Termius: Terminal & SSH client Reviews

by 41nko

Termius was great during the trial period. My favorite feature was that port forwarding didn’t time out after a few minutes, like it does for so many other apps. For two weeks, I was truly able to use my iPad Pro as a mobile workstation, working on Jupyter notebooks hosted on my desktop at work.

Then the free trial expired, and port forwarding sessions began to die in the background after just a minute or two. This breaks the functionality of Termius for me, rendering it basically useless. I understand why some of this app’s advanced features can justifiably be sold as part of a subscription, but the way their pricing is currently structured, the developer gives you a taste of a working app for two weeks and then tries to charge you $100 to not intentionally break Termius for one year.

I refuse to pay anyone a subscription to keep them from breaking their own product. Charge me $20 up front and I’d be happy to pay. As it stands, I’ll go back to hauling my laptop around before I give this extortionist developer a cent of my money.

by Ibscas

Until recently I would have said this app is the best terminal app, but others have caught up (Blink is excellent and reasonably priced but fully functional as a free app). this app got greedy and shady. $120/year is insane - A YEAR. And they do this in a shady way by making it a “web app” so they don’t have to pay Apple their cut, even though without the Apple App Store they wouldn’t even exist. Add to this that they now also collect your data to sell to the highest bidder, it just screams “avoid like the plague”. The subscription price is just absolute extortion for features that many other apps already have, such as not timing out after 60 seconds. Do you need the silly bells and whistles that this app thinks is worth the exorbitant yearly forever subscription or do you need a shell? You decide.

by Williamwu

I’ve been using this app for three years as a paid premium user. Their latest updates has significant flaws where it got the idea of syncing so wrong: I bought a new laptop lately and downloaded this app as my first thing, however after logged in Termius it automatically starts syncing all of the hosts config and was somehow corrupted. Then I tried to manually click the SYNC NOW and RELOAD DATA button on my account page and it start uploading the corrupt files back to the cloud… I’ve tried contacting this app but haven’t heard from them for the past 48 hours. What should I do? And how do I recover the data?

I’m being nice to leave a 2 star review, honestly Termius has a major flaw, and the UX part could’ve done better: UI is just a pretty face, UX is the key.

by Howmrmamwd

I have used Termius for a long while now… It comes in clutch pretty often. I have to say that it feels like there are massive issues with the way that the physical keyboard input is handled in the ipad app though… i dont want to turn on full keyboard access as that is an objectively bad experience in this app. The primary issue using it without full keyboard access is that the arrow keys dont work for navigation without it and the this app app’s shortcuts do nothing. the ^CMD + s one works for hiding the side bar but the CMD + 1-9 hotkey does not… its a shame because using the terminal from with the physical keyboard is great, it is just the inability to functionally handle anything in the ui without awkwardly pressing around on the screen on my mounted ipad to move files in the sftp window… Frustrating enough for me to wish for alternatives that handled this better while providing the general high quality Termius provides… this improvement would immediately increase my score to a 5 easy.

by Imfh

I’ve used this app for years and it is a very solid SSH app. However, with recent UI updates, its usefulness has been severely hampered. There are two major problems.

1) You used to be able to put a finger on the terminal screen and drag it in any direction to quickly use the sparrow keys. This functionality, as far as I can tell, has been mostly removed. You can still drag up and down, but key repeat is so fast it is unusable. A new spacebar dragging option has been added, but holding the spacebar for a second or two is extremely inconvenient. The key repeat is also extremely slow for the spacebar cursor movement.

2) This missing cursor movement gestures wouldn’t be a huge deal if the small keyboard toolbar wasn’t also removed. The toolbar had arrow keys in it which work as a decent substitute. The small keyboard toolbar has been replaced by a large keyboard panel which takes up an entire side of the screen. The buttons are further to reach and waste valuable screen space on smaller devices.

