Cosyra vs Termly: Coding From Your Phone (2026)

Short answer. Termly is free, ships on both app stores, and takes about a minute to set up. It is also a mirror: your Mac runs the agent and your phone watches. Cosyra costs $29.99/month after the free tier and runs a persistent Ubuntu container in Azure with Claude Code, Codex CLI, OpenCode, and Gemini CLI already installed. Pick Termly if you own a machine that stays awake and you want your existing setup on your phone for nothing. Pick Cosyra if you would rather not own that machine at all.

We think Termly is the best-built relay app we have looked at, and it is the one we would recommend to a friend who already has a Mac Studio humming in a home office. That is also the exact condition under which the two products stop competing.

This post was written by the Cosyra team. We compared Cosyra against Termly based on hands-on use of our own product and first-hand testing of Termly's CLI, which we installed and ran on 2026-07-23. Store, repo, and pricing facts were re-verified the same day against the App Store lookup API, the Google Play listing, the termly-dev/termly-cli GitHub API, and termly.dev. We did not pair the mobile app to a session, so nothing below describes the app's on-device experience, and we say so rather than implying a test we did not run.

How do Cosyra and Termly compare feature by feature?

Termly's software costs nothing and ours costs $29.99/month. That gap is not a discount or a margin difference, it is a description of what each product is: our price buys a machine and its storage, and Termly's price assumes you already bought one. The table lines the two up on thirteen attributes. Every Termly value was verified 2026-07-23.

Where does the agent actually run?

Termly states the answer on its own homepage, and we appreciate the clarity: "Your Mac runs the code. Your phone mirrors the session." The CLI opens a session on your desktop, you scan a QR code, and the app becomes a window onto a process that never leaves your machine. Termly says its relay servers carry encrypted data only and cannot decrypt your code. Those are vendor claims about a closed-source app, so we report them as claims, and we have no evidence against them.

Our model inverts that. The container is a per-user Ubuntu 24.04 x86_64 environment on Azure AKS, provisioned fresh on first launch in about 15 seconds in our testing. Nothing you own is in the path. The phone is not mirroring a terminal somewhere else; it is the only device involved.

Everything else in the table falls out of that one decision. Termly is free because it does not run compute for you. It supports 20 agents because it detects whatever you installed rather than shipping any. It needs your machine awake because that machine is the product. None of that is a flaw in Termly. It is what a relay is, and Termly is a good one. The category comparison is worth reading in full if you are choosing between architectures rather than brands: relay apps vs cloud containers.

Termly publishes three different tool counts, and none of them is 20

Here is something you will not find in other Termly write-ups, because it required installing the thing. On 2026-07-23 we installed the CLI into a throwaway directory rather than globally:

$ npm install --prefix . @termly-dev/cli
added 106 packages in 2s

$ ./node_modules/.bin/termly --version
1.9.5

The published package is small, 174,432 bytes unpacked, and it declares node: ">=18.0.0". Install was quick and clean apart from one deprecation warning about uuid@9.0.1, which is already filed on the repo as issue #48. Then the counts stopped agreeing.

• The termly.dev homepage and the CLI README both say 23+ tools.
• The CLI's own --help banner says 17+ tools.
• termly tools list enumerates exactly 20.

We are not calling this dishonest. Docs drift behind code in every fast-moving project, ours included, and the repo has commits after the v1.9.5 release. We flag it because it changes how you should read any agent-count claim about Termly, including the one in our own table. If a specific agent is the reason you are choosing Termly, run termly tools list yourself before you decide. The detection is real: on our machine it correctly found Claude Code v2.1.201 and OpenAI Codex CLI already installed and marked the other eighteen as missing.

Where does Termly beat Cosyra?

Five places, and the first one is not close.

1. Price. Termly is free and we are not. The App Store lookup API returns price: 0.0 for app ID 6754467087 with no in-app purchases, verified 2026-07-23. There is no qualification to add here. If your budget for this is zero, the comparison ends at this line.

