Other SSH clients

This document focuses exclusively on OpenSSH to keep it concise and easy to maintain. OpenSSH is also the only client that is free and available on all major (desktop) operating systems.

Due to popular demand we’ve included our opinions on a few alternative SSH clients.

MobaXterm

MobaXterm is a terminal application, which serves as a SSH client and X Server for Windows operating systems.

The Home Edition can be used professionally as long as the person using the software is the same person who downloaded and installed it.

To use the software on centrally managed or shared systems a paid license is required.

To get started, follow the documentation.

PuTTY

PuTTY is a free implementation of SSH and Telnet for Windows and Unix platforms. It was a widely used SSH client for Windows until the integration of OpenSSH in Windows 10. We recommend to migrate to OpenSSH if possible.

While the project is still actively maintained, it is somewhat cumbersome to use and lacks support for the ProxyJump mechanism. It uses a proprietary format (.ppk) for SSH keys.

Anectodal evidence suggests that PuTTY ist almost never updated after the initial installation.

Non-native OpenSSH environments for Windows

There are a few software packages that provide a UNIX-like environment for Windows; most notably Cygwin, MSYS2 and the Windows Subsystem for Linux.

They lack access to the native ssh-agent and they need to be maintained separatly from Windows.