When comparing PAC Manager vs SecureCRT, the Slant community recommends SecureCRT for most people. In the question“What are the best SSH clients for UNIX-like systems?” SecureCRT is ranked 6th while PAC Manager is ranked 10th. The most important reason people chose SecureCRT is:
Some of us still need actual VT220 emulation to log into OpenVMS machines. SecureCRT does a superior job at it.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro PAC is pretty simple and does its job of collecting and managing a list of connections that can be quicly used to connect to some machine through SSH
Pro VT220 emulation
Some of us still need actual VT220 emulation to log into OpenVMS machines. SecureCRT does a superior job at it.
Pro Buttons bar
SecureCRT while not free has the ability to make common commands in to button for faster command processing. Commands like: exit, clear, :wq!, ls -lha and the etc.
Pro Scriptable via Python API
Has a Python API to control most aspects of the terminal and sessions. Scripts can be bound to buttons, menu items, and keyboard shortcuts.
Pro Puts emphasis on security
SecureCRT has strong data encryption and secure authentication through the support of password and public keys.
Cons
Con The developer officially abandoned the project
Early in 2017 the developer announced that he had no interest in continuing to develop it. Not a single line of code has been added or improved since then,
Con Heavily dependent on long-forgotten libraries
PAC Manager draws its underlying terminal functions from the Perl libraries written to interface with GNOME Terminal, circa...2006. The libraries have been untouched for at least five or six years, and just recently have begun to be removed from major distribution repositories like Debian and Ubuntu. It's a chore to get them installed and will only continue to get harder.
Con The tool has problems with blocking focus on its window, so sometimes it's hard to quickly switch to another one
Con Not free
Paid product. Some nice additional Cygwin type features and server version are integrated, but for most users the feature set probably does add enough value for a paid only client.