by Harry Wagstaff

Created on: January 19, 2007   Last Updated: January 31, 2010

I often find myself in need of a decent FTP program, and the free-er it is, the better. However, many programs are irritating to use, look way too complicated or are simply poorly put together.

Googling 'free ftp' brings up a variety of useful links, though some of the hits are ftp hosts. The word 'client' will bring up only the programs used to access ftp, which is presumably what you want.

Onto the programs:

SmartFTP:
The first program to appear on Google is SmartFTP. This is a professional looking shareware program which has a relatively clean interface and a number of snazzy features. However, the one problem with this program is that it's shareware - and once the trial runs out the program refuses to start until you upgrade. This doesn't sound like much of a problem, but SmartFTP doesn't exactly go out of it's way to make your life easy.

Still, if you have some patience and a semi-decent connection for downloading the updates, SmartFTP can be fairly rewarding to use.
http://www.smartftp.com/ for more info.

Filezilla:
The next program to appear is Filezilla. This is an Open Source project, which means that anyone can help to improve it, and it also comes in a portable flavour for storing on USB pen drives if that's what you need. Filezilla is OK on modern machines, but on older ones it simply refuses to run, which may be a problem - it was for me.

Filezilla is slightly more complicated-looking than Filezilla though it's still a good one to go with.

http://filezilla.sourceforge.net/

CoreFTP
The final program today is CoreFTP. This, like SmartFTP is shareware, though in this case it simply has a delayed 'splash' screen which slows you down opening it a bit. It features site-to-site transfers which may be of use to you if work on more than one website or want to copy between websites, but CoreFTP does have fairly small explorer windows (for selecting and moving files) which may be a problem if you have a low-resolution setup.
http://www.coreftp.com/

This is by no means an exhaustive list, there are perhaps hundreds of ftp programs out on the Internet. However, I hope I have helped you to find a client which suits you.

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