10 Excellent FTP Clients You Probably Did’nt Know About

Posted on May 20th, 2010
A blog post by DN (1 Comment)

1) Classic FTP File Transfer Software

Classic FTP is a program used to download, upload, delete and manage files present on a remote server or website by using the file transfer protocol. The software has been particularly designed for the look and feel of a traditional FTP client and at the same time it supports the latest FTP features. Classic FTP can be used with Windows, Windows CE devices and Mac OS X.

Classic FTP has an easy to use interface which makes the process of locating and editing files in the website very easy. Uploading and downloading of files can be also done with a single button click. The software also comes with a handy “Mirror and Upload” tool, which will scan any selected local folder and will upload files that are not present in the selected remote folder by a single click. The software also allows the synchronized navigation of any local folder with in a remote folder.

2) cURL

cURL functions act as a command-line tool for file transfer with a URL syntax. Daniel Stenberg started the coding work of curl in 1997. cURL was intended act as a method to transfer files more programmatically through protocols such as FTP, gopher, sftp, HTTP,  ftps, scp, tftp, etc which are13 in total, using a command-line interface.

cURL also supports a wide variety of data-transfer protocols. The use of curl involves automating and unattended file-transfers or a sequence of operations.  Users can incorporate libcurl, which is a library/API into their programs. libcurl can provide URL-based transfer capabilities to various  applications.

3) FileZilla Client

FileZilla is a free, cross-platform, open source FTP client. Binaries of FileZilla are available for Windows,Mac OS X andLinux.   It supports FTP, SFTP and FTPS. FileZilla Server is one of the sister product of the FileZilla Client and it features support for classic FTP and FTP over SSL/TLS technology.

4) Fling FTP

Fling is an FTP Client developed for Windows and is a portion of the FTP Client software package developed by NCH Software. Unlike a typical FTP Client, Fling uses Windows explorer interface and clicking menu with the right mouse button makes transfer of files. Fling allows you to assign a Windows folder as default Fling Folder and if a file within that folder is changed, the software detects a files has been modified and saved and will automatically upload the file.

5) Fugu

Fugu is an SFTP client developed for Mac OS X by the University of Michigan’s Research System Unix Group (RSUG). It act as a graphical shell for OpenSSH tools and provides a simple interface to all their features. The name of the program is dedicated to the Blowfish encryption algorithm, which is used by OpenSSH and Fugu is a type of blowfish.

6) PbFtpClient

Pbftpclient is a group of FTP (file transfer) client applications and was developed by Level5Software.It has a Windows-based interface and can be used for both home and professional use. pbFtpClient is widely used to transfer files among computers and FTP servers to download  music, digital images, multimedia files and softwares, publish web pages, and transfer files of any capacity or type between home and office and vice versa.

The features of Pbftpclient includes

• View files on Ftp servers.
• Connect to FTP servers.
• Transfer files from home system to Ftp servers.
• Download files from Ftp servers to your local system.
• Support for upload and download of multiple files in sequence.
• Availability of source code editing component.
• Can connect to remote FTP sites with the help of proxy server             connections.
• SFTP Secure Fingerprint.
• Can export/import sites favorites in XML format.
• Can download files for editing then store the changes to the server

7) ExpanDrive

ExpanDrive is a Network file system developed for Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows it allows mapping of local volume to any of the SFTP server, which the user can access. The Mac version of the software also connects to FTP servers and Amazon S3.

Whenever a server is mounted using ExpanDrive any of the programs can read, write, or manage the remote files just as if the files were stored locally. MacFUSE is the file system implementation layer used on the Mac, a custom version of FUSE is used on Windows by ExpanDrive.

8 ) FTP Commander

FTP Commander is an FTP client used in Windows. InternetSoft Corporation developed this program and the features present includes SSH, SSL, multiple connections, chmod features, scheduler and backup tool, proxy and firewall support and localization for over 20 languages

9) Global Downloader

Global Downloader is a series of FTP client applications developed by Actysoft Inc and posses a Windows-based interface. Global Downloader can be used for both home and professional use. The software can be used to transfer files among computers and between computers and File Transfer Protocol (FTP) servers.

10) Interarchy

Interarchy  was originally known as Anarchie and is a file transfer application developed for Mac OS X. It was developed by Nolobe Pty Ltd. Interarchy is TCP/IP file transfer client, which is developed according to RFC standards.

The supported file transfer protocols includes:

• SFTP
• FTP
• HTTP
• HTTPS
• FTP/SSL-TLS
• FTP over SSH
• WebDAV
• Amazon S3
• WebDAVS