Comparison

LexShell vs BentoTerm

Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.

Head to head
About

LexShell

Connect to remote servers and Bonjour services with ease. This client remembers your frequently accessed servers, adapting to different locations for seamless access. It's designed for efficient and reliable SSH connections.

Highlights
  • SSH terminal client
  • Remote server access
  • Bonjour server support
  • Location-aware server memory
  • Connect from anywhere
Features
Read full description

Sometimes you need to SSH into a server. This app helps you do exactly that. Remote servers, Bonjour servers — we welcome them all. We'll optionally remember the servers you frequently access from a given spot, too; so if you're always connecting to one network from the coffeeshop and another from home, we've got you covered. With built-in support for the keyboard keys that iOS forgot (Esc, Tab, and Control-combos), a slew of themes, and a ton of functionality included for free. Need Pro features like 1Password keys, SFTP support throughout iOS, and Snippets? Take a look at a Pro subscription. EULA: https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/dev/stdeula/

About

BentoTerm

Features
Read full description

Your agents run for forty minutes at a time. Watching one is a waste of you — so you run several, and the problem becomes keeping track of them all. Bento Term is a terminal built for exactly that. A WHOLE TEAM, ONE SCREEN Every agent gets a pane, tinted by what it's doing: blue is working, amber is waiting for you, green is done and you haven't looked yet. You read the room instead of visiting each one. Parallel mode tiles everything; Focus mode gives one pane the whole screen with the rest in a sidebar. SAY IT, DON'T TYPE IT Hold on a pane and talk. Speaking is about three times faster than typing, and Bento reads the screen, so file names and technical words come out right — mixed Chinese/English included. Slide up to send, down to cancel. LEAVE THE DESK, NOT THE WORK Everything runs in tmux on your machine — your Mac, a Linux server, or WSL — over plain SSH, with nothing installed on the other end. Quit the app, close the laptop: nothing stops. Attach from iPhone or iPad mid-run and answer from wherever you are. EVERY DAY - The file tree of every pane's working directory. Tap a printed path and it opens with syntax highlighting, even at :42. PDFs and images too. - Panes move like windows: split, drag, drop — every move is a real tmux move. - Pick a folder, pick an agent, and Bento opens the panes and starts them. No shell needed. - Ten agents recognized out of the box — Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI and more — every profile editable, so a tool nobody has heard of yet is one profile away. BUILT LIKE A TERMINAL Native Swift, the same GPU renderer as Ghostty (libghostty), real tmux control mode (-CC). No accounts. Your terminal output never leaves your machines. Free and open source, Apache-2.0. Requires a machine you can ssh into with tmux installed. macOS, Linux and WSL all work.

Screenshots

LexShell4 screens
BentoTerm4 screens

Verdict

The call

LexShell and BentoTerm are too close to call on the numbers: across 5 compared parameters — price, ads, in-app purchases and device support among them — neither pulls far enough ahead to decide it. What separates them is feature set and interface, not measurable difference.

Scored on Price · Rating · Positive reviews · Number of ratings · Update frequency · Ads · In-app purchases · Monetization · Best chart rank · Devices · Requires iOS

CostPrice · In-app purchases · Ads · Monetization

Both are free to download. Neither carries in-app purchases, so what you see is what you pay.

ScorecardNo meaningful differences
LexShell versus BentoTerm: the parameters behind the verdict, then further details
ParameterLexShellBentoTerm
PriceFreeFree
Rating5.0 (3 ratings) — better—
Number of ratings3 — better—
Update frequencyEvery 3 days—
AdsNoNo
In-app purchasesNoNo
MonetizationFree—
DevicesiPhone, iPadiPhone, iPad
Requires iOS17.017.0
Further details — not scored
Size28 MB42 MB
Age rating4+4+
DeveloperLex FriedmanChi On Ho

In-app purchases

None

LexShell

No in-app purchases

None

BentoTerm

No in-app purchases

Questions

Is LexShell free?
LexShell is free to download, with no in-app purchases.
Is BentoTerm free?
BentoTerm is free to download, with no in-app purchases.
Do LexShell or BentoTerm have ads?
Neither LexShell nor BentoTerm shows ads.

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