As a workaround, I’ll probably be try mapping the volume buttons as up down, but this is not an ideal solution. Please bring back the cursor movement by touching the screen rather than the space bar, and add the small additional keyboard back. The large panel is nice if not all keys fit, but it is not a drop in replacement.

by --csc

Cleanest look and feel too., but SFTP is locked behind a sub. model. I’d drop $59 for this in a heartbeat and consider up to $99, but even that would only get me 6 - 10 months of use under the subscription model. I have no fewer than 6 Raspberry Pi’s running throughout my house (not enterprise business) at any given time. Oh how sweet it is to do all I could want from my new iPad Air 3 without leaving the Lazyboy in the evenings. Well almost all. Not sftp. I don’t mind copying my this app public key around by hand. That’s a good enterprise-pay feature. Ditto for on going Mosh dev, automated execution snippets, and so on. Until there is a one-time purchase option for personal use, or sftp is moved out to free, I see this as a product for business users. I could not recommend this product to makers or hobbyists. If you’re getting used to doing functional things on iOS/iPadOS now, hobbyists may as well get used to the individual quirks of something else with sftp instead, if you haven’t already tweaked your setup or copied your keys around.

by ONENESS-VOICES.fm Music Radio

To addition to proprietary AWS-based this app Cloud, Apple iCloud for storing personal and team vaults would be great. Many of us read a lot about hacking AWS storages of private companies because human factor (misconfiguration or lack of knowledge during AWS configuration) or targeted hacker attacks). Even big tech giants struggling on this types of attacks. But on this time Apple iCloud HAVE NO ANY ISSUES like that: if You keep Your Apple credentials safe - all Your iCloud storage are also safe. So, if vaults are already encrypted, there no any problem to give this app users to choose whom they are trusted more: this app AWS-based Cloud - or - Apple iCloud (which supported by thousands of best security experts and millions of $USD). This also let this app developers focused more on new most-wanted features and more frequent updates (unfortunately new features and updates are VERY rarely for Termius price range like this).

by Smileaf

Been using it for almost 2 years now, suddenly within the last month or so I’m unable to scroll while using screen. In some cases attempting to scroll causes multiple issues with garbage being entered into the terminal. In one case simply rotating(or changing the size of Termius ) my iPad caused this as well.
All of this started after trying to load it one day and it crashed, even for quitting and restarting didn’t fix the crashing. I uninstalled and reinstalled.
After doing this the keep alive stopped working and I’m unable to locate the option anymore. It use to use GPS to keep the terminal alive in the background. Now 10-20 secs after leaving, iOS sleeps Termius and I lose everything I was working on, unless I’m in a screen, which now has the above mentioned issues.

by Murderizer9000

I really want to like Termius. It has excellent UI design which you don’t find often in ssh applications. My main problem with it is that a lot of its functionality, like SFTP, is locked behind a $10 per month subscription fee. That’s a LOT of money for an application like this. If it were a $30-$50 one-time payment, or a $5 subscription, I’d have no problem. For reference, 1Password is one of the all-time best utility iPhone apps for developers and it costs $4 per month.

But $10 per month is $120 per year on top of all the other types of subscriptions that I already pay. That’s just too much. It’s 75% of a full-priced Adobe app. It’s more than I pay for Capture One. For an SFTP client. Why in God’s name???

I can’t imagine that they’re making as much as they could have if their pricing model included casual users and hobbyists as well as the professional user base that it’s currently priced for.

by Zob_zob

I’ve used Terminus for about a year now for infrequent access to my hosts with an iPad or iPhone. Positives are easy to use, good configuration options, easy key syncing. Port forwarding works well. The main negative is the insanely overpriced subscription, an SSH app with all the bells and whistles should be a 1 time purchase, period. As a subscription what am I paying for? Support? No, features. I’d consider paying for this if the monthly price ($9.99/mo) was the annual price, but never more than $1/month for something that should be a one time $10 app (like this). The next negative - I’m not sure if I’m doing this wrong, but I swear the back button used to work even if I exit a session, now I have to kill Termius to get out of an existing session. It works if I don’t CTRL+D or ‘exit’, but if I do either the back button to go to Termius does nothing. Going to go look for a replacement that doesn’t have an abusive, rip-off your customers business model.

by Jelloskins

I am a paid subscriber. It is cheap for what it does and it does it very well. I would have given 5 stars but docked a star for the following.

