Termius alternative: an SSH client for bastions
Looking for a Termius alternative on desktop? Termius and Gatesys SSH compared on price, jump hosts, AI, sync, and where your hosts and keys are kept.
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Termius at a glanceTermius vs Gatesys SSHWhere Gatesys SSH is differentWhere Termius is the better choiceSwitching from TermiusFAQSourcesTermius is the SSH client most people name first when they outgrow a bare terminal. It runs on five platforms, it syncs, and it looks good doing it. People still go looking for a Termius alternative, usually for one of three reasons: the price of Pro once the free plan is not enough, a wish to keep hosts and keys off somebody else’s cloud, or servers that sit behind bastions and fail in ways a bare error message does not explain.
We make Gatesys SSH, so read this as one side’s account. Every figure about Termius below comes from its own website, read on 12 October 2026, and the page says plainly where Termius is the better pick.
Termius at a glance
Termius is a cross-platform SSH and SFTP client for macOS, Windows, Linux, iOS and Android. Its pricing page lists five plans:
| Plan | Price | What it adds |
|---|---|---|
| Starter | Free, commercial use allowed | Local vault, SSH and SFTP, AI-powered autocomplete, port forwarding |
| Pro | $10 a month, billed annually | Personal cloud vault, sync across mobile and desktop, session logs, snippets automation |
| Team | $20 a seat a month, billed annually | A team vault, real-time collaboration, shared session logs |
| Business | $30 a seat a month, billed annually | Several team vaults with access control; SAML SSO as an add-on |
| Enterprise | Custom | SAML SSO, a SOC 2 Type II report, priority support |
What Termius does well is hard to argue with: the same hosts on your laptop and your phone, a vault a team can share, and a mature product with years behind it.
Termius vs Gatesys SSH
| Termius | Gatesys SSH | |
|---|---|---|
| Platforms | macOS, Windows, Linux, iOS, Android | macOS, Windows, Linux |
| Free plan | SSH, SFTP, port forwarding, local vault, AI autocomplete | The whole client: SSH, SFTP, jump chains, tunnels, keychain, audit log, health signals, command safety. No account |
| Individual paid plan | Pro: $10 a month billed annually, so $120 a year | Pro: 3 months free without a card, then $20 a year |
| Sync between devices | Yes, with Pro | No. Hosts and secrets stay on the computer |
| Mobile apps | Yes | No |
| Shared team vault | Team and Business plans | Not yet |
| Jump hosts | Yes, host chaining | Chains of any depth, with a hop-by-hop diagnosis when one fails |
| AI | Autocomplete on the free plan | Farabi, on Pro: your own model, local or cloud, answering from facts measured on the host |
Where Gatesys SSH is different
The free plan is the whole SSH client
Gatesys SSH’s free plan needs no account and has no time limit. It covers sessions to any number of hosts, a dual-pane SFTP browser, local, remote and SOCKS5 tunnels, jump chains, a keychain that flags weak keys, snippets and a 90-day audit log. The limit is one terminal per session: more terminal tabs and split panes inside a session are part of Pro. The full list is on the plans page.
Pro costs $20 a year after a three-month trial that asks for no card. That is one sixth of Termius Pro’s yearly price, though the two plans buy different things: Termius Pro buys sync, Gatesys Pro buys the assistant.
Your hosts and keys stay on your computer
There is no Gatesys cloud vault. Hosts live in a settings file on your disk, and passwords, passphrases and API keys are sealed with AES-256-GCM in a local vault. The app has no telemetry. That is also the trade-off, stated plainly: there is no sync, so a second computer means a second setup.
Bastions are a first-class case
A host can sit behind any number of jump hosts, each hop with its own login and its own host key. When a connect fails, Hop Doctor names the hop that broke and the step, whether DNS, TCP, the SSH handshake, the host key or the login, and offers the fix as a before-and-after diff of the host’s settings. It runs its checks from the hop in front of the failure, and it never logs in a second time, so it adds nothing to the server’s MaxAuthTries count or to fail2ban.
An assistant that has to show its evidence
Termius gives AI autocomplete away on its free plan, and in August 2025 it announced Gloria, an experimental agent that runs in Termius Cloud, as a limited preview. Gatesys SSH takes another road:
- The model is yours. Eight runtimes: Ollama, LM Studio and llama.cpp on your own machine, Claude, OpenAI and Gemini with your own key, or the Claude Code and Codex CLIs you are already signed in to. With a local model, nothing leaves the computer.
- Facts come first. Farabi answers from what the app measured on the host over your own SSH session, with a fixed list of read-only commands. Nothing is installed on the server.
- Code decides the risk. Every suggested command is rated by 167 local rules before it can reach your shell, never by the model. A critical one asks you to type the host’s name. See command safety.
Health and safe config edits, without a model
Two things on the free plan have nothing to do with AI. Health forecasts a disk filling up or a process leaking memory from the metrics the terminal already samples. Safe Change reviews an edit to sshd_config with the server’s own sshd -t, keeps a backup, and can arm a timer on the server that restores the old file unless you confirm the new login works.
Where Termius is the better choice
- You use SSH from a phone or a tablet. Gatesys SSH is desktop only.
- You want the same hosts on every device. Termius Pro syncs; Gatesys SSH does not.
- You share credentials with a team, or your company asks for SAML SSO and a SOC 2 report. Termius has plans for that today.
If one of those is your reason for using Termius, stay with it.
Switching from Termius
- Download Gatesys SSH and open it. No account is needed.
- If your hosts are in
~/.ssh/config, choose File › Import from ~/.ssh/config….ProxyJumpentries become real jump chains. - For anything else, paste the
sshcommand into the Hosts search box, for examplessh -J edge-bastion deploy@10.0.3.4. It becomes a host with its jump host set. - Point each host at the key file it uses, or at your SSH agent. A key that was generated inside Termius has to be exported from its keychain first.
The first connection guide walks through each step.
FAQ
Is there a free alternative to Termius?
Yes. Gatesys SSH’s free plan is a full desktop SSH, SFTP and jump-host client with no account and no time limit. Tabby and PuTTY are free and open source. The roundup of SSH clients compares twelve of them.
Does Gatesys SSH sync hosts between computers?
No. Hosts, keys and saved passwords stay on the computer you set them up on. If sync across a phone and a laptop matters to you, Termius Pro is the better fit.
Does Gatesys SSH have a mobile app?
No. It is a desktop app for macOS, Windows and Linux.
How much cheaper is Gatesys Pro than Termius Pro?
Termius Pro is $10 a month billed annually, which is $120 a year. Gatesys Pro is $20 a year after three free months. They are not the same product: Termius Pro adds sync and session logs, Gatesys Pro adds the Farabi assistant, hooks and more terminals per session.
Sources
- Termius pricing and the Gloria announcement, read on 12 October 2026. Prices and plans change, so check them before you decide.
- Gatesys SSH: plans and what runs on the server.
