Free Alternative to Transmit

I have had Cyberduck installed on every Mac I have owned since 2011. It is the most obvious Transmit alternative because it feels like a real Mac app. Version 8.8.2 supports almost every protocol you can name. I connected it to Amazon S3 and a cheap HostGator shared server without any configuration headaches. The interface relies on a single-window browser rather than a dual-pane view. This means you drag files from Finder directly into the Cyberduck window. I find this annoying when managing complex directory structures. You also have to deal with a donation prompt every time you quit the app. It asks you to buy a registration key. You can dismiss it but it gets old fast. Performance is excellent for large files. Small file transfers stumble a bit compared to Transmit.

FileZilla looks terrible on macOS Sonoma. The toolbar icons look like they were pulled from Windows 98. I hate looking at it. But I use it anyway because it never fails. When I need to transfer a 50GB database dump over a spotty Wi-Fi connection I open FileZilla. The transfer queue management is the best in the business. You can pause transfers and auto-resume broken uploads. I strongly recommend installing this via Homebrew. The official SourceForge download page often bundles adware in the installer. The Homebrew cask skips that garbage entirely. The interface uses a rigid dual-pane layout. Your local files sit on the left. Remote files sit on the right. You double-click to move things across.

Rclone is not a traditional FTP client. It operates entirely in the Terminal. I avoided it for years because I wanted a graphical interface. That was a mistake. Rclone is the fastest way to move data between cloud providers. In my testing on an M3 Max MacBook Pro Rclone 1.65 transferred 10000 raw photos to an S3 bucket 40% faster than Transmit. It skips the overhead of drawing a user interface and just pushes bytes. You configure remotes via a text prompt. Then you use commands to move things. It supports over 70 cloud storage providers. I use it to automate my weekly NAS backups via a simple shell script.

Eltima Software built Commander One in Swift. It feels incredibly snappy compared to the Java-based alternatives. The free version operates primarily as a local file manager. But it includes a basic FTP client. I tested version 3.9 and found the connection manager very intuitive. You press Command-K to open the server connection dialog. The dual-pane layout makes moving files between your local Documents folder and a remote server very fast. The catch is the paywall. The free tier locks away SFTP Amazon S3 and Dropbox support. If you only need legacy FTP for a cheap shared host the free version works perfectly. The dark mode implementation is also very well done.

Windows power users love Total Commander. Double Commander is the open-source attempt to bring that exact experience to macOS. I tested version 1.1.9. It looks remarkably dated. The icons are tiny. The menus are packed with obscure options. But it is an incredibly capable piece of software. It includes a built-in FTP client that supports secure connections. I like how it treats remote servers exactly like local drives. You can compare directories by content and batch rename files on the remote server. The macOS version requires you to grant it full disk access in System Settings or it will throw constant permission errors.

I usually avoid Java apps on macOS. They consume too much memory and ignore standard keyboard shortcuts. muCommander is the exception. I tested version 1.3.0 and it uses barely 150MB of RAM while idle. It is a dual-pane manager that supports FTP and SFTP out of the box. The interface is highly customizable. I stripped away all the toolbars and created a minimalist two-column view. Connecting to an SFTP server takes seconds. The transfer speeds are completely adequate for general web development tasks. It does struggle with extremely large directories. Loading a remote folder with 5000 images took a few seconds longer than Cyberduck.

Midnight Commander has been around since 1994. You run it by typing mc in the macOS Terminal. It draws a text-based dual-pane interface using ASCII characters. I use this exclusively when I am SSH'd into remote Linux servers. But it works great locally on a Mac too. The built-in FTP client is hidden in the menus. You access it by typing cd ftp://username@server.com. It is incredibly fast because it renders zero graphics. Your hands never have to leave the keyboard. The learning curve involves memorizing function keys. F5 copies a file. F6 moves it. F10 quits. If you live in the terminal this is a mandatory tool.

Transmit has a feature called Transmit Disk. It lets you mount a server so it appears on your desktop like a USB drive. You can replicate this for free using MacFUSE and SSHFS. I set this up on my M3 MacBook Pro running Sonoma. It is a difficult process. Apple heavily restricts third-party kernel extensions now. You have to reboot into Recovery Mode and lower your Mac's security settings to install MacFUSE. I do not recommend this for most people. But once it is running it is magic. I can open remote server files directly in VS Code or Photoshop. The remote server just looks like a local folder.