Start with the fact that changes the question
Most "ExpanDrive alternative" pages were written for a product that charged everyone. That is no longer what ExpanDrive is.
Files.com acquired ExpanDrive in January 2024, and in April 2025 ExpanDrive was made free for personal use — its own announcement page puts it as "every cloud service, every operating system, no trial timer, no degraded free tier. Forever." Paid tiers begin above 10 users, at $29 per month for a team, and the site also carries a page about migrating from ExpanDrive to Files.com.
So if you are one person who wants remote storage to appear as a drive, and you were hoping this page would tell you something cheaper exists: it does not. Price is off the table. What is left is model, platform coverage and who owns the client.
Everything below was checked against vendor pages on 23 September 2026. That date matters more than it should in this category — Mountain Duck's comparison page is roughly 920 words, carries no date, and still measures itself against "ExpanDrive v7"; ExpanDrive's own compare pages are undated; and one of its blog posts ranking on the first page for mounting S3 is stamped January 2023. Check the date on any of these, this page included.
When it is still worth replacing ExpanDrive
Four reasons survive the free tier:
- The mounted-drive model itself. A drive letter that hides a network is convenient until it is not — a copy you cannot inspect, an app that blocks on a stalled write, no visible transfer queue.
- Ownership. ExpanDrive is now a client owned by a storage vendor, with a documented path pointing at that vendor's own service. That is legitimate, and it is also a reason some teams prefer a client with no service behind it.
- Specific backends. Cