Tuesday, July 15, 2008

Byebye SmartFTP... Hello FileZilla!

I have been a long time user of SmartFTP (a fast and feature-rich FTP client) and were grateful that it was free for personal use. However, as of 7th July (version 3.x and up), it is no longer being offered free for personal use and the software is time-bombed so that you cannot continue to use the free version. I would love to support them by buying a license but unfortunately, their $36.95 pricing is just a tad too much to pay for my very basic and ad-hoc FTP needs.

So out it goes and within five minutes, I found its replacement; The open source project FileZilla. Apparently this is a very capable FTP client and has won top honours from download sites such as cnet, softpedia and snapfiles. I did a quick tour and found it more than adequate for my needs (side-by-side local/remote view, drag-n-drop from explorer, site manager aka favourite's list, concurrent uploads/downloads). Best of all, this is a sourceforge project so I can be pretty sure that I won't be getting any nasty surprises like its predecessor!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

In addition to FileZilla being an open source FTP Client, you may want to recognize that FileZilla also offers an open source FTP Server. They work together seamlessly and are easy to implement.

Here at C4CMedia http://c4cmedia.com
we have used both Smart FTP and FileZilla... After years of experience with both we have found time after time that filezilla has a faster throughput for uploads.

-Josh Bois
CTO C4CMedia.com