Termius asks you what you think of Termius and gives you some smiley/frown faces to pick from. I picked the max smiley face. Then it asks if I would review Termius and I said yes because it is an amazing app. It then pops up a screen to where you can give it 1-5 stars and looks like an Apple rating. I give it 5 stars and then it has a button "for Write a Review". I think I would not and skip that and then it just goes away. I then check on Apple and no ratings are there. So, they are basically tricking people to get them to Apple ratings only if they are already loving it. So the ratings here will be skewed by this.

by Krag0th

Overall, the experience with this app is incredible. Often I’ll SSH into another computer to do my work, and this app has made the experience nearly flawless.

LOVE:
- Keep Alive works extremely well
- Remapping Caps Lock — I remap to ESC because of the iPad Keyboard/Trackpad case lacks ESC.
- Having ^B as a UI button — I’m a heavy tmux user, and it can be handy.
- Port Forwarding — This has been randomly handy working with containers.
- Being able to really customize the on-screen keybind buttons to a lot of pretty useful things.
- Sync across all devices that can run Termius .

LIVE WITH:
- The subscription model feels a bit steep, but overall Termius is polished enough to justify.

ROOM TO IMPROVE:
- “Custom” / “Better” Themes! Even supporting the community’s “iTerm2-Color-Schemes” (GitHub) list of themes. The project has been great about adding in “exports” for other applications. Even being able to tweak the standard color set would be a huge step up. For example, the blue can be way too dark on the darker backgrounds.
- Nerd Font Symbol support
- Ligature Support

by Russell Grapes

Your product is perfect, but please keep marketers away from interfaces and development! Personally, for more than a year I have been suffering on MacOS from banner ads about the "teams feature", which I don’t need! On my iPad today I got stuck with a colorful update button that forced me to click on it and change my data plan, I don't need that! I've already been paying you the most expensive app store subscription for many years in a row! Please, stop selling me what I don't need! With each update, the application on the iPad becomes more and more unstable and has to be closed and reopened all the time when I switching apps. Pay attention to the quality of your product, not cheap marketing moves! --- Fan of this app for many years.

by KarlChilders

This is a great app! I use it all the time, especially when I am not near a terminal. Or even when I'm near one but just want to do a spot check.

You can set up identities and keys. I just configured it to use RSA public key encryption. I can associate the key with a login and use that configuration to login. Very easy!

You can also save multiple configurations for the different hosts and logins you need. I can now admin my system from anywhere. At dinner, on the trail, or anywhere I have my phone, or tablet, and internet.

You customize your view so different terminal sessions can easily be distinguished. There is also a handy history log of all your login sessions.

I don’t need sftp, but that can be added for the price of a subscription ($10 / year, I believe). For that price you also get snippets (macros), fingerprint recognition, plus more.

(Edit) There was a keyboard issue that made ‘shift’ characters hard to enter (caps/special chars/etc) (There was a workaround, but inconvenient). This was fixed, so I keep my 5-star rating. There is a lot packed into this FREE app! Very nice!

by User_R116

I have been in IT for 15 years at this point and have used basically every major terminal emulator and SFTP client there is on every platform (PC/Mac/Android/iOS/Linux/Solaris/BSD/HP-unix/et al.) Paid, free, doesn't matter, I’ve shelled out the cash to buy serious SSH clients. But none have really cleaned up the whole experience as well as this app here. I can shift between any of my systems, iPad, iPhone, Mac, PC and share the same set of devices, public key auth credentials, and scripts. Nobody does it like this, at this level of quality, in such a great looking cross-platform UI. Yes, it costs money for the subscription. SO WHAT! Do you want to have a cloud service that does all the above and gets better with time while responding to new tech? You gotta help pay the developers that make that work. Just give it a shot, the 14 day free trial thing will tell you all you need to know. For me, I have paid upwards of $700 for other systems that provide these features.... on PC/MAC... but not mobile as well. So is this app worth a few bucks a month? Of course. Would highly recommend.

