Multiplex vs Drover
Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.
Multiplex
This open-source terminal app for iPhone and iPad allows users to manage persistent remote sessions with live monitoring and quick reconnections. It offers advanced features for AI agent sessions, file viewing, and home screen widgets, enhancing productivity for developers.
- Live session monitoring
- One-tap reconnection
- AI agent session integration
- File and link viewer
- Home screen widgets
- MOSH support (Pro)
- Connection statistics (Pro)
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Multiplex is a terminal for people who live inside persistent remote sessions — open source, built native for iPhone and iPad. THE WALL Hosts probe concurrently. Every session is a live monitor: its actual last screen lines, red LIVE while attached. See the fleet before attaching; NO SIGNAL reconnects in one tap. Run tmux, or switch a host to herdr — one tile per session, agent state from herdr itself. A SESSION WHERE YOU NEED IT On iPad each session opens in a real scene for Stage Manager, Split View, and external displays. Merge windows into tabs and split them back out — the SSH connection and scrollback move with the tab, so shells never drop. On iPhone, the wall and terminal share one adaptive full-screen shell. BUILT FOR AI AGENT SESSIONS Start Claude Code, Codex, Pi, Grok Build, Antigravity CLI, or Hermes with a setup script, model, and first prompt in one step. Multiplex spots all six in any pane; helper chips follow the foreground agent — commands reach the process receiving your keystrokes; rearrange or add your own, synced everywhere. A message box takes longer prompts: autocorrect, dictation, attached or dropped files land in the pane's directory, sent as one message. Pro lifts the daily chip limit, alerts you when an unwatched turn ends or needs input (Claude Code, Codex, Grok Build on tmux; all agents on herdr), and opens Claude Code prompt history with transcript jumps. FILES & LINKS BESIDE THE TERMINAL Tap a link or path — Multiplex confirms the resolved target first. Files open read-only in the ▤ File Viewer: code, rendered Markdown, images, PDFs, sound files, git diffs. Web links can open in an inline ⌗ viewport. On iPad both land in a side panel beside the pane — the terminal never changes size — or move into a tab. WIDGETS & SHORTCUTS Put a host on your Home Screen — last-known frames, an honest SEEN stamp, SHELL and AGENT keys straight into a connection — or a fleet widget for every host at a glance. Shortcuts and Siri open a shell, show a remote file, or launch an agent in a chosen directory, fresh or inside an existing session. A multiplex:// URL scheme drives automations. MOSH BUILT IN With Pro, switch a host to mosh and the session survives sleep, roaming, and IP changes — a native Swift mosh client, no companion app. CONNECTION STATS A live latency chip on every host rail; Pro opens the full per-host board: round-trips, typing echo, mosh loss and roams, reconnects, data volume. Measured in-session; nothing leaves the device. A REAL TERMINAL xterm-256color emulation, multilingual system-keyboard input, touch and pointer clicks for mouse TUIs, hardware keyboards, live PTY resize, and a menu of everyday tmux (or herdr) commands. Hold CTRL for Key Commands: saved chords the software keyboard cannot press (Shift+Enter, a double Ctrl-C) and one-line text macros, synced everywhere. Pane-clamped selection on long press or double tap. System, Light, and Dark switch the whole chassis, each with its own terminal theme — ten built in; Pro adds an editor down to all 16 ANSI colors. The app speaks English, Traditional Chinese, and Japanese. OPEN SOURCE, PRIVATE BY DESIGN The complete app — terminal engine, mosh client, and all — is open source, Apache 2.0, at github.com/multiplex-term/Multiplex. Read the code that holds your keys, or build it yourself. Hosts, command setups, and secrets sync through iCloud Keychain, end-to-end encrypted. Nothing touches our servers — there are none. No account, no analytics, no tracking. MULTIPLEX PRO One purchase, no subscription: unlimited hosts, mosh, agent notifications, the Connection Stats board, the unmetered command strip, custom themes, and twelve Key Commands. Free includes two hosts, the complete terminal, five Key Commands, and 10 chip taps a day. WHAT YOU NEED A remote host reachable over SSH (password or ed25519/RSA key). The wall and persistent sessions need tmux 1.8+ or herdr 0.7.5+; plain SSH shells need neither. mosh needs mosh-server on the host.
