You are here: Home / Featured / Rant: SecureCRT – too expensive – alternatives Putty, Tera Term ?

Rant: SecureCRT – Too Expensive – Alternatives Putty, Tera Term ?

24th October 2008 by 37 Comments

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 class ((mostly that run on MAC)) for about USD$25 but for a hundred bucks, it is not good value for money.

securecrt-1.jpg

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.

puttycm-1.jpg

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.

teraterm-1.jpg

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).

Filed Under: Featured, Rant Tagged With:
About Greg Ferro

Greg Ferro is a Network Engineer/Architect, mostly focussed on Data Centre, Security Infrastructure, and recently Virtualization. He has over 20 years in IT, in wide range of employers working as a freelance consultant including Finance, Service Providers and Online Companies. He is CCIE#6920 and has a few ideas about the world, but not enough to really count.

He is a host on the Packet Pushers Podcast, blogger at EtherealMind.com and on Twitter @etherealmind and Google Plus

  • http://globalconfig.net Brandon Carroll

    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.

    • http://etherealmind.com Greg Ferro

      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)

    • http://www.sunpenguin cciejoruney

      @ Brandon: You using iterm for the terminal? http://iterm.sourceforge.net/

  • http://security-planet.de Karsten

    @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?

    • http://etherealmind.com Greg Ferro

      Fair enough but that is not my point – at a hundred bucks it is really overpriced, I am not willing to be ripped off.

  • http://www.cciecandidate.com Ethan

    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

  • http://aconaway.com Aaron Conaway

    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.

  • http://etherealmind.com Greg Ferro

    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.

  • http://ertw.com/blog/ Sean

    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.

    • http://etherealmind.com Greg Ferro

      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 ?

  • Mike Seth

    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.

    • http://etherealmind.com Greg Ferro

      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

    • http://etherealmind.com Greg Ferro

      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.

  • http://evilrouters.net/ Jeremy L. Gaddis

    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!

  • FranÁois Luneau

    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!

    • http://etherealmind.com Greg Ferro

      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.

  • Mike Bo

    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

  • http://blog.packetfault.org Francois

    Kitty (an enhanced version of putty) http://www.9bis.net/kitty/

  • Johan

    @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.

  • ck

    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?

  • http://etherealmind.com Greg Ferro

    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.

  • Duncan

    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

  • Ananth

    hello all, i wanted to know if there is a way to connect multiple consoles on TeraTerm. Iam using, teraterm-4.60.Wanted some tool like iTerm its so colourful and so nice.By the way iam using Winxp professional.

    I downloaded the TeraTerm Web Pro 3.1.3 from softpedia, http://www.softpedia.com/get/Network-Tools/Telnet-SSH-Clients/Tera-Term-Web.shtml . The screen shots provided in their site is looks cool, but after downloading i found that it wasnt what they had mentioned.

  • Pingback: Cisco:ASDM Unconnected sockets not implemented | My Etherealmind

  • SullyC

    I usually use Terminal on my Mac. I use an open source app called poderosa, http://en.poderosa.org for SSH when I need to run it on my PC. Poderosa hasn’t been update since 2006, though.It does what I need it to. I, too find putty to be clunky.

  • ciscopad

    There is a way to connect multiple consoles on TeraTerm go to http://7200emu.hacki.at/viewtopic.php?p=26305&sid=af55b5e24629c0f37e4dd685f06ba323.

    • Ivan Brunello

      I second this.
      Not good for managing many devices, But I happened to make fast and dirty diags (show commands on Cisco) on 8 devices at a time, and it behaved as expected.

  • allen joslin

    install Console2 (get the most recent beta!) for a usable replacement for the dos window that works with cygwin to get a reasonable replacement for iTerm on mac OSX

    Console2: http://sourceforge.net/projects/console/

    Once you’ve installed Console2 edit the settings and point your Shell to: C:\Cygwin.bat and point the startup dir to: C:Documents and Settings (which is where you’ll put your .ssh folder.)

    Don’t forget to go to the mouse section and turn off ‘shift’ key for select-text, go to hotkeys and reset paste to ctrl-v, and behavior to turn on clear selection on copy and copy unix newlines.

    • http://etherealmind.com Greg Ferro

      I will give that a look.

  • http://www.siliconcircus.com Jon Bright

    You might want to try PenguiNet. We’re cheaper than SecureCRT and more user-friendly than PuTTY.

  • Ordsec

    SecureCRT may be $99 but it’s a $99 that makes me more productive (tabbed interface, hitting enter to reconnect instead of heading for the mouse, integrated sz support, integrated sftp) and probably one that I won’t have to spend again for another 4 or 5 years it seems.

    I’ll use putty in a pinch, but it’s… meh. VanDyke support the 3 times I’ve ever needed it has been great.

    I’d have to think though that they’d sell way more if they cut the price in half.

  • jimbo

    Securecrt has one feature that is worth the price alone, and that is “send chat to all tabs” – I can open up 20 that I need to make the ssame change to in tabs, and reconfigure them all at the same time with a simple cut and paste. Or, I can look for a mac-address on my network by sending “sh mac-addr | i to all my routers at once. There were some Putty users at my current job, and after I showed them that feature, they never went back.

    • Anonymous

      Putty Connection Manager can do the same.

      • http://etherealmind.com Etherealmind

        Putty Connection manager is abandoned AFAIK.

  • Alex

    SmartCode VNC Manager (http://www.s-code.com) includes built-in SSH client. it’s not based on Putty, it seems they use some sort of .Net-based ssh client implementation. we use it manage all sorts of remote computers via different protocols VNC, RDP, SSH, Citrix ICA

  • http://www.facebook.com/majid.cs Majid Khorsandi

    You can also try MobaXterm, multi tabb and macro support