Top 5 ‘free’ FTP clients for the Mac
If Mac.Blorge readers are to be believed, then CyberDuck is the cat’s meow, creme de la creme of free FTP clients. At first blush, it doesn’t seem terribly sexy, but digging around yields some pleasant surprises.
I like the Quick Connect address bar right at the top of this application and it’s well equipped with a range of easy to access commands and functions. Therein, CyberDuck includes fairly broad standards compliance, with support for FTP, sFTP, WebDAV, folder synchronization, folder management and it plays well with Apple’s MobileMe. Also, this client is AppleScript compatible and supports Growl notifications, making it plenty extensible.
Download CyberDuck 3.1.2 now
— 10.3MB, it’s really free
— AppleScript, Growl support
RBrowser is a Mac.Blorge reader suggestion too, which offers a unique user interface (among FTP clients) that gives you the choice of icon, list and paned views a la OS X. Further, whereas this isn’t free ($29, demo licenses are available, free for use as a plain jane FTP client), it does offer functionality, like service specific preference panes, meta data awareness and recursive commands (powerful medicine), that make it fairly special alongside some other GUI-based clients.
Download RBrowser 4.4.9 now
— 2.9MB, free as a plane jane FTP client, $29 full function
— No AppleScript, no Growl
Filezilla is yet another reader recommendation, but this one offers the dual pane interface some many of us seem to prefer. However, the interface looks a lot like a port and, given that client is available in Window, Linux, BSD and other flavors, that might be a fair assumption.
Download Filezilla 3.2.4 now
— 4.3MB, requires Leopard; separate PPC, Intel builds, it’s really free
— No AppleScript
NcFTP is a free set of programs that implement the File Transfer Protocol, which sounds simple enough. However, NcFTP is a command line application that is intended for advanced users and, if you’re not comfy in the terminal, you probably want to keep your distance.
Download NcFTP 3.2.2 now
— 568K, free as in beer or speech, does everything
— No AppleScript, no growl
That said, if you’d like to get your terminal FTP feet wet, check out Brand X Internet’s concise command-line FTP summary. Yes, although it’s true that real men don’t GUI, this introduction to FTP via the terminal gives you enough to get started, but probably not enough to rend the fabric of Western civilization.
Lastly, check out Stanford’s Mac FTP server listing, which is just what it claims to be—an old fashioned server list. Hmm, when I say, “Berkeley” or “Dartmouth,” you think of…
Related Posts:
April 22nd, 2009
I’d just like to tell that I’m a very happy RBrowser user.
April 22nd, 2009
I’d throw OneButton FTP into the mix. It has a very clean interface, and only small glitches that I’m willing to work around. Price: FREE!
April 22nd, 2009
I did have a look at OneButton and CrossFTP, but didn’t include because of issues, missing features and relatively poor implementation, respectively, that I had with them.
April 22nd, 2009
Fetch is free for educational and charitable use:
http://fetchsoftworks.com/edapply
April 27th, 2009
FYI: Cyberduck has been updated to v3.2
http://cyberduck.ch/