Cyberduck vs FileZilla 2026, and a Third Option

Two free clients that are not interchangeable

Updated 24 September 2026. Cyberduck and FileZilla get recommended in the same breath and then disappoint people for opposite reasons. Both are free, both are open source, both have been around for more than twenty years. The difference is what they were built to talk to: FileZilla was built for servers, Cyberduck was built for servers and then grew into cloud storage.

That one sentence decides most of these comparisons. If your remote side is a hosting account, a NAS or an SFTP jump box, FileZilla is the more focused tool and it runs on more machines. If your remote side is a bucket — S3, Backblaze B2, Azure, Google Drive — the free FileZilla client does not connect to it at all, and Cyberduck does.

The comparison, column by column

The row that surprises people is WebDAV. FileZilla's own description of the free client is exact: it "supports FTP, FTPS, and SFTP — connections to traditional servers and NAS devices." WebDAV, S3, Azure, Backblaze B2, Box, Dropbox, Google Cloud, Google Drive, OneDrive, SharePoint and OpenStack Swift are all FileZilla Pro features. Cyberduck ships every one of those in the free download.

Protocols: where the two actually part company

Cyberduck's provider list is the longest thing about it: FTP, SFTP, WebDAV, SMB, Amazon S3, OpenStack Swift, Backblaze B2, Microsoft Azure, OneDrive, Google Drive and Dropbox, plus Box, Google Cloud Storage, DRACOON, Files.com, Nextcloud, ownCloud and Wasabi through its connection-profile registry. Version 9.5.4 was released on 25 August 2026, so this is maintained software, not a survivor.

FileZilla's free client covers three protocols well and stops there. That is not a flaw; it is a product decision with a paid upgrade attached. FileZilla Pro adds the cloud backends, runs on Windows, macOS and Debian-based Linux — "only for Debian," per its own page, though it "works also on Ubuntu 20.04" — and starts at €12.99 for a single device, €29.99 for up to three, or €24.99 for a bundle with the command-line tool. Its FAQ is candid about who should not bother: "if your transfers are FTP/SFTP only, the free client is sufficient."

Neither tool lists Cloudflare R2. Both can usually reach an R2 bucket by typing an S3-compatible endpoint into a generic S3 connection, which works until something behaves differently from S3 and you own the debugging.

Platforms: the reason FileZilla wins on Linux

Cyberduck's download page lists two operating systems: Windows 10 (64-bit) or later, and macOS 10.13 or later on Intel or Apple M1. There is no Linux desktop build, and Flathub has no ch.iterate.cyberduck application as of September 2026. It does carry FileZilla, published under GPL-2.0-or-later, which makes FileZilla the obvious free choice on a Linux desktop even though the free build cannot see your buckets.

On macOS and Windows the platform question is a wash and the choice comes down to protocols and taste. Cyberduck's interface is a single browser window with bookmarks; FileZilla's is the classic two-pane local-and-remote layout with a transfer queue at the bottom. People are usually loyal to whichever one they learned first, and neither loyalty is wrong.

Price: free, donation-prompted, and €12.99

Cyberduck is free to download and shows a donation prompt. Its wording is specific: "As a contributor (minimum amount 10 USD) you receive a registration key that registers the installed application to your name and disables the donation prompt." Buying it from the Mac App Store or Microsoft Store has the same effect. So Cyberduck's real price is either nothing with a nag, or roughly ten dollars once.

FileZilla is free with no nag in the application, funded by sponsors and advertising on the project site. FileZilla Pro is the only genuinely priced option in this comparison, and its licensing model changed in a way worth reading before you buy: "your license is perpetual, but activation now governs access to FileZilla Pro's online services, including new versions of the app."

Neither one mounts, and that is often the real question

A large share of people comparing these two are not comparing transfer clients at all. They want the remote storage to appear in Finder or File Explorer so that Photoshop, Excel or a video editor can open files directly. Neither Cyberduck nor the free FileZilla does that. Cyberduck's answer is its paid sibling Mountain Duck; FileZilla's answer is RemoteDrive, a separate macOS product.

This is where the third column earns its place. AnyStorage 0.2.24, released on 23 September 2026, runs on macOS 11 or newer, Windows 10 or newer and Linux, and does both jobs in one app: a tabbed workspace with a visible transfer queue, and an optional mount that needs no filesystem driver because the app runs a WebDAV server on http://127.0.0.1:3211 for the operating system's own WebDAV client to mount. More than 20 connection types are supported, with Cloudflare R2, Backblaze B2, Google Cloud Storage, Azure Blob, Alibaba Cloud OSS and Tencent Cloud COS as separate types rather than generic S3 endpoints. The free tier allows two connections, permits commercial use and serves WebDAV read-only; Pro removes the connection cap and makes the server read-write. Install it on macOS with brew install --cask kilerd/tap/anystorage.

It is not a better FTP client than FileZilla. It has no CLI, no offline sync and no arm64 Linux build, and two connections is a real limit on the free tier. But if your list of remotes is mostly buckets, the comparison you started with was the wrong one.

Which to use

• Servers only, any platform, zero budget: FileZilla. Three protocols, all three desktops, and the only current Flathub listing of the three.
• Servers and buckets, macOS or Windows, zero budget: Cyberduck. It is the broadest free client in this category by a wide margin.
• Servers and buckets on a Linux desktop: not Cyberduck. FileZilla Pro on Debian or Ubuntu, or a tool with a native Linux build — see the Linux S3 client page.
• You need the storage mounted as a drive: none of the free options. Mountain Duck, RemoteDrive, or a workspace with a built-in mount.
• Object storage is the main event: start from the S3 GUI client page instead, or the macOS S3 client page if you are on a Mac.

Questions