The Best FTP App for Mac

Dec 24
09:07

2015

Rossy Guide

Rossy Guide

  • Share this article on Facebook
  • Share this article on Twitter
  • Share this article on Linkedin

FTP is the standard way of transferring files between your computer and your server, whether it be shared or dedicated. One of the nice things about FTP is the fact that you can view and edit the entire file structure of your website or file server remotely, without ever touching your server. In order to do this, you’ll need an FTP client. FTP clients allow you to connect your Mac to your remote server via the Internet.

mediaimage

While FTP clients are pretty basic applications,The Best FTP App for Mac Articles they’re not all created equally. Some feature different price-tags, feature lists and other important differences. There’s a number of well known paid FTP apps for the Mac, but what if you just want to upload a couple files and don’t want to spend a ton to do it? That’s why we’ve thrown together a list of the best free FTP clients for Mac OS X.

Mac OS X is, fortunately, blessed with a variety of really nice file transfer apps that support many services and protocols.

CyberDuck:

CyberDuck is one of the most popular FTP applications for Mac OS X for two pretty good reasons: features and price. CyberDuck offers a ton of features such as Amazon S3, Amazon CloudFront, RackSpace and even Google integration. Connecting to standard FTP servers is also a breeze with CyberDuck as you can easily save multiple FTP configurations as defaults for easy reconnection to multiple servers. While CyberDuck may be free, you can also choose to purchase it for $23.99 via the Mac App Store to get rid of the donation ad which shows when launching and quitting the application.

Price: Free with paid options.

Requires: OS X 10.6.6 or later

Developer: Swiss Made Software

Paid alternatives:

Transmit still manages to be the best pick of them all thanks to its comprehensive feature set, excellent user interface, and amazing speed.

Transmit:

Transmit is currently the FTP client to own if you’re on a Mac. Why is this? Simple, because Transmit offers pretty much everything you’d want in an FTP client. Not only can you upload and download files via a standard FTP server, but you can also take advantage of the built-in Amazon S3 and WebDav integration. Transmit also offers a feature under the name Transmit Disk. Transmit Disk allows you to mount your FTP and Amazon S3 servers as network drives on your Mac. Because of this, you can upload files to your FTP servers without Transmit even being open. All you have to do is drag and drop the into Finder.

Price: $34

Requires: OS X

Developer: Panic

Features:

  • Supports file transfers via FTP, SFTP, SSH, Amazon S3, and WebDAV
  • FXP support for direct server-to-server transfer
  • Very fast (much faster than previous versions)
  • Simple bookmarking system with history
  • Bandwidth-limiting options
  • Path bar navigation
  • Multitouch navigation
  • File sync with file size comparisons
  • Tabbed interface with tear-off tabs
  • Quick look for files
  • View images as thumbnails
  • Easily change file and folder permissions
  • Auto-updates
  • AppleScript support
  • Set complex file transfer rules to skip certain types of files or set specific permissions automatically
  • Mount servers like disks in the Mac OS X Finder
  • Access your bookmarks through a menubar item