One plane for access — people and machines alike.

Modern access proxies broker secure, short-lived connections for your engineers. MisterShell does that too — through outbound-only workers, from the browser or their own SSH client — then covers the traffic a proxy never sees: the scheduled jobs and automation reaching the same devices. And it keeps going, into the operations work a proxy hands off to other tools.

Deploy Free Try Pro / Enterprise

Workers deployed per segment, connecting outbound to the core — Workers per segment, dialling out — no inbound firewall rules to grant

Access and the operations around it, as one fabric

MisterShell brokers governed access across SSH, Kubernetes, databases, RDP, and VNC — from the browser or from your own SSH client, with automation taking the same governed door — through outbound-only workers — no inbound firewall rules, and strict host-key verification on every session and background check — with session policy, per-command ACLs, recording, an official Terraform provider and REST API that keep inventory, credentials, roles and grants, and session policy rules and per-command ACLs as reviewed code, and a built-in MCP endpoint that gives your AI tooling inventory, changelog, and diagnostics with exactly the caller’s permissions, read-only by default. Then it carries what a proxy hands off: configuration change tracking, per-metric health, operational facts, and in-session AI under the same guardrails. One self-hosted fabric for access and the operations around it, with your data staying in your environment.

It governs the people. Everything else still goes around it.

A proxy is built for interactive humans, and that is the part of the traffic it sees. The config-backup job, the monitoring poller, the Ansible run, the vendor script on a schedule — each keeps its own credential and its own direct path to the same devices, and none of them shows up in the proxy’s record. You end up with a carefully governed front door and an estate full of side entrances that never appear in an access review, because none of them is a person. And a proxy’s job ends the moment you are connected: it does not track configuration changes, hold health history, surface device facts, or help you diagnose inside the session. So it sits beside a monitoring tool, a config tracker, and the AI tooling your team is starting to adopt — each governed separately.

What MisterShell covers

The essentials, in one platform

Remote workers, enterprise sign-in, high availability, and audit export to your SIEM come with the Pro edition; policy engines, session recording, and automation ship with Enterprise; IDS, syslog collection, and external access are licensed add-ons.

Deployment model — Self-hosted — run it as a single self-contained container, or as a full deployment with outbound workers. No SaaS control plane.

Access surfaces — SSH, AWS CLI, Azure CLI, Kubernetes (kubectl), databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, SQL Server, ClickHouse), interactive RDP, VNC, and web-application sessions — in the browser, or from your own SSH client against the same policy.

Your own SSH client & automation — Point your usual SSH client at MisterShell, sign in with your own SSH key, and work the way you already do — every shell resource you may reach, under the same permissions, policy, approvals and recording as the browser. A full terminal workspace comes with it: the resource tree, several sessions in tabs, and the same in-session AI, without leaving the terminal. Automation connects the same way, so Ansible and the tooling around it keep reaching devices through MisterShell rather than around it. Included in every edition.

Network model — Outbound-only workers deployed inside protected zones — no inbound firewall rules required — with strict SSH host-key verification applied to live sessions and background checks alike.

Session policy & per-command control — Firewall-style allow/deny rules — with notify and log flags — at connection time (by location, resource type, tag, role, session type) and per-command ACLs that take a command line apart and require every part of it to be allowed — so a blocked command chained onto a permitted one still never reaches the target. An Approve action on a rule holds the connection until a person says yes.

Approval before access — Session and file-transfer rules can require a human decision before access — the roles you name approve, the access expires on its own, and every request and decision is kept as evidence even after the rule is edited or removed.

Governed file transfer — The location tree doubles as a file catalog, with object stores mounted per location — so where a file lives follows your topology. People move files against the catalog, never the resource directly; an ordered File Transfer Policy decides each copy on location, type, tag, role, direction and both paths — and can require an approval before the transfer starts. The closest worker streams the bytes, so the resource never reaches the store and no new egress path is opened. Every transfer is its own session, with operations and hashes recorded and no file content retained.

Inventory, RBAC & session policy as code (Terraform / MCP) — The official Terraform provider goes past inventory: locations, resources, tags and credentials, but also roles, users and role grants, session policy rules and per-command ACLs, identity providers and their mappings, workers, log destinations, settings, and AI models, prompts, agents and skills — so who may reach what, and what they may run, lands in a reviewed pull request rather than a console. Recording, fact and config policies and automation playbooks are authored in the UI, not yet in the provider. Plus a REST API for scripts and CI, and a built-in MCP endpoint giving external AI access to inventory, changelog, and diagnostics with exactly the caller's permissions, read-only by default.

Session recording & replay — Full recording and replay for terminal sessions and graphical RDP, VNC and web-app sessions — immutable operational evidence in an object store you own (local, S3, or Azure Blob), SHA-256 hashed at capture and verified on replay, with retention set per rule and replay flagging any gaps.

When a dedicated access proxy still earns its place

MisterShell covers governed access for the vast majority of day-to-day work. A dedicated access proxy — Teleport, StrongDM, or HashiCorp Boundary — earns its place when credential-less, certificate-based ephemeral access or deep machine and workload identity is a hard requirement, especially in a cloud-native, Terraform-first shop. MisterShell’s own answer sits in between: time-bound, approval-gated access under each person’s own login — enough for most teams, short of a certificate per connection. Plenty of teams run one for that specific path and keep MisterShell as the everyday plane for access and the operations around it.

Start with MisterShell when

The automation and scheduled jobs reaching your devices should be governed on the same path as your engineers, not left beside it
You want governed access plus the operational context around it — config, health, facts, AI — in one place
Self-hosted, with outbound-only workers reaching into segmented or OT zones, matters
You would rather not run a proxy, a monitor, a config tool, and an AI gateway separately
Browser-delivered RDP and VNC for Windows and HMIs alongside SSH, Kubernetes, and databases is useful

Add a dedicated access proxy when

Credential-less, certificate-based ephemeral access is your top priority
Certificate-based machine and workload identity is central to your model (agent platforms reach MisterShell as a user, through your own identity provider)
You want a purist IaC/Terraform-native access layer and little else
You need the proxy to double as a network path — port forwarding and tunnelling beyond the session itself
A fully managed, edge-delivered proxy suits you better than self-hosting

Comparison reflects publicly available information as of September 2026. Verify current capabilities with each vendor.

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