Switching From Termius to Termio: What Actually Changes

People usually start looking for a Termius alternative for one of three reasons: a renewal notice, a security review, or a laptop that will not let them sign in.

None of those are good reasons on their own to throw away a tool that works. Termius is a genuinely well-made SSH client — better looking than most of its competitors, available on more platforms than any of them, and the only one in this category with mobile apps worth using. If it fits your work, the correct advice is to keep paying for it.

This is for the people it has stopped fitting. Here is what actually changes when you move from Termius to Termio, where the switch is a downgrade, and how to do the migration without a bad afternoon.

The one difference everything else follows from

Termius is an account-centred product. Your hosts, keys, and snippets live in a vault that syncs between your devices through Termius's infrastructure. The sync is end-to-end encrypted, and we are not going to pretend otherwise — this is not a story about a vendor reading your keys.

The consequence is structural, not cryptographic. Because the vault is the product, your setup exists in a place you do not control, reachable through a login, on terms that can change.

Termio is built the other way round. Everything lives in ~/.termio on your machine. Credentials go into the operating system's own store — Apple Keychain, Secret Service on Linux, Windows Credential Manager. There is no account, no sync service, and no tier. If you want your connections on a second machine, you commit the workspace files to a repo and pull them, the same way you move dotfiles.

That single decision explains every other difference below, in both directions.

What you gain

No subscription, no tiers, no feature gates. Which Termius features sit behind which plan has moved around over the years — sync, SFTP, snippets, autocomplete, and team vaults have each been on both sides of the line at different times. Check their current pricing before you plan around it. In Termio the question does not exist: everything in the app is in the free app, for personal and commercial use.

No account to be blocked by. A new contractor is productive in the time it takes to git clone a workspace. A machine with no route to a login server still works. This sounds trivial until it is the exact thing stopping you at 9am on someone's first day.

Credentials where your security team already expects them. "Secrets are in the OS keychain" is a sentence that ends a review. "Secrets are in a third-party vault, encrypted client-side, synced through a vendor" is a sentence that starts one. Both can be true and safe; only one is quick. There is more detail in how to store SSH credentials securely on Linux and terminal apps with Apple Keychain support.

Sharing that uses the tooling you already have. Termio workspaces are plain text files. Team sharing is a repo with a pull request and a review, which means your SSH setup gets the same history, blame, and rollback as your code. No seats, no invitations, no separate permission model. The mechanics are in how to share terminal and SSH setups with Git.

A local terminal that is not an afterthought. Termius is an SSH client that can open a local shell. Termio is a terminal that also manages connections — split panes, a command composer for multi-line scripts, per-connection files and scripts, and on Windows, WSL and PowerShell session backends selectable per connection. If you currently run Termius and iTerm2 or Windows Terminal side by side, that is two apps becoming one.

What you give up

We would rather you read this here than discover it on day three.

Mobile. Termius has iOS and Android apps, and they are good. Termio is desktop only — macOS, Windows, Linux. If you have ever fixed something from a phone on a train, that is a real capability and Termio does not replace it. This is the single most common reason to stay.

Automatic cross-device sync. Git is a fine sync mechanism, and it is one you already understand, but it is manual. You pull. Termius does it in the background across every device you own, including the phone. If "I add a host on my laptop and it is on my desktop before I get there" is load-bearing for you, that convenience is worth money.

A full SFTP file browser. Termio does file transfer by dropping files onto a connection. It is fast for the common case and it is not a two-pane file manager. If you spend real time browsing remote filesystems, check this against your workflow before switching.

Maturity in the edges. Termius has been shipping since the mid-2010s and it shows in the corners — the long tail of protocol options, transfer resumption, enterprise SSO, team administration. Termio is younger. Take your must-have list, install the current build, and test the three things you would miss most rather than trusting anyone's comparison table, ours included.

Migrating: an evening's work

The good news is that the parts that are painful to move are the parts nobody owns. Your keys are standard OpenSSH keys. Your hosts are hostnames. There is no proprietary format to convert.

Step 1 — Write down what you actually use

Open Termius and go through your hosts. Most people find that a third of them are dead. Do not migrate those. Take the survivors and note the grouping you wish you had, not the one you have.

Step 2 — Keep your keys where they are

If your keys are already in ~/.ssh as id_ed25519 or similar, nothing needs to happen. If Termius generated and stored keys inside its vault, export them first, from the identity or key section, and drop them into ~/.ssh with 600 permissions:

chmod 600 ~/.ssh/id_ed25519
chmod 644 ~/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub
ssh -i ~/.ssh/id_ed25519 you@host   # confirm it still authenticates

Do this before you cancel anything. It is the only genuinely irreversible step in the process.

Step 3 — Rebuild the tree, not the list

In Termio, create a workspace and make folders that match how you think during an incident: by environment, by client, by blast radius. Add the hosts you kept. This takes about twenty minutes for forty hosts and it is the part that pays you back. How to organize SSH servers by workspace covers the patterns that hold up over time.

Step 4 — Move snippets onto the connections that need them

Termius snippets are global. Termio scripts attach to a connection. The translation is usually an improvement: the restart sequence for the payments box belongs on the payments box, not in a global list where you have to remember which host it was for.

Step 5 — Point the awkward hosts at the system SSH client

Every fleet has three hosts with an ancient key exchange, a jump box, or a certificate authority. Since 1.2.3, you can switch an individual connection to the system SSH client, which means ~/.ssh/config, ProxyJump, certificates, and agent forwarding behave exactly as they do in your shell. Use it for those three and leave the rest on the built-in client.

Step 6 — Commit the workspace

Put the workspace files in a repo. Private, ideally the same one your team already uses for infrastructure. Now your connection setup has a history, and onboarding someone is a clone.

Step 7 — Run both for two weeks before you cancel

Termius keeps working while you decide. There is no reason to make this a leap.

Common questions

Is Termio free, really? Yes. No paid tier, no seats, no usage limits, no account. It is free for commercial use too.

Does Termio sync between my machines? Not by itself. You put the workspace files in a Git repo and pull them, which is deliberate — it keeps the data yours. If you want automatic background sync to a phone, Termius does that and Termio does not.

Can I import a Termius export directly? There is no one-click importer today. In practice the migration is manual by design: you are re-grouping hosts, and the twenty minutes it takes is the useful part.

Will my existing SSH config keep working? Yes. Standard OpenSSH keys work unchanged, and connections can be pointed at the system SSH client so your ~/.ssh/config applies.

What about teams? Sharing is a Git repo rather than a subscription with seats. That is better if your team already lives in Git and worse if you need centralised access revocation from an admin console.

Final take

If you need SSH on a phone, or you want your hosts to appear on a new device without thinking about it, stay on Termius and enjoy it. Those are genuine advantages and no amount of local-first philosophy replaces them.

If what you want is your fleet described in files you own, credentials in the keychain your OS already ships, no renewal to justify, and one window for local shells and remote sessions, the switch takes an evening and there is nothing to cancel afterwards.

For the structured side-by-side version, see Termio vs Termius. For the reasoning behind the storage model, how to manage SSH connections without cloud sync is the deeper read, and Termius alternative for local-first teams covers the team angle specifically.