There was no warning for my favorite FTP client, YummyFTP. And the developer’s site seems to have disappeared. 
I am using FileZilla for now, but hate the UI. It’s so clunky.
I looked at the Transmit page, but the page itself has so many problems with my Mac I am skeptical about trying the client.
Any nice FTP clients people can recommend? I use FTP all the time for my work.
Any nice FTP clients people can recommend?
I still use Interarchy. Might not be fancy, but it just works.
Somebody at Reddit recommended Forklift. Forklift seems to work great! In just a few minutes I got used to the UI. It seems to have even more options than YummyFTP did, and looks really nice.
Also, it seems I once bought ForkLift as part of a promo bundle. They remembered my license from 2011. So I can buy it at a discounted price.
I have been using Transmit for many years and highly recommend it.
What page did you visit and what kind of problems did you have with it?
Daviid
In addition to being clunky, it usually comes with an adware installer if you choose the big green download button. If you click the link further down for “Show additional download options” you will find a Mac OS X download link that will give you an adware free bzip2 file. From then on, just update from within the app.
At the Transmit page there is a serial number check. I think I might have had a serial number at one time. But that feature didn’t work. It did at the Forklift page though.
Fetch, but I didn’t check compatibility with Catalina
Diane
Cyberduck is pretty well made and generally feature-complete; Forklift has been at times very unreliable for us; Transmit is great, and I do like Panic. I was very sad and a bit mad when they abandoned iOS shortly after we bought in all around. They offered refunds but we decided to support them as a company. Also use Yummy products; wasn’t aware they folded.
I don’t care for Cyberduck because it isn’t dual pane. If you are doing FTP transfers and always opening up different servers, you have to also separately locate the other server’s Finder window and keep it open separately at the same time, which seems like a huge nuisance. Please correct me if I’m wrong here.
I didn’t know Panic ever supported iOS.
YummyFTP was a shock. I had been in regular communication with the developer over the years and he was always very helpful. But it appears to have vanished. Email bounces, and the site is gone.
There are some things I like about Transmit better than ForkLift, though Transmit is $45 and it will only cost me $20 to upgrade from my old Forklift license. Maybe these can be resolved in Forklift. I’m not sure.
In Forklift I wonder if we can maintain the panes so that the left one is local and the right one is remote? Not always, but frequently, I’ll open a connection and they are switched and I have to swap. It could get easy to be mixed up in transfer direction this way. In Transmit local is always on the left and remote is always on the right, like I prefer.
In Forklift it seems hard to avoid confirming an overwrite from local to remote each and every time. I have this set in the preferences, but it often (not always) asks me to confirm.
Is there a way of starting an FTP transfer other than dragging between panes in Forklift? In Transmit, I can customize the menu and add “transfer button” to click. But I don’t see something similar in Forklift.
In Transmit it is possible to have confirmations just for replacing local files when downloading, but always replace when uploading to a remote server. I don’t see two separate options like that in Forklift though.
Decisions. Decisions.
You are correct that Cyberduck is not dual-pane, but I’m only excited by a dual-pane scenario when I’m trying to compare a local file set with a set on the server. As for having multiple servers open, with Cyberduck, I approach it in two ways, depending on the servers I’m accessing.
In the first case, you can open as many connections, including to different directories on the same server, or just different servers. Cyberduck will remember these windows and their positions between restarts, and so it’s just a question of training your brain s to what window connects to what instance.
Second, Cyberduck supports macOS Tabbed windows, so if you only want one window with all your connection instances, you can cycle through tabs as you like.
Sadly, they dropped AppleScript support many years ago, but you can still whip a little Keyboard Maestro to help manage/manipulate windows/connections, etc…
I only offer up CyberDuck because it’s so much more affordable, as it’s free or donationware; and it’s “good enough” for most people.
Transmit iOS was (is; still works on iOS 12) absolutely fantastic; it worked well with Shortcuts (née Workflow), and played well with Dropbox, iCloud, et al; and it synchronized nicely across platforms/devices.