2. Your real environment, untouched. Your repos, your dotfiles, your local branches, your already-authenticated agent CLIs. Termly attaches to the machine you already work on. We hand you a clean container, which means a migration: clone the repo, add your keys, rebuild your setup. For a large private monorepo with local-only tooling, that migration can be the deciding cost.

3. Breadth of agents. Twenty detected agents against our four pre-installed. If you work in Aider, Cursor Agent CLI, Amazon Q Developer, Kilo Code CLI, or Qwen Code, Termly supports your agent today and we do not ship it.

4. No tunnel to configure. Termly runs a hosted relay, so it works off your local network without Tailscale or port forwarding. That is a genuine advantage over the relay apps that make you bring your own tunnel, and it is why their 60-second setup claim is plausible.

5. An auditable daemon. The CLI is MIT-licensed with 282 stars and 18 forks. You can read exactly what runs on your machine. Our orchestration is proprietary, so you cannot do that with us.

Where does Cosyra beat Termly?

Nothing of yours has to stay awake. This is the one that matters, and it is structural rather than a feature gap. Our container runs on Azure AKS. Termly needs your desktop powered on, unlocked enough to keep the CLI process alive, and online for the entire session. The failure mode is not hypothetical: a laptop that sleeps mid-session takes the agent with it, and third-party guides to running coding agents remotely spend real word count on how to stop your Mac from sleeping. Closing the lid before you leave the house is the wrong habit to have to unlearn.

The phone is the whole computer. With a relay, the phone is a view onto hardware you still have to own, buy, power, and maintain. If your laptop is at the office and you are on a train, Termly has nothing to mirror. We think the phone keyboard is fine for agent-driven coding, and most people who disagree have not tried it — you are writing prompts and approving diffs, not typing out a refactor by hand. Twenty minutes on a train is a real unit of work when the machine is already awake and waiting.

Zero desktop setup. No Node.js 18+, no npm install, no daemon, no machine to configure. We provision the container on first launch, about 15 seconds in our testing, with the agents already on the PATH.

Persistent cloud storage. 30 GB that survives a lost, stolen, or reset phone, and does not depend on any machine you own still existing.

No one-device limit. Termly's README states "One mobile device per session," and repo issue #21 tracks users hitting it. Your container is reachable from any device you sign in on.

Who should pick Termly instead of Cosyra?

Choose Termly if you already own a desktop that stays on, your work lives on that machine, you want to spend nothing, or your agent of choice is one of the sixteen we do not pre-install.

Choose Cosyra if you do not want to own the always-on machine, you want the agents working the moment you open the app, or you need the environment to survive whatever happens to your hardware.

Try Termly first if:

• Your code cannot leave your machine. Client work under a contract that forbids third-party infrastructure rules us out on the first page. Termly's agent runs locally against your own filesystem.
• You have a home server or a desktop that never sleeps. The main cost of the relay model is already paid. Adding Termly is free and takes a minute.
• You want to try the idea before paying for it. Install the CLI, scan the QR code, and find out whether coding from a phone suits you at all. That is a reasonable thing to learn for free, and if the answer is yes but the always-on machine becomes the annoyance, that is the point at which we are worth $29.99.

How do you choose between them?

One question decides it: when you reach for your phone on the platform at 7:40am, is there a machine of yours that is awake, online, and running a daemon? If the answer is a confident yes, Termly is free and good and you should use it. If the answer is "my laptop is in my bag" or "I would have to remember to leave the desktop on," you are not really comparing features, you are deciding whether to keep a computer running for the rest of your life so that your phone has something to talk to.

That is the honest split. Termly is not a worse version of us and we are not a paid version of Termly. Two different answers to the question of which machine is awake. For the wider landscape, see our roundups of AI coding agents on mobile and the mobile coding terminal, or the closest architectural sibling to this comparison, Cosyra vs Paseo.

Frequently asked questions