BentoTerm vs ShellConnect
Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side ā with what reviewers say about each.
BentoTerm
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Your agents run for forty minutes at a time. Watching one is a waste of you ā 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 ā mixed Chinese/English included. Slide up to send, down to cancel. LEAVE THE DESK, NOT THE WORK Everything runs in tmux on your machine ā your Mac, a Linux server, or WSL ā 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 ā 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 ā Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI and more ā 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.
ShellConnect
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ShellConnect is a mobile SSH workspace designed to make server and AI CLI work comfortable on a smartphone. Instead of editing a long sentence at a terminal cursor, compose Korean or English requests and multi-line commands in a familiar text box, then send them at once. Switch to Direct mode whenever you need hands-on terminal control. Key features ⢠Direct SSH connections to servers you choose ⢠Request Input for long text and multi-line commands ⢠Direct mode with Esc, Tab, Ctrl+C, Ctrl+D, and arrow keys ⢠Workspaces that combine a server with an optional start path ⢠One-line command templates for frequent tasks ⢠D2Coding terminal font with clear Korean text ⢠SSH host-key confirmation on first connection and change warnings ⢠Device-only password protection in the iOS Keychain ⢠Optional app lock with biometrics or device passcode ⢠Optional prevention of automatic screen lock while connected ShellConnect has no account registration, ads, or analytics SDK. SSH credentials and terminal input or output do not pass through PointLink servers. They travel only between your device and the SSH server you select. Note: Mobile operating systems may suspend or terminate background apps. For long-running work, use screen or tmux on the remote server.
Screenshots
Verdict
BentoTerm and ShellConnect are too close to call on the numbers: across 5 compared parameters ā price, ads, in-app purchases and device support among them ā neither pulls far enough ahead to decide it. What separates them is feature set and interface, not measurable difference.
Scored on Price Ā· Rating Ā· Positive reviews Ā· Number of ratings Ā· Update frequency Ā· Ads Ā· In-app purchases Ā· Monetization Ā· Best chart rank Ā· Devices Ā· Requires iOS
Both are free to download. Neither carries in-app purchases, so what you see is what you pay.
| Parameter | BentoTerm | ShellConnect |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | Free |
| Update frequency | ā | Daily |
| Ads | No | No |
| In-app purchases | No | No |
| Devices | iPhone, iPad | iPhone, iPad |
| Requires iOS | 17.0 | 17.0 |
| Further details ā not scored | ||
| Size | 42 MB | 19 MB |
| Age rating | 4+ | 4+ |
| Developer | Chi On Ho | PointLink Co., Ltd. |
In-app purchases
BentoTerm
No in-app purchases
ShellConnect
No in-app purchases
Questions
Is BentoTerm free?
Is ShellConnect free?
Do BentoTerm or ShellConnect have ads?
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