Rant: SecureCRT - Too Expensive - Alternatives Putty, Tera Term ?
24 October, 2008 by Greg Ferro Print Posting
SecureCRT is a common choice for SSH Client for MS Windows. I want to buy SecureCRT but its too expensive. Way too expensive. Or is it just me ?
Cost
One copy of SecureCRT is USD$99 and that gets you one year of updates. You can upgrade to 3 years of updates for an extra USD$40. Now that is a lot money for an SSH terminal client and I cannot perceive the value. For example, I am readily able to purchase applications of this class1 for about USD$25 but for a hundred bucks, it is not good value for money.
The good things about SecureCRT are :
- console support for serial devices
- scriptable login procedure that is simple enough to work for network geeks
- it really works. Simple, fast and doesn’t crash.
- comfortable - this is the client that I have used for a number of years when using Windows so I know how it works
Things that I really hate about SecureCRT:
- they continue to INSIST on using *NIX conventions for Cut and Paste. Ctrl+INS and Ctrl+Shift+V are THE WORST POSSIBLE key combinations. Why not Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V ? What about a global option to change the cut / paste keystrike
- Price
- The global and session options are stupidly laid out and almost unusable.
- PRICE
Lets face it, this product has not changed significantly in five years, surely it can’t own them any money ?
sigh.
Putty and Putty Connection Manager
Many people use Putty, which is good but …. clunky. Putty can be improved by using Putty Connection Managemer from http://puttycm.free.fr/ which provides a useful graphical interface for the basic putty. Its a good product, but requires some Microsoft toxic software (NET 2.0) which tends to bloat Windows installs and requires administrator access to install and because it needs to load the Net2.0 library it is quite slow to start and run. In all other respects, it is brilliant.
Tera Term
TeraTerm is an Open Source project (Sourceforge and is a venerable product. It works well enough but I have never been comfortable with it.
MRemote and VisionAPP Remote Desktop 2008 (VRD2008)
I found Mremote a while ago, which is more than just a skin for Putty, but also included RDP, ICA and Citrix skins. However, that developer has stopped open source and passed to a commercial application.
Visionapp Remote Desktop 2008 costs USD$89 for a single user license and will incorporate the mRemote features in Jan 2009. Since it will combine ” connection protocols such as ICA, VNC, SSH, Telnet, HTTP, HTTPS” its a much more useful tool.
And makes my point about SecureCRT not being good value.
Any others?
Have i missed any ? If you know of other SSH / Telnet clients for Windows, please let me know. I am looking for something reasonably cheap, that does what networking people need (not what sysadmins might use).
Footnotes
- mostly that run on MAC [back]
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I Agree that SecureCRT is too expensive. I use putty. On the MAC I use terminal. Anything better for the MAC? I use zterm for console. I wise there was one that did both. maybe i just dont know about one.
Brandon , there is an article on the site about using a serial console on OS X and using iTerm (hard to put a link from my iPhone)
@ Brandon: You using iterm for the terminal? http://iterm.sourceforge.net/
@Greg: I bought (and upgraded often) the SecureCRT/SecureFX-Bundle. The reason for that is one of your points: It just works! And that saves me money (and nerves) if I can do my work more efficiently. And the price? Come on, it’s less than the hourly rate I (and probably you) charge your customers …
@Brandon: I use iTerm on Leopard which has a very nice session-management (not as good as SecureCRT but ok).
BTW: has anyone of you found a way to send the “Shift-CTRL-6 +x” on iTerm or terminal.app?
Fair enough but that is not my point - at a hundred bucks it is really overpriced, I am not willing to be ripped off.
Sadly, at $90, my favorite doesn’t fit into your pricing criteria of free/cheap…but I swear by ZOC. http://www.emtec.com/zoc/index.html
The concept of Putty Connection Manager is great, but the requirement of admin rights is terrible. I’m using Tera Term right now, but it seems a little…dated. I also sometimes just fire up Cygwin and use the OpenSSH client there.
I use iTerm on the Mac, although terminal is getting better. See my dynamips articles of you want to see how to use it.
The fact that Microsoft doesn’t include an SSH or even a telnet client in vista is shocking, disgusting and stupid at the same time.
I’m a full time network guy - routers, switches, firewalls. I’ve been happy with Putty, it does everything I need. The highlight to copy is handy, and I’ve had few problems with it. It even does serial now for consoling into network devices.
At my previous job I had SecureCRT. The tabs were nice, but I don’t miss them.
I have found that putty is acceptable if you only work on a single network. If you have several networks that you might work on (lab, dynamips, cust1, cust2, cust3) this is where putty isn’t so great.
I also use puttytel a lot in certain networks to get a nice telnet CLI while using putty session name to get to it.
The tabs are not great, but if you are mixing Linux / IOS / ASA / BlueCoat / Juniper then SecureCRT has an edge.
Maybe I am missing a “magic hand wave” for putty, a trick that would make it work for me.
Why are there so few SSH clients ? Why ? Why ? Why ?
If your daily job consists of logging on to many machines, and you need an adequate terminal emulator, how is $40 expensive? That’s your primary work tool, and it doesn’t cost thousands. No comprende.
if it WAS $40 then I would not be complaining. It’s a hundred and forty dollars, do you know what sort of software I can buy foe that money ?
Look at MacBundle - 49 dollars for eight top quality programs
How is USD$100 cheap ? For a program that hasn’t changed in five years ?
