Muxly vs ShellDiver
Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side โ with what reviewers say about each.
Muxly
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Native tmux for iPhone and iPad, optimized for AI coding agents running on your host. Muxly is a native tmux client that makes you forget you're inside tmux. Your tmux windows become tabs, panes are a tap away, and scrolling is smooth and native. Your sessions keep running on your server when you close the app or lose connection, and an encrypted bell notification can reach you when a build finishes or an agent needs you. TMUX, FULLY INTEGRATED โข Create, rename, reorder, and close real tmux windows from a native tab strip. โข Switch panes with the iPhone pane picker or work with your tmux layout on iPad. โข Resume your last session, choose an existing one, or start fresh. โข Switch sessions over a live connection. โข Your tmux prefix and shortcuts work as usual, including with a hardware keyboard. โข Return to the same server sessions from your other tmux clients. THE BELL FOLLOWS YOU Step away while your work runs. When a program rings the terminal bell, optional push notifications can reach you even after Muxly closes and SSH disconnects. Configure builds, scripts, or coding agents to ring when they finish or need input. Notification content is end-to-end encrypted. FILES AND EDITING โข Browse and manage remote files over SFTP. โข Upload from Files or Photos, download to Files, and save supported photos and videos to Photos. โข Edit code and configuration files with built-in syntax highlighting. โข Keep your file browser and unsaved edits available while switching terminal tabs. โข Share photos and screenshots with coding agents in just a few taps. A TERMINAL MADE FOR TOUCH โข GPU-accelerated rendering and momentum scrolling. โข Precise text selection, copy and paste, and terminal search. โข A customizable keyboard toolbar with shortcuts, snippets, sticky modifiers, arrows, and F1โF12. โข Hardware keyboard support. โข Editable voice dictation on iOS and iPadOS 26 or later. โข 12 monospace fonts, 4 themes, adjustable text size, and up to a million lines of scrollback. DIRECT SSH TO YOUR HOSTS โข Password and Ed25519 key authentication. โข Generate or import Ed25519 keys, or create Secure Enclave keys protected by Face ID or Touch ID. โข Local, remote, and dynamic SOCKS port forwarding. โข Host key verification, startup commands, environment variables, and keep-alive settings. โข App Lock with Face ID or Touch ID. No Muxly account, ads, or tracking. SSH traffic goes directly to your servers. Credentials are stored in the iOS Keychain; Secure Enclave private keys stay on the device. FULL ACCESS Connecting requires a monthly or yearly subscription, or a one-time lifetime purchase. You can start for free with a two-week free trial. REQUIREMENTS iOS or iPadOS 18 or later and an SSH server. Native tmux integration requires tmux 3.2 or later on the server. Optional bell notifications also require openssl, curl, and outbound HTTPS. Plain SSH works without tmux. Terms of Use: https://muxly.sh/terms Privacy Policy: https://muxly.sh/privacy
ShellDiver
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With software, free is usually a question rather than an answer. Here it is arithmetic: no server of ours, no accounts, no analytics โ nothing for a subscription to pay for. Sync, startup commands, port forwarding: all of it is in the app. WHERE YOUR KEYS LIVE In your device's keychain. ShellDiver has no account and no sign-in โ there is simply nowhere on our side for anything of yours to sit. An Ed25519 key either travels with you through iCloud Keychain, end-to-end encrypted, or stays on this device behind Face ID. A Secure Enclave key is created inside the security chip. It cannot be read out โ not even by ShellDiver โ never leaves the device, and will ask for Face ID on every sign-in if you want it to. THE VAULT Instead of iCloud you can take syncing into your own hands: an encrypted file in a place you choose. A USB stick, a cloud folder, or your own WebDAV server, so Nextcloud, ownCloud, a Synology, an Apache with mod_dav. It works across different Apple IDs and carries the secrets with it: saved server passwords and private keys. Only your devices encrypt and decrypt. Whoever runs the storage location sees nothing but unreadable files. You add a second device with a QR code, without typing your passphrase there. THE TERMINAL It does not hang up because you looked somewhere else for a minute: the connection belongs to the session, not to the screen. The running build and the half-typed line are still there when you come back. Up to 20 sessions as tabs, terminals and files mixed. Real xterm emulation: colour, UTF-8, resizing that works โ htop, vim and colourful logs look the way you expect. Plus search through the scrollback, your choice of monospaced font including Nerd Fonts, and five colour schemes. On iPhone there is a row above the keyboard with esc, ctrl, tab, arrows and a paste key, because a phone has no โV. When the link drops, ShellDiver notices through keepalives and rebuilds it by itself. This is SSH, not Mosh: the new shell starts fresh. SIGNING IN WITHOUT GUESSING ShellDiver asks the server which methods it offers and works through whatever it holds credentials for. That covers publickey followed by keyboard-interactive โ 2FA after the key โ and equally a server that only offers keyboard-interactive while the host is saved as "password". One-time codes are never pre-filled and never stored. You confirm a host key once, by its fingerprint. Every connection after that checks it, and a key that has changed is refused rather than waved through. THROUGH A JUMP HOST When a server is only open on the inside, you give it a jump host โ OpenSSH's ProxyJump. The jump host then forwards nothing but encrypted bytes and cannot read along; both sign-ins are signed on this device. So your key does not have to sit on the machine in between, and a Secure Enclave key works here too. FILES AND TUNNELS The SFTP browser downloads and uploads, whole folders included, renames, and deletes recursively. Local port forwarding brings a database or an admin interface onto this device. It listens on 127.0.0.1 only and cannot be reached from outside; each rule holds its own connection, so a tunnel does not fall with a terminal. WHAT YOU ALREADY HAVE Your ~/.ssh/config is imported, with each IdentityFile matched against the keys you have and any ProxyJump resolved; so is known_hosts, hashed entries as far as they can be matched. Keys come in as Ed25519, RSA or ECDSA โ from the OpenSSH container, from PuTTY's .ppk (v2 and v3), and from the PEM family. A passphrase on the file is used once during import and not kept. Snippets are also the buttons above the keyboard โ global or bound to one host, with a confirmation step if you want one. One per host runs by itself as soon as the shell is open. The backup is a JSON file you can read โ secrets sit inside an encrypted block under a passphrase you choose. Without it nobody gets at them, us included.
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Verdict
The clearest difference is in-app purchases: ShellDiver at none against Muxly's 3. On price, update cadence, ads and device support there is nothing between them.
Scored on Price ยท Rating ยท Positive reviews ยท Number of ratings ยท Update frequency ยท Ads ยท In-app purchases ยท Monetization ยท Best chart rank ยท Devices ยท Requires iOS
Both are free to download. Muxly sells 3 in-app purchases, starting at $2.99 per month. ShellDiver asks for nothing beyond the download.
Muxly ships an update every 4 days, ShellDiver weekly. The most recent releases landed on October 8, 2026 and October 21, 2026 respectively.
| Parameter | Muxly | ShellDiver |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | Free |
| Update frequency | Every 4 days โ better | Weekly |
| Ads | No | No |
| In-app purchases | Yes | No โ better |
| Devices | iPhone, iPad | iPhone, iPad, Mac โ better |
| Requires iOS | 18.0 | 18.0 |
| Further details โ not scored | ||
| Size | 45 MB | 11 MB |
| Age rating | 4+ | 12+ |
| Developer | Whale shark s. r. o. | Mathias Oysmueller |
In-app purchases
Muxly
- Muxly Monthly14 Days trial$2.991 Month
- Muxly Yearly14 Days trial$14.991 Year
- Muxly Lifetime$29.99
ShellDiver
No in-app purchases








