Favorite free SFTP client

Question

What is your favorite SFTP client?

I'm in need of a free-as-in-beer SFTP client for Windows. There seem to be a number of them out there, of varying quality.

It doesn't need to be fancy. Decent usability and high quality would be the ideal.

Thanks!

Answer 1

I've been using winScp for a long time. It behaves well with SFTP and provides a pretty standard gui interface.

EDIT: Thomas Owens reminded me that it does tie in with all the PuTTY standard authentication items. So it works with Pagent and the like.

Answer 2

I use FileZilla, never needed anything else.

Answer 3

I'm out of upmods, so I can't just promote Mykroft's answer, but I too use winSCP and like it a lot. I believe that it somehow uses puTTY, so that's another option.

Answer 4

I too chime in for filezilla. Also, jEdit supports sftp nicely too (see ftp plugin), so I don't actually use a traditional ftp client all that much..

Answer 5

@Christopher Mahan: There's something borked with jEdit's SFTP and FTP. It won't close it's connections, which made the sysadmin here go insane trying to figure out the problem, until he asked all of the devs how we were connecting to the server.

Answer 6

+1 for FileZilla

Answer 7

@Thomas Owens: interesting. I use it on servers I administer and I've never had problems... (Debian stable servers). I'll look more into it.

Answer 8

I second WinSCP, it's by far the best client out there, free or otherwise.

If you have the need to map a drive letter, however, I recommend non-free SftpDrive. You can even use it to map a drive through a tunnel from one SSH connection to another.

Answer 9

@Christopher: We use Solaris and OpenSolaris boxes here. I'm wondering if it's a bug in (Open)Solaris or some server config that was set up by the admin.

Answer 10

The putty sftp client is awesome, especially if you use pageant for ssh keys.

I pretty much use only the putty tools if I'm not using cygwin.

Answer 11

I just installed both WinSCP and FileZilla. In my fast, entirely unscientific survey, I found:

1. Both applications installed easily.
2. Both applications had an acceptable UI that was easy to figure out.
3. I liked the way WinSCP made it easy to store the information for the host I was connecting to (for the next time I log in).
4. I really liked the amount of information that FileZilla provided regarding the transfer of the files.

There was a problem on the server I was transferring to (lack of disk space). FileZilla made this easy to figure out.

So there you have it. Amazing. Ten Answers in 50 minutes. +5 for StackOverflow! Thanks everyone!

Answer 12

If you're using Firefox, there's FireFTP. Its available as an extension. I find the interface better than FileZilla and it generally seems to stall less on transfers. Note that I haven't used FileZilla for a while so it may have improved and I rarely use SFTP features.

Answer 13

I'll echo the WinSCP. I've been using it for years and it just works