I didn’t care as much for YummyFTP as I did YummyFTP Watch, and also being able to set up YummyFTP shortcuts for drag and drop for less-skilled clients/employees. Yes, the developer (Jason?) was super helpful and responsive. Sad he threw in the towel.
If you’re doing a lot of drag and drop, window to window, from your local device to your servers, maybe you should instead be looking at scripting and terminal? There’s also tons of ready-made scripts out there, easily customizable.
There’s nothing like a right-click to a menu command, or a Service (free; builtin to macOS) or Macro in something like Keyboard Maestro, FastScripts (free with limits), etc., etc., which can be set to a keystroke or menubar itms or pallet items, to quickly select a Finder item(s) or open document (such as TextEdit, Preview, whatever) in your active application and send it to your desired server path. It’s pretty easy to get directories and file paths with prompts to direct as neededand skip a GUI FTP client altogether.
HTH
Frederico
In my work flow the dual pane really makes things easier. I have a couple of dozen client servers with scripts on it. The locals are on my computer and the remotes are there. Each server has different local and remote paths. It would be really complicated to do it with a couple of dozen Finder windows and dragging back and forth between there.
With two panes it’s just easier. At least for my kind of work flow.
I rarely do FTP on my iPad, and never on my iPhone. I have some app for that on my iPad, I can’t remember what it is at the moment. It’s just for emergencies though. My “real work” is on my MacBook Pro.
Maybe I was just used to YummyFTP. That and Jason was always really responsive.
At the moment, Transmit seems (1) the most like Yummy FTP with all the panes, notifications, etc. and (2) the most expensive ($45 vs $20).
Forklift seems a bit buggier, and confusing with keeping track of left and right panes. But their support did say they were working on a “fixed remote right pane” option. So I guess others may have mentioned it as well.
OUCH … I use Yummy regularly … just tried to reach their site and the server can’t be found. I need an equally capable replacement. What are really good recommendations of Yummy’s quality or better>
So far I’ve found Forklift and Transmit to be the most YummyFTP-like in user experience.
Perhaps Transmit has a few better features, including settings for whether to replace or ask when overwriting files on download and upload.
You can test both with free trials. I’m doing that now.
Doug
frederico wrote: “I was very sad and a bit mad when they [panic transmit] abandoned iOS shortly after we bought in all around.”
I’m really happy that I bought it before it disappeared, and I wish they could earn enough to bring it back. It’s the only legit ios app I’ve found that can do S3, and with their panicsync encrypted sync, it would allow wasabi to be more than just a backup location.
Fortunately, so far transmit seems ok on ipados 13.n. But I’ve stopped using panicsync for my cloud sync because it could stop working any time. I’m using sync.com instead, which is ok but not as nice.
Still testing, but I notice sometimes that with Forklift 0 bytes will get uploaded for a file. So a remote file with contents will end up empty. That’s pretty disturbing. I have an email out to support about it.
But Interarchy is not compatible with Catalina. That is what I used to… until today when I upgraded and found it dead.
I went to the Interarchy site, but it only shows version10. Not sure what version I have (since I can’t launch it to check), but I last downloaded in Feb 2018. The 10 that I downloaded still shows not compatible.
I’ve been happy with FileZilla, but am learning here that others are better. I maintain parallel directory hierarchies on my Mac and FTP server and wish there were a way so that when I change local directories, the FTP client would automatically change to the corresponding remote directory. Do any of the two-pane alternatives to FileZilla do that? ―Ken
Neither Forklift nor Transmit automatically change the corresponding directory to match changes.
Also, one new downside to Transmit I discovered. Unlike Forklift, Transmit does not refresh the target directory listing in a pane after a file transfer. You have to Command+R to do that manually. So that’s one for Forklift.
Still looking at the error though where a file sometimes gets transferred with 0 bytes and wipes out the target. The Forklift people are looking at my logs.
Actually, I was trying FileZilla again and FileZilla does have a setting to automatically change the panes to show the corresponding directories. It’s the View > Synchronized Browsing settings.