15 Best Free FTP Clients for Web Designer and Blogger

Updated on July 2nd, 2018 by Quertime Team in Software

We all know that most of the web hosting providers allow us to use their web-based solution for uploading files. Although they work well for basic purposes, but they tend to be slow and the features are limited. That’s where third-party and free FTP clients come in place. What’s FTP client? It’s basically a program that lets you connect to the web server in order to upload and download files. If you’ve ever transferred a huge directory of files, you will know how important FTP client is.

Here are some of the best free FTP clients available on the web. They are all for free and very easy to use. If you know of any other free FTP clients, please let us know in the comment section below.
(Image Source: Multimedia.journalism.berkeley.edu)

FTP Clients for Multiple Platforms

FileZilla
FileZilla Client is a fast and reliable cross-platform FTP, FTPS and SFTP client with lots of useful features and an intuitive graphical user interface.

Cyberduck
Cyberduck is an open source FTP, SFTP, WebDAV, Rackspace Cloud Files, Google Docs, Windows Azure & Amazon S3 browser for Mac and Windows. It features an easy to use interface with quickly accessible bookmarks. The browser allows to download, upload and move files using drag and drop with a hierarchical view to browse large folder structures efficiently. Transfers are handled with ease including synchronization of local with remote directories.

i.Ftp
i.Ftp is a little graphical FTP/SFTP client. It is designed to work from portable media like USB keys as well. It doesn’t store anything in the registry and will find its resource files and options via relative paths. A full install is about 900kb so it doesn’t eat up much space on your portable storage. If you don’t need SFTP support then you can delete libssh.dll and libeay32.dll to make it even smaller!

FTP Clients for Windows

CoffeeCup Free FTP
CoffeeCup Free FTP gives you all the great FTP features you’d expect from CoffeeCup Software without all that extra stuff. Set up multiple server profiles, transfer files in binary, ASCII, or auto mode, and upload files by dragging and dropping them from your computer to your server.

WinSCP
WinSCP is an open source free SFTP client, SCP client, FTPS client and FTP client for Windows. Its main function is file transfer between a local and a remote computer. Beyond this, WinSCP offers scripting and basic file manager functionality.

Smart FTP
SmartFTP is yet another FTP (File Transfer Protocol), FTPS, SFTP, SSH, Terminal client. It allows you to transfer files between your local computer and a server on the Internet.

Staff FTP
Staff-FTP is a unique ftp client that is easy to use. Unlike others it comes with full tls/ssl support (also with FXP). It also includes a glftpd-manager with all the site commands (drftpd and other command sets as well).

Core FTP
This free, secure FTP client gives you a fast, easy, reliable way to update and maintain your website via FTP. It also provides a secure method (via SSL, TLS, or SFTP) to upload / download files to and from FTP servers.

Tunnelier
Tunnelier is a fast, robust, easy to use SSH client for Windows platforms with flexible TCP/IP tunneling support which provides manual rules as well as an integrated SOCKS and HTTP proxy for dynamic forwarding. It features forwards Windows file shares, has strong auto-reconnect, advanced graphical SFTP file transfer client, a scriptable console-mode SFTP client, an FTP-to-SFTP protocol bridge, support for single-click remote desktop forwarding for graphical server access.

Go FTP
GoFTP is a File Transfer Protocol client that provides file transfers between your local computer and a server on the Internet. GoFTP is easy to use and has all of the basic features you need plus many advanced features that make this one of the best FTP clients on the net.

FTP Surfer
FTP Surfer is a professional FTP client featuring an Internet Explorer style user interface including an address bar, history, and favorites menu. Features include multiple server connections, drag-and-drop, server file editing, smart reconnect for unreliable connections, find files, find-in-files, HTTP downloads, ‘execute FTP commands directly’, and ‘Send To’ menu support.

FTP Clients for Mac

Fugu
Fugu is a graphical frontend for the text-based Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP) client that ships with Mac OS X. SFTP is similar to FTP, but the entire session is encrypted, meaning nothing, including passwords, is sent in the clear. Fugu provides a friendly, intuitive interface for OpenSSH’s SFTP client, featuring secure drag-and-drop file transfers, remote file editing and remote file preview. It allows you to take advantage of SFTP’s strong encryption without having to sacrifice ease of use.

RBrowser
RBrowser is a graphical SSH/SCP/SFTP/FTP Client for the Mac. It provides access to files on the local host as well as remote systems and a Folder Sync Engine with an easy-to-use graphical interface.

OneButton FTP
OneButton FTP is a graphical FTP client for Mac OS X with a strong emphasis on simplicity, drag and drop usability, and file queuing. It allows you to easily transfer files to and from remote servers, such as the ones hosting your website, simply by dragging files to and from your computer.