by D4nk M33m335

This is a great SSH client, with support for saving identities, key generation, and port forwarding even in the free version. The only downside is sessions cannot stay open in the background for more than 3 minutes, but that is a limitation of iOS itself, not this app. I also wish it advised users to use SSH instead of Telnet the first time they use it because Telnet is unencrypted and you should really avoid using it if at all possible. I use this app for connecting to my Debian server when I don't have my computer on me and need to do something that I can't do through the Webmin interface. The port forwarding feature comes in handy when I need to do something like connect to said Webmin interface remotely or use OpenVPN in public places when it is blocked (Surprisingly, I have run into this problem before, at an airport). Overall, a great app if you have a server and don't want to carry a computer around to access it.

by Mikeosude

I have been using this app on all my iOS devices. Though I wished they had a 1 off payment option coz Termius is that good and they deserve the payment. I love the sync option and this is one of the best ssh apps I have ever used.
NOTE: I am using the free version and would be willing to pay for a cloud sync service through iCloud but as a 1 time payment for individual users where it syncs to their cloud server and restores/updates from there. The developers stand a chance to make money by braking the services to have some that are monthly(for business and teams) and some that are one off (for individuals)

by Algalgal

this app is excellent. I’ve been using it for a year or so.

It supports TrueColor. It handles Unicode well. The UI for configuring new hosts is clear and straightforward. It has the best UI by far for setting up port forwarding, making a process with lots of confusable details fairly straightforward. It has great integration with the iOS keychain for managing secrets, like passphrases for encrypted private SSH keys.

So, yeah, it’s one of the more expensive SSH clients on iOS. But you’re not paying for nothing. It’s got many features, solid support for subtler aspects of good terminal functionally, and (most rare of all) excellent user interface design that makes it easy to use.

by Frets1127

Finding a free terminal client app with no ads that gives you the ability to save commands and unlimited hosts. They do well at telling you what they offer with their premium services, but do not push it or ad pop ups like others. Or watch this video every time you connect. Apps like these, that give you your ssh connection and if that’s all you want then have at it, but if you want more you can pay are few and far between. I suggest using the free version, and just on principle alone purchase some premium or the premium app. They are constantly updating and very active. I don’t leave many reviews for apps. And yes, us Linux, bash, terminal snobs are picky…but they do a very good job at having options for everyone. From advanced to noob.

by Austenite800

Used this to mosh/ssh into a google compute engine flawlessly. SSH Tunneling (port forwarding) works perfectly with safari as well for my Rstudio server. (Had a minor bug on iPad where my kernel wouldn’t connect to my Jupyter notebooks on my other server, but it’s probably nothing to do with Termius and more to do with iOS, since the ssh tunnel worked fine as far as being able to connect to the jupyter server). There’s even an unexpectedly convenient workaround for keeping your ssh tunnels open in the iOS background through the location tracking option. Everything I could have asked for as a first timer working with servers.

Amazing job this app team!

by Sluggishly~

I use the free version and have been pleasantly surprised by the features of the free version and lack of aggressive ads suggesting you upgrade. I am a light user without the need for advanced features so this fits the bill perfectly.
The interface is clean and pleasantly/intuitively designed. There is no time out or limit as I have encountered with other terminals in the past. I have been using this regularly for quite some time now and have noticed frequent updates that noticeably improve quality with each update. There is also a companion app for windows that allows you to sync your sessions (I believe this is a paid feature, but convenient ). Both this app for Windows and IOS are my terminal of choice and with that I would recommend at least the trial, you may be pleasantly surprised as I was.

by DJTurtle.com

Without Termius, I’d be forced to either use an inferior app or carry a laptop with me everywhere I go. I pair it with a small Bluetooth keyboard (although not required) for an on the go solution to get work done anywhere in the world.

The “themes” or “skins” are an easy way to customize your color, specific to Termius (not on your server). It, personally made my eyes feel better.

