electerm vs XPipe

electerm combines a terminal emulator, graphical SFTP file manager, and remote connection tools in free, open-source software under the MIT License. It supports SSH, SFTP, FTP, Telnet, serial, RDP, VNC, and Spice sessions, with both public-key and password authentication. Connection options include proxies, SSH tunneling, agent forwarding, port forwarding, X11 forwarding, and connection hopping. The SFTP manager lets users open remote files for editing. Its AI assistant supports OpenAI Chat Completions, OpenAI Responses, and Anthropic Messages formats for generating commands and scripts, creating bookmarks, and explaining things. Bookmarks, themes, and quick commands can sync through GitHub or Gitee secret gists, WebDAV, a custom server, or electerm cloud. Desktop builds cover Windows 7+, macOS 10.15+, and Linux across several processor architectures; mobile versions are available for Android, iOS, and HarmonyOS. The browser version works without installation and supports several remote protocols, but lacks local terminal, serial-port, and web-page features. In electerm online, credentials are stored on the server and SSH connections are proxied through it; the site provides no security guarantees.

XPipe is a connection hub for organizing remote connections and opening shell sessions in a terminal of your choice. Its remote file browser can transfer files between a desktop and remote systems, and open remote files in locally installed programs for editing. It supports SSH and SFTP, reading SSH configuration files and working with existing agents, jump servers, tunnels, smart cards, and PKCS#11 libraries. XPipe also connects to container, virtualization, and subsystem tools, including Docker, Podman, Kubernetes, Proxmox, VMware, and WSL. A VNC viewer is included; RDP sessions can be launched, and VNC or RDP traffic can be tunneled over SSH. Shell scripts, templates, shell environments, and automatic port tunneling support automation. Connections can be synchronized across systems and team members using remote Git repositories, including self-hosted ones. XPipe says connection data remains on the local machine and connected systems. The application core is open source under Apache License 2.0, while some paid features are not. It runs on Linux, macOS, and Windows. Community is free; Homelab is $5/month or $40/year, and Professional is $10/month or $80/year.