of that decision is the sync row in the table above. Sync is coming, with the iOS, macOS, Windows and Linux clients, and it will be built so that we still cannot read what it carries. Until then we would rather name the gap than pretend it is not there.

What you get instead

• Sessions that survive the network dying. A small open-source agent on the server keeps your shell alive through a dropped connection or a switched network and reattaches you to it. Not a reconnect into a fresh shell - the same session, still running.
• Everything included. SFTP with an editor and image preview, snippets with run history, port forwarding, key management, biometric lock. No tier gates any of it.
• An interface built for a phone. A key toolbar for the characters a terminal needs and a touchscreen does not have, a draggable action dock, 14 colour schemes, and text selection that works with a thumb.
• Built for long-running work. A foreground service keeps the process alive so Android does not freeze your sockets while an agent run continues in the background.

Moving your hosts over

Termius can export your host list, and your keys are yours - if you generated them in Termius you can export the private key from its key manager. Termphin imports OpenSSH PEM private keys and generates ed25519 or RSA keypairs of its own.

The safe sequence is the same as any key rotation: add the new public key to authorized_keys, confirm you can log in with it on every server, and only then remove the old one. If you are keeping Termius installed on a desktop, there is no need to remove anything at all - both clients can hold their own key.

Frequently asked questions

Is Termius free?

Largely, yes. The free Starter tier covers SSH, SFTP, port forwarding and a local vault, and is allowed for commercial use. Pro, at $10 a month billed annually, adds cloud sync between devices, a personal cloud vault and snippet automation.

What happens if I forget my Termius vault password?

Nothing can be done. The vault is encrypted with a key derived from that password and Termius does not hold it, which is the correct design for a zero-knowledge vault and also means there is no recovery path. Termphin avoids the question by not having a vault in anyone else's cloud.

Does Termphin sync between devices?

Not yet. Termphin is Android today, with iOS, macOS, Windows and Linux clients coming, and sync arrives alongside them. If you need one host list across a phone and a desktop right now, Termius does that and Termphin does not.

Can I import my Termius keys?

Yes, if you export the private key from Termius in OpenSSH PEM format. Termphin can also generate ed25519 or RSA 2048/4096 keys directly on the phone.

Is Termphin open source?

The terminal renderer and the server agent are, in public repositories. The app itself is not, though it has no server component and nothing it stores leaves your device.

How does Termphin make money if it is free?

Right now it does not. There is no advertising, no data collection beyond opt-in anonymous analytics, and no paid tier. If that changes, the features described on this page stay as they are.