An xterm-256color terminal, Ed25519 and ECDSA keys, a key bar for Ctrl, Esc and Tab, local and remote tunnels, credentials in the iOS Keychain. Native on iPhone and iPad.
Apple does not ship an SSH terminal for iPhone or iPad. Shortcuts can run a script over SSH, but it gives you no interactive shell: no top, no vim, no way to follow a log while you look into an incident. SSHive is a native iPhone and iPad app with a real xterm-256color terminal, sign-in with Ed25519 and ECDSA private keys, SSH tunnels, and credentials kept in the iOS Keychain. The same app browses a server's files with its SFTP client for iPhone, opens Windows and VNC desktops, and can bring up a VPN before the SSH session.
There is no account to create and no subscription. The free version keeps 2 SSH sessions open at a time, with 5 saved profiles, 1 local tunnel, 3 snippets of your own and SFTP uploads up to 10 MB per file. Pro is a single purchase of $12.99 on the App Store: it unlocks the rest on iPhone, iPad and Mac at once, and Family Sharing extends it to your family. The Free and Pro comparison lists what it adds. Nothing about your servers is sent to us: no telemetry, and no SSHive server between you and your hosts.
Built on SwiftTerm, with full xterm-256color emulation, so htop, vim and tmux draw as they should. Pinch to resize the text, keep 1,000 to 50,000 lines of scrollback, and pick one of 8 themes: Tokyo Night in the free version; Dracula, Solarized Dark and Light, Monokai, Nord, Gruvbox and One Dark with Pro.
Above the keyboard sits a bar with the keys a phone keyboard lacks: Esc, Tab, Ctrl, Alt, the four arrows, |, /, ~, - and _. Tap Ctrl, it lights up, then type c: the server receives Ctrl+C. The same goes for Ctrl+R to search your shell history, Ctrl+D to log out, or Alt as the Meta key in Emacs.
Import your private keys in OpenSSH format, Ed25519 or ECDSA P-256, with or without a passphrase. An encrypted key is decrypted on the device, and for each one you decide: keep the passphrase in the Keychain, or type it at every connection. RSA keys are not supported in the iPhone and iPad app.
Generate an Ed25519 key pair on the device, copy the public key and paste it into ~/.ssh/authorized_keys on the server; the private key is stored in the Keychain. On the first connection, each server's host key is recorded as a SHA-256 fingerprint. If it changes later, SSHive refuses to connect instead of carrying on, and Settings > Known hosts shows what you trusted.
On iPhone and iPad, a local tunnel (-L) reaches a remote port through the SSH connection, and a remote tunnel (-R) opens one of your ports on the server. The free version includes 1 local tunnel; with Pro, local and remote tunnels have no limit in this app. SOCKS5 (-D) stays on the Mac: iOS gives other apps no way to use a SOCKS proxy running inside SSHive.
Set up your hosts once on the Mac, where SSHive can import your SSH config from ~/.ssh/config in one click. Pro then offers two ways to bring them over: iCloud sync, off until you turn it on, which sends the profiles to your private iCloud database and their passwords and keys to iCloud Keychain; or a .sshive file exported from the Mac, which the iPhone imports once you type the file's password.
Pro is a one-time purchase of $12.99, not a subscription. It is a Universal Purchase: bought on the iPhone, it is unlocked on the iPad and the Mac too, and Family Sharing extends it to your family. The free version has no time limit, and updates are included for as long as the app is maintained.
Passwords, keys and passphrases are stored in the iOS Keychain with the ThisDeviceOnly protection: tied to this iPhone and unreadable while it is locked. Turn on Require Face ID / Touch ID in the app's settings and opening them takes Face ID, Touch ID or your passcode. They reach iCloud only if you enable iCloud sync (Pro), which places them in iCloud Keychain. No telemetry, no SSHive account.
SSHive on iPhone and iPad is written in Swift for iOS and iPadOS 17 and later, not a web view: tabs on the iPhone, a sidebar on the iPad that lists your open sessions, light and dark mode. The free version keeps 2 SSH sessions open at once and Pro has no limit, while a keep-alive of 5 to 120 seconds stops firewalls and NAT from dropping an idle one.
The Mac app shares the same Pro purchase and adds what does not fit a phone: broadcast, which sends what you type to every connected SSH session, a SOCKS5 proxy (-D), FTP and FTPS, Telnet, serial consoles, and the MCP server for Claude Code and Cursor. In return, the iPhone and iPad app has what the Mac lacks, above all its VPN client.
A cross-platform client for Mac, Windows, Linux and iOS. Its free Starter plan already covers SSH, SFTP and port forwarding; the Pro subscription adds an encrypted vault that syncs hosts and credentials across your devices. A good fit if you work across several operating systems.
Detailed SSHive vs Termius comparisonPanic's terminal for Mac, iPhone, iPad and Apple Vision Pro, with SSH, Mosh and Eternal Terminal. It does not do RDP, VNC or VPN. A strong choice if you want Mosh, or a polished terminal and nothing else.
An SSH and Mosh terminal for iPhone and iPad that can also open VS Code in the browser (Blink Code). A good fit for development work on an iPad, where Mosh keeps sessions alive across network changes.
Monitoring first: it reads CPU, memory, disks and Docker containers over SSH, with nothing installed on the server. The SSH terminal itself is a Premium feature. Ideal if watching servers matters more to you than typing in them.
SSHive on iOS is a Swift app from end to end. The terminal is SwiftTerm, a mature xterm-256color emulator written in Swift: it handles VT100 and xterm escape sequences, 256 colors, the alternate screen that less, vim and htop switch to, bracketed paste and mouse reporting. The SSH layer is Citadel, a Swift implementation of SSH2, and every connection checks the server's host key against the fingerprint recorded the first time.
Credentials are Keychain items marked WhenUnlockedThisDeviceOnly. With Require Face ID / Touch ID on, they are also bound to your current biometric enrollment: reading one takes Face ID, Touch ID or the device passcode, and SSHive reuses that single authentication for the whole connection instead of asking twice. An encrypted private key is decrypted on the device with the OpenSSH key format's own derivation, bcrypt-pbkdf.
The network on a phone is not a desk. iOS suspends an app that goes to the background, so a session you leave for long will be cut; a keep-alive, 30 seconds by default, keeps a session you are still using from being dropped by a firewall or NAT that forgets idle connections. When the servers are only reachable behind a gateway, a VPN profile attached to the SSH profile is brought up before the connection.
On iPhone, the key bar is what makes a shell usable: Esc, Tab, Ctrl and Alt are one tap away, so Ctrl+C stops a runaway command and Ctrl+R finds the one you ran yesterday. On iPad, the sidebar keeps your open sessions in view, and a hardware keyboard turns the same app into a comfortable place for longer work.
.sshive file exported from the iPhone (Pro) carries the profiles to another iPhone or iPad, without their passwords.Free on the App Store, no account needed: 2 SSH sessions at a time, 5 profiles, SFTP uploads up to 10 MB per file. Pro costs $12.99 once, covers iPhone, iPad and Mac, and unlocks RDP, VNC, the VPN client and remote tunnels in this app.
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