15 Free And Useful FTP Clients For Windows and Mac

The term FTP (File Transfer Protocol) is no stranger to web designers and web masters these days. In fact, it is one of the most essential tools when it comes to web design and web moderating. For those who are yet familiar with FTP clients, to put it simply FTP client is a program that allows one to easily move or transfer files from one computer to another. There are two different categories of FTP clients available for users, a web based client and a computer based. For this article we will be focusing mainly of computer based FTP clients.

A brief history is that FTP has existed back in 1971 and is one of the oldest protocols that support the Internet. A computer based FTP clients are programs that were installed into a computer that enables file transfer between the machine and server. FTP clients can be very useful not only for making websites but also for download and file transfers. In fact, most web hosting services provide their own brand of FTP client or file transfer services that is similar to FTP clients, however based on personal experience their services are normally slower and sometimes complicated to operate and became too much hassle when one is transferring bulk files between servers. Which are why most users prefer to install a computer based FTP client to speed things up and the program itself will only take up a small space in your computer. Therefore, for this particular article we will be featuring free FTP clients for Windows users.

Among most of the Windows FTP clients featured on the list, each of them has their own special feature, while all of the featured Windows FTP clients on the list are available for free; some of them require a small fee for a service upgrade. Some of the free FTP clients features and supports other functions such as drag and drop, thumbnail generator, folder locking and some security functions.

However, while me dedicate this post mostly for Windows users, we have also included a few free FTP clients for Mac users (seeing that yours truly are one of them). But a note to mention here is that, while certain FTP clients only supports one operating system; other FTP clients also provide different versions to support different operating systems. For this particular article, we have collected different free FTP clients that provide and supports different features; we hope that this will help our users get started.