Electerm Online: Your Terminal, in a Browser Tab
You are on a machine that is not yours. A locked-down work laptop with no admin rights. A borrowed desktop. A tablet, or a phone. Somewhere on the other side of that is a server you need to reach right now — and you cannot install anything.
cloud.electerm.org is the answer to that. It is electerm, the same application you would otherwise download, running as a web service in a browser tab. Sign in with GitHub and your connections are there.
Feature video: Electerm Usage Demo.
What it actually is
Not a slimmed-down "web terminal". It is the electerm client itself, served over HTTP: the same tab bar, the same session control bar, the same footer, the same themes, the same keyboard shortcuts you already have in your fingers.
| URL | cloud.electerm.org |
| Sign-in | GitHub OAuth. No registration, no password to invent |
| Cost | Free |
| Runs on | Any modern desktop or mobile browser |
| Session types | SSH, SFTP, FTP, RDP, VNC, SPICE, Telnet |
| Not included | Local terminal, serial port, web-page tabs |
Two sentences in, here is the honest framing: this is the desktop client minus the three things that only make sense when you are sitting at your own machine. Everything else came along.
Getting in
- Open cloud.electerm.org and click Sign in with GitHub. Authorise the app; you land in the main UI. No email confirmation, no account to create.
- If you already use desktop electerm, do not rebuild your bookmarks by hand — export your data from the desktop app and import it into the online one. Bookmarks, quick commands, themes and the rest come across in one file. Video: Electerm Data Import Export.
- Add a connection the same way you would on the desktop — or ask the AI assistant to create the bookmark from a sentence, if you have an LLM API key configured.
That is the whole onboarding. From there the interface is the one you already know.
What you get, feature by feature
Every protocol the desktop app speaks. SSH, SFTP, FTP, RDP, VNC, SPICE and Telnet. A Windows box over RDP, a hypervisor console over VNC or SPICE, a switch over Telnet, an old FTP host — all in the same tab bar, next to your SSH sessions.
The SSH feature set, not a subset. Agent forwarding, local and remote port forwarding, dynamic SOCKS proxying, X11 forwarding, SSH tunnelling, and connection hopping through a jump host. Video: Electerm Connection Hop.
The AI assistant. Point it at any OpenAI-compatible LLM API and it will generate commands, explain the command you just selected, write scripts, create bookmarks from a plain-English description, and run tasks in Agent mode. If you would rather not configure a key, ai.electerm.org is a free endpoint for electerm users.
Your data, synced where you choose. Bookmarks, themes and quick commands go to a GitHub secret gist, a Gitee secret gist, electerm Sync Cloud, a custom server, or WebDAV — the same options the desktop app offers. Video: Electerm Sync Data to Cloud Service.
The workflow features that make electerm electerm. Quick commands, mirror input and batch input for driving many terminals at once, split panes and 2x2 layouts, drag-and-drop file transfer between two SFTP sessions, and the timestamp tooltip that turns any epoch number in your logs into a date.
Themes, including custom CSS. The built-in iTerm theme set, plus your own theme and your own CSS if you want to go further.
Double-click to edit a small remote file. The same gesture as the desktop app: double-click a file in an SFTP pane and edit it in place.
Fourteen interface languages. The whole UI is localised, not just the menus.
Workspaces. Save a layout and its connection list, and load the whole working set in one action. Video: Electerm Workspace.
On a phone, for real
This is the part that surprises people. The online version is built for touch as well as for a mouse, so a phone browser is a first-class client, not a fallback. The layout adapts, the control bar collapses to a menu, and the batch input trigger becomes a compact button.
It is not how you would want to spend a day writing YAML. It is exactly what you want when a deploy breaks at dinner and your laptop is in the other room: open the tab, connect, restart the service, close it.
When to use which
There are now three ways to run electerm, and they are not competitors:
| Your situation | Use |
|---|---|
| Your own machine, full features, offline | Desktop electerm — local terminal, serial port, everything |
| A machine you cannot install on, or a phone | electerm online — nothing to install, just a browser |
| Your own server, your own data, self-hosted | electerm-web — run it yourself, including in Docker |
electerm-web is the source code; electerm online is a service built on the same idea, run for everyone. If "no third party in the middle" is a hard requirement for you, self-host electerm-web instead — that is a legitimate choice, and the project supports it.
Security, stated plainly
Read this part before you put a production database password into it.
- Credentials are stored on the server, and SSH connections are proxied through it. That is how a browser client works — a browser cannot open a raw TCP socket to port 22. Your traffic passes through the maintainer's VPS in transit.
- Prefer key-based authentication. Generate a key, put the public half on the server, use the private half in the online client. It is better practice everywhere and it matters more here.
- Do not park your most sensitive credentials in it. If a host needs a password you would not type into someone else's laptop, use the desktop client, or self-host.
- It is one developer, a small VPS, and no guarantees. The project says so plainly on the landing page, and I would rather repeat it than let you find out later.
None of that is a reason not to use it. It is the reason to use it knowingly, with key auth, for the hosts where a browser client is the right tool.
Being a good citizen
The service is free and it runs on one small VPS. It is not a place to park a permanent htop or to proxy gigabytes of file transfer on someone else's bandwidth. Use it for what it is good at — reaching a host when you have no other client — and use the desktop app when you are at your own desk.
The short version
- cloud.electerm.org is electerm in a browser: same UI, same features, nothing to install.
- Sign in with GitHub, import your desktop data, and your bookmarks are where you left them.
- SSH, SFTP, FTP, RDP, VNC, SPICE, Telnet — and it works properly on a phone.
- Not the desktop app: no local shell, no serial port. Use the desktop for those.
- Be honest about the trade-off: credentials live server-side and SSH is proxied. Use keys, skip your crown jewels, or self-host electerm-web.
Open cloud.electerm.org in a tab next to this one. If you have not set up the desktop app yet, start with Install Electerm or the introduction to electerm.