Drover
Supervise AI coding agents running on your computer directly from your phone. View sessions as a chat, interact with prompts via buttons, and receive notifications when agents need your input. Connects directly via SSH with no intermediary servers.
- Supervise AI coding agents
- View sessions as chat
- Interact with prompts via buttons
- Receive agent status notifications
- Direct SSH connection
- Voice dictation
- Attach photos to agents
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Drover is a mobile client for the AI coding agents you run under Herdr on your own computer. It turns them into something you can supervise from your phone. It is not a mobile terminal. Drover speaks the agent's language: it renders a running session as a readable chat, turns permission prompts into buttons you can tap, and tells you the moment an agent is waiting on you. NO SERVER IN BETWEEN Drover connects straight from your device to your own machine over SSH. There is no service in the middle. Your transcripts, your commands and your code go to your machine and nowhere else — the developer of this app cannot see them. WHAT YOU CAN DO • See every agent and its status at a glance — waiting for you, working, done • Read the session as a chat, with Markdown, syntax-highlighted code and diffs • Answer an agent's permission prompt by tapping a button instead of typing into a raw terminal pane • Send follow-up instructions, cycle the agent's mode, or dictate by voice • Attach a photo from your camera or library for the agent to look at • Get a notification the moment an agent is blocked and needs you • Switch between several machines, or watch them all in one list TRY IT WITH NO SETUP Tap "Try the demo" on the first screen. It runs a scripted session entirely on your device, with no host and no connection, so you can see how Drover works before setting anything up. WHAT YOU NEED Drover is a client for a machine you already own. To use it for real you need a computer running Herdr (herdr.dev) with your coding agents in it, SSH access to that machine with key-based authentication, and Herdr 0.8.0 or newer. PRIVACY Speech recognition runs entirely on your device — Drover will not fall back to a server. Notifications carry a fixed message and never any of your transcript. Your SSH key is stored in the iOS Keychain and never leaves your device. Drover is an independent project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by the Herdr project, Anthropic, OpenAI, or GitHub, and is not certified by any of them.
Screenshots
Verdict
The clearest difference is in-app purchases: Drover at none against Multiplex's 1. Drover also leads on iOS requirement (15.0 vs 17.0). On price, review sentiment, update cadence and ads there is nothing between them.
Scored on Price · Rating · Positive reviews · Number of ratings · Update frequency · Ads · In-app purchases · Monetization · Best chart rank · Devices · Requires iOS
Both are free to download. Multiplex sells 1 one-off in-app purchase. Drover asks for nothing beyond the download.
Multiplex ships an update weekly, Drover every 5 days. Both last shipped on October 31, 2026.
| Parameter | Multiplex | Drover |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | Free |
| Rating | 5.0 (1 ratings) — better | — |
| Positive reviews | 100.0% of reviews | 100.0% of reviews |
| Number of ratings | 1 — better | — |
| Update frequency | Weekly | Every 5 days — better |
| Ads | No | No |
| In-app purchases | Yes | No — better |
| Monetization | Free with in-app purchases | Free — better |
| Devices | iPhone, iPad, Vision Pro — better | iPhone, iPod |
| Requires iOS | 17.0 | 15.0 — better |
| Further details — not scored | ||
| Size | 21 MB | 37 MB |
| Age rating | 4+ | 4+ |
| Developer | Jhen Jie Hong | KEISUKE NISHITANI |
Customer experience
Multiplex
Drover
In-app purchases
Multiplex
- Multiplex Pro$19.99
Drover
No in-app purchases








