Good SFTP Clients?

Joel Parker Henderson writes "To improve security, my company is switching servers from Microsoft to RedHat, and from FTP to SFTP. The new RedHat has SFTP-- secure FTP with SSH and host fingerprints-- and I want to upgrade our people to use it. What are good SFTP clients? Priorities: an easy user interface, point-and-click renaming of remote files and folders, recursive directory transfers. Useful: drag-and-drop, resume broken transfers, synchronization of local and remote directories, written in Java, shareware or freeware. Thanks in advance for advice!"

Comments

MacSFTP is nice for Mac OS X (but $25 shareware)

[ubiquitin]

MacFSTP works with classic (MacOS9) and carbon (OSX). I really like it, but it is $25 shareware from some developer in France.

List of OpenSSH clients

[scubacuda]

FYI, Here is OpenSSH's list of free recommended clients for interoperating with OpenSSH from Windows machines.

ssh.com

[bwulf]

.. has a fine client, which includes a file-transfer function.

I use it every day to transfer files from/to home and work.

It does some of the things you mention; easy UI, remote renaming, recursive directory transfers, drag and drop and some other bits.

CuteFTP

[Yarn]

Caveat: I personally use psftp/pscp from the PuTTY ssh toolkit, sftp/scp under Linux or Cygwin.

CuteFTP Pro claims support for SFTP and FTP over SSL.

Some of my users use it, I never have ;)

GFTP is quite nice

[fialar]

You can get a copy here. The best thing about it is it's multithreaded and you can transfer many files at once.

WinSCP

[Pauly]

If you're still using Windows clients, you really want WinSCP. It is closed source, freeware but this is for Windows after all.

One of the many wonderful things about ssh is that is provides many interfaces to the same protocol. The ssh protocol combines file transfer, remote shell access, port forwarding, encryption and compression all on one port/service. That means when you turn on the ssh port, you can access it using an interactive shell (ssh), or an interactive file transfer session (sftp) or an automated file transfer session (scp). WinSCP truthfully acts more like a GUI ftp client, but, when it comes to ssh, what's in a name?

For file synchronization, look into rdist, rsync, unison, and of course NFS, AFS, etc.

WinSCP

[GldisAter]

http://winscp.vse.cz/eng/

It's not really an sftp client; it uses a ssh connection to get file information on the remote host and to manipulate those files and uses scp to transfer files.

1.0 has a Norton Commander-like interface.
2.0-beta has both a NC-like and Windows Explorer-like interface.

mindterm ssh from appgate.com

[spike666]

mindterm ssh from appgate.com takes a novel approach to sftp. in addition to having a popup window that will do the sftp, you can also use the ssh client as an ftp proxy server - meaning you can use standard ftp to the ssh client, and it will then translate that into sftp to your ssh server. meaning you can have your users use whatever ftp client they like.

Re:gnome-vfs?

[fingal]

This is one of the reasons why I enjoy using KDE because of the kioslave named kio_fish. This lets you enter URLs of the style:-

fish://<user>@<host>/path

This means that you can securely connect to your remote server, browse the file system, open up a text file for editing (or a graphic file or whatever) with the appropriate GUI tool on the local desktop and then save it back to the remote filesystem completely transparently. Greatly reduces the pain of secure remote administration.

SecureFX

[fliplap]

My suggestion would be to go with Vandyke's SecureFX. Vandyke is the same company that brought us the beloved SecureCRT. Plus its one of the very few Windows graphical SFTP clients. It does ftp over ssl, sftp, and normal ftp with a very simple user interface. It might be alittle pricey but if you've got the money then go for it.

If you're in a UNIX shop and still want graphical you should check out gftp, I know it also does sftp. Good luck and let us know if you find any other good ones!

On the advice of Openssh.com

[xrayspx]

I just grabbed Secure iXplorer. This is a GUI app that lets you browse, Windows Explorer style, your remote SFTP directory. So far I'm really impressed, might just use it as file managment for my remote machine, since it's easier to look at than a putty window.

Requires PSCP.exe and plink.exe, which are part of the PuTTY toolkit iXplorer does include these in its standard install distro.

Both are Open Source (PuTTY is MIT, iXplorer is GPL), both are really swell, and iXplorer would be good for desktop users unfamiliar with a command line.

Don't choose FTP

[Anonymous Coward]

FTP is an aging protocol that doesn't deal well with IP Masquerading, etc. Although there's Secure FTP it's just another hack ontop of a flaky protocol.

WebDAV (dot org) uses a subset of HTTP 1.1 and it's generally better in every way. FTP has syncing issues due to using multiple ports for any transmission - so WebDAV is faster (always). It can access via https so it's more secure than sftp. WebDAV clients are included in the base install of Windows '98 (they call them 'web folders'), and there are many Unix clients too (even nice web clients). For servers there are Apache modules, and standalone servers.

Anyway, enough of my rant. FTP is really a bitch to get working. WebDAV has been gaining support for the last five years and it's really quite efficient. If you're picking clients it doesn't look like you're too entrenched in any software. Dump FTP. You'll thank me for it.