Its a corporate rip off. They get away with it because they can.
SecureCRT is worth it, in my opinion. I’ve been using it for years and it really is great, like Karsten mentioned (and you already know). Some of the others (PuTTY, etc.) are okay, but switching from SecureCRT back to PuTTY or one of the others is like switching back to dial-up after you’ve had a taste of broadband!
I’ve been using SecureCRT for > 9 years now and what pointed me towards that program was simply the VBA support. Above and beyond the “scriptable login procedure”, SecureCRT can actually have scripts to do anything, even a watchdog script that looks at what you are doing and act accordingly if you wish it so.
At some point I had no SNMP access to > 1500 routers and needed to change the passwords on these boxes. VBA in SecureCRT allowed me to login to each of those boxes, change the password, test the password change by connecting back into the same router then saving the config when successful while writing a report in an Excel file, all this from a rather simple VBA script.
As for the CTRL-C being disabled by default, there is a good reason behind that, mostly if you are using the software to configure Cisco equipment. CTRL-C, for example, is a special code that you need to send to most Cisco devices to do a password recovery and if it were intercepted for an program interface command, it would make it much more complicated to send to the devices you are connected to. They made an assumption but I think they were right in doing so for most of their customers.
Also, you must know that you can change this in the application’s settings, by connection, though. This way, you can get it to remember to disable CTRL-C for Cisco and Unix connections, where CTRL-C is needed to be sent out to the remote host, while configuring some other connections to use CTRL-C for copy, CTRL-V for paste and so on and so forth.
As for the global and per connection settings, I believe you could get over that by taking your time to understand it. It is actually rather practical although maybe a little different than what you’d be used to.
Another feature which may be overlooked but which I like is the possibility of having different visual settings per connections. For example, you could set it to have a light green background for any lab connections, while you might want to have a light red background for production machine connections. This way, with many open sessions, you might prevent a damageable command to be issued in the wrong context, while moving quickly through the different sessions.
But in the end, you pay much more for VBA and the few other readily visible features and, as many seem to suggest, it is always a matter of taste more than anything. If you are only looking for an SSH client, this may be overkill and overpriced indeed.
Good luck with that!
Great reply! Would you be willing to share those scripts ? Can we post them here ?
Personally, I find VBA a dogs breakfast to use and debug. The logic and structure makes no sense to me and thus I have never been tempted to use this feature. Maybe a starting point for a hack would help - if you can share that would be be kewl.
I’m working for a client who supplied me with SecureCRT after years of using Putty. About the only advantage I see to SecureCRT are the session tabs for consolidating multiple sessions to a single window. Unfortunately, this great feature is offset by the absolutely horrible cut/paste keys. Putty has it right with highlight to copy, click to paste… it’s xterm behavior and that’s UNIX. I could even live with Ctrl-C/V… but not something foreign and unchangeable.
I’m sorry, I just don’t see the tremendous features that others are singing about - it’s an SSH terminal program… for a hundred bucks? The cut/paste thing has me fleeing back to Putty immediately.
mikebo
Kitty (an enhanced version of putty) http://www.9bis.net/kitty/
@Greg: If you don’t like VBA, use any other language that integrates with windows scripting host, like ActivePerl or ActivePython. They can do the same as VBA when it comes to SecureCRT, most of my older scripts are in perl whereas the newer tend to be python.
@Mike Bo: Global options, terminal. Check “copy on select” and “paste on button” and you will have your X-style copy and paste.
I’ve been a happy SecureCRT user for many years now and I personally feel it was and is well worth the money.
I, for one see great benefit with CRT, currently it is supplied by my employer, but i think if i had to pay for it myself and just write it off I would.
I currently use a mac as my personal laptop and have a windows laptop issues by my employer.
The problem im facing now is, I want to totally abandon windows and wipe the laptop and throw linux on it.
Secure CRT, and the use of scripting and its session management are the only thing left to decide how to tackle before i make the move!
Any suggestions?
I use iTerm for terminal work. I talk a bit about it here http://etherealmind.com/2008/01/22/iterm-and-dynamips-write-to-all-terminals-at-once/
It has an Applescript interface that can script much
The Terminal in Leopard 10.5.5 also supports a lots of Applescript features and can be scripted well. I haven’t had the time to put anything together. if you have any tips I would love to see them.
I’m a full-time *nix support engineer. I regularly need to connect to multiple hosts using SSH through multiple firewall connections requiring a variety of auth methods.
I started out with TeraTerm but moved onto PuTTY and spent a while getting a comfortable config there. However, I do quite a bit of SSH dynamic tunnelling, and found PuTTY a bit clunky for that, and plugging the config in and out of the Windows registry took a bit of getting used to. I briefly tried both SecureCRT and the SSH.com products, but didn’t get on with them and had no budget to pay for them anyway.
I’ve subsequently moved to CYGWIN. Being a *nix dude I find this the most natural choice for working in windows - I can script and I can use a config that’s familiar, flexible and easy to manipulate ( ck, if you’d been using CYGWIN OpenSSH, migration to Linux would have been simple
). I have also experimented with running Linux in a VM, which is nice but a bit heavy on resources.
No doubt I could learn to love the commercial products if I got more familiar with them, but for my purposes CYGWIN’s OpenSSH implementation meets my requirements just fine. And it’s free