The latest update is good; although, I see some security flaws. It’s concerning that even without an account, Termius pulls so much data from the server by default. Is that data saved? Is it sent somewhere? I didn’t make a login because I feel that too is a security risk. But you don’t have to login to use it! And that’s a plus.

by Frostycellnex

I’ve not found a more functional and feature-rich ssh client for iOS. I don’t use this app often, mainly because tapping on a phone is challenging, especially for long strings of commands that must be syntactically correct. this app tries to help with that with Gestures mode (among other usability features), which you can conveniently toggle on/off. You’ll want to pay attention to that though—I wasn’t aware of the feature and it felt as though I was unable to scroll in the terminal pane (couldn’t see the entirety of command output). Same too with some necessary iOS input accommodations like “locking” the key in order to allow, say, -c. If you phone buzzes and it’s not behaving like you expect. Check for some of those other keys!

by IraDalor

I don’t usually write reviews, but wow. For a CS major, this turns an iPad into a serious production machine. I can connect to my Uni’s SSH and take advantage of the pico and VIM editors, as well as GCC for my school projects. I essentially have an entire development environment at my fingertips, weighing in at less than 2lbs, from anywhere; you don’t get much better than this after you take 10 hours of battery to back it up into account.

Time to grab yourself a keyboard cover, or Smart Keyboard for a Pro user, and get to work.

The paid features are great for professionals as well, just really not necessary for lightweight development. If you don’t have an SSH server to connect to with this, it makes it worth it to pay $5 a month for a droplet or similar cloud platform and load it up with tux, VIM, GCC, and all the goodies a developer could want to maximize workflow. The addition of MOSH support only makes this 100x more viable for this type of implementation as well.

Keep up the amazing work!

by D.Simms

I have been using Termius for connecting to my external and remote servers for years now, and they have made many necessary improvements to Termius over that time. It has gone from usable to useful. I use it enough, and have enough confidence in their maintenance of Termius , that I am now putting in my own requests for improvements and features I'd like to see in future updates. I rarely write reviews for apps or anything else, but when they requested it this time, I am gladly giving them 5 stars and 2 thumbs up. 😀 ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ 👍👍 😀 🖖 Live long and prosper

by Tbrowder2

I use this app all the time to take care of tasks on my three remote Linux Debian 10 servers (as well as my Debian 10 laptop when I'm too lazy to go to its normal location). The documentation has improved over the years and this app' stability has, too. I would like to see a split screen capability so I could watch two servers or two different directories at once. My only real complaint is about Apple's virtual keyboard which takes up WAY too much vertical screen space for a single-finger typist as well as its lack of a left single-quote character which I need often as a programmer in Bash, Raku, and Perl. (I have bought and tried other keyboards but they still take up too much vertical screen space.)

by E-dant

Great mobile terminal. With the major exception of mosh, there’s no real need to pay for the extra features if you have your system configured in a way that suits you. There are handy control keys above the keyboard. This allows aliases and vi key bindings the few extra keys they need to make up for the limitations of a mobile keyboard.
I’m keen on privacy & very —very— rarely leave reviews on or pay for services unless it’s through some alias, LLC or other medium. This is an exception. this app is a good app.
My only recommendation is to raise the price and make the software as FOSS as possible. I’d happily pay for and donate to any product like that.

by Andre251

I appreciate that the free product includes most features I want to use as an individual non-business user, and that most of the premium features are ones designed to support a business use case.

It’s kind of crazy to see people complaining about the developer charging subscription pricing for features designed for professional use. Nearly all software used in business today is priced this way, and if this software is bringing you value at work you or your employer should be happy to pay for it.

by D E Frink

I’m a software engineer and use this app to ssh and/or mosh to my Mac in my office. I use it many hours each day, seven days a week. I’m very happy with the current version.

I do have one currently unresolved issue — when I run this app on my iPad Pro and split the screen with a second app, I cannot get keyboard focus back into the terminus terminal window after using the 2nd app. Using this app in split screen mode requires a lot of patience to continually unsplit the screen as a workaround for focus.

this app support has told me it will be fixed in the next couple of weeks. I do appreciate the quick response.