Comparison

ShellDiver vs BentoTerm

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

Head to head
About

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 โŒ˜V. 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.

About

BentoTerm

Features
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Your agents run for forty minutes at a time. Watching one is a waste of you โ€” 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 โ€” mixed Chinese/English included. Slide up to send, down to cancel. LEAVE THE DESK, NOT THE WORK Everything runs in tmux on your machine โ€” your Mac, a Linux server, or WSL โ€” 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 โ€” 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 โ€” Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI and more โ€” 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

ShellDiver4 screens
BentoTerm4 screens

Verdict

The call

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

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

CostPrice ยท In-app purchases ยท Ads ยท Monetization

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

ScorecardNo meaningful differences
ShellDiver versus BentoTerm: the parameters behind the verdict, then further details
ParameterShellDiverBentoTerm
PriceFreeFree
Update frequencyWeeklyโ€”
AdsNoNo
In-app purchasesNoNo
DevicesiPhone, iPad, Mac โ€” betteriPhone, iPad
Requires iOS18.017.0 โ€” better
Further details โ€” not scored
Size11 MB42 MB
Age rating12+4+
DeveloperMathias OysmuellerChi On Ho

In-app purchases

None

ShellDiver

No in-app purchases

None

BentoTerm

No in-app purchases

Questions

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

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