The Wave Terminal alternative built for a fleet.

01  /  different jobs

A workspace terminal, or a client for your servers.

Wave's design centres on a local workspace: a flexible block layout with web and preview widgets, and Wave AI as a context-aware assistant that reads your terminal output and scrollback, and can read, write and edit files with automatic backups and your approval. Termalin's centre of gravity is your fleet: an encrypted host vault with folders, tags and colors, one-unlock keys, an SFTP panel with an editor, the watch grid, and a status bar with live CPU, memory, disk and network for the box you're on.

• ▸Every server in one window — browser-style tabs with a hosts sidebar and session restore with scrollback.
• ▸Edit remote files in place — an SFTP editor and a dual-pane file manager, plus a database client for 13 engines.
• ▸Recording & replay per host — scroll back through what happened on a box, with agent actions marked. Output only, never keystrokes.

02  /  sync and teams

An encrypted cloud for your hosts — and a team to share it.

Wave keeps everything local, with no login — a good fit for its job. Termalin stays fully usable that way too, on the Free tier. When you want more, it adds an end-to-end encrypted cloud: your hosts, keys and command history are encrypted on your device before anything is uploaded, so the server stores only ciphertext it can't read, and the master password can't be reset by design. On Team, a shared vault, roles and session sharing bring the fleet to a group. Read the security model →

• ▸Encrypted blobs only. The sync server never sees a hostname, a key or a password in the clear.
• ▸Works offline. The Free tier is local-only and needs no account — the cloud is an add-on, not a requirement.
• ▸Reach it from anywhere. Native iOS apps and a browser cabinet give you a real terminal, SFTP and recordings on any device.

03  /  agents that act on servers

A hosted MCP, so agents reach the fleet keylessly.

Wave AI reads your terminal and edits files with approval; per its README, running commands is still "Coming Soon". Termalin's angle is a hosted MCP endpoint where Claude, ChatGPT, Claude Code, Codex or Cursor sign in and run commands on the servers you enrol — keylessly, through an outbound Connector, with no desktop app running. Each app gets a scope (which servers) and a policy (full, allowlist or read-only), and every command lands in the audit log. And Termalin doesn't install a helper on your servers — the Connector is outbound-only and optional, where Wave installs its wsh helper on remote hosts by default. We didn't find MCP support in Wave's docs as of October 2026.

04  /  switching — honestly

What Wave does better, and using both.

Credit where it's due: Wave is Apache-2.0 open source, free with no account, supports a long list of BYOK and local-model providers, and offers a flexible block layout with web and preview widgets, durable SSH sessions that survive network drops, and Linux packages for every format. For a local workspace terminal you can read end to end, Wave is excellent, and that's its whole point. Termalin doesn't try to be your local workspace. The two aren't mutually exclusive — keep Wave on the laptop and use Termalin for the fleet and for agents. When you're ready, Termalin imports hosts from an ~/.ssh/config (the same file Wave reads), a CSV, PuTTY or MobaXterm, and exports back any time — no lock-in, either direction.