A Roundup of FTP Clients

Note: this post is from 2013, and is now somewhat out of date. It’s been left here for legacy purposes.

An FTP client is a program that allows you to upload files to the web—such as web pages, images and videos. Most web designers use an FTP client to upload their websites to a remote server. There are quite a few FTP clients available for uploading your website files to the web—some free, others not.

This post compliments my previous post that gave a Roundup of Code Editors. I haven’t set out to judge these FTP clients or comment on them, but rather just to list them for your convenience. They are also not ordered in terms of preference (most of them I haven’t used). Feel free to comment on which you prefer (but make sure to say why); and you are also welcome to suggest others that you have tried and liked. This list below is far from being exhaustive.

I’ve also sorted the editors into PC and Mac applications. (Where they work on both systems, I’ve listed them twice, but added an asterisk as well.)

Some code editors—such as Dreamweaver—have a code editor built right in to them, so I’ve listed them here in brackets, as they are mainly code editors.

FTP Clients for Windows

These FTP clients work on Windows systems. First I’ve listed the free ones, then the commercial ones.

Free Windows FTP clients

• FileZilla*
• CrossFTP*
• FireFTP* (FireFox add-on)
• (CoffeeCup)*
• (KompoZer)*

Commercial Windows FTP clients

• CuteFTP*
• (Dreamweaver)*
• ExpanDrive*

FTP Clients for Mac

These FTP clients work on Mac systems.

Free Mac editors

• FileZilla*
• Cyberduck
• Flow
• Macfusion (see Julian’s update in the comments)
• CrossFTP*
• FireFTP* (FireFox add-on)
• (CoffeeCup)*
• (KompoZer)*

Commercial Mac FTP clients

• Transmit
• Fetch
• (Coda)
• (Dreamweaver)*
• CuteFTP*
• ExpanDrive*
• (Espresso)
• (BBEdit)
• (PageSpinner)

FTP Clients for Linux

These FTP clients work on Linux systems.

Free Linux editors

• FileZilla*
• CrossFTP*
• FireFTP* (FireFox add-on)
• (KompoZer)*

Legacy Comments

Kim — May 08, 2013

Another user-friendly and secure FTP client is WebDrive. WebDrive integrates cloud services into the desktop by mapping a network drive letter to Google Drive, DropBox, and Amazon S3, as well as other cloud services and web servers such as SFTP and WebDAV.

There are other various features including advanced security (supports WebDAV over SSL to keep important documents secure),offline access, and automated backup and synchronization. 

There is a fully functional download at http://southrivertech.com/download/downloadwd.html so you can try it to see if it meets your needs.

Julian Kingman — November 27, 2013

Macfusion is unmaintained. It’s been forked and is under development here: http://osxfuse.github.io/

Ralph Mason — November 27, 2013

Thanks for heads up, Julian.