3 Popular FTP Clients for Windows

Do you use FTP based protocol to manage your files on your web-server? If yes, then you may find this information useful. Before that lets know more about how FTP works.

FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol. FTP is used extensively in Web Development and maintenance. Using FTP is simple and does not need any software (only the protocol has to be installed on your Operating system). You can even directly connect to your web server using the following pattern: ftp://yourwebsite.com/, however this might be a tedious thing using it directly on your Web browser. FTP clients are meant to make this work much easier and systematic.

The three popular FTP clients I know of, available on web are:

1. FileZilla – It’s a Free, fast and reliable cross-platform FTP client and even supports FTPS and SFTP protocols.

Few of its features are:

• Cross-platform support for Windows, Mac OS, Linux and more
• Supports IPv6 pattern
• Supports multiple languages
• Supports drag & drop for files
• Supports file editing remotely
• Supports remote file search

1. FireFTP – It’s a fast and secure FTP client for Mozilla Firefox and offers cross-platform support, in simple words, it works wherever Firefox works. Its even supports SSL/TLS/SFTP protocols which are considered excellent in terms of Web security.

Few of its features are:

• Offers Directory comparison support, even compares Sub-directories
• Support for more than 20 languages
• Supports Dragging & Dropping
• Offers file compression using MODE Z
• Supports Proxies
• Supports IPv6 protocol

3. SmartFTP – And here’s the last but not the least FTP client which lets you safely manage files on your web-server. It does offer FTP, FTPS, SFTP and SSH protocols which makes it pretty reliable in terms of security as well. There are limitations in the features based on the license you select.

Few of the common features are:

• Full File and Folder synchronization
• 20+ Languages supported
• Offers IPv6 support
• Compression supported with MODE Z
• Drag & Drop supported
• Establish Multiple Connections simultaneously
• Transfer verification using: XCRC, XMD5, XSHA
• Server to Server File Transfer support
• Supports Proxies and Firewall
• Caching of Remote Directories

I hope the above information is useful to you while working with your files on a remote server. You can also get detailed information on their specific websites and download the software directly. Do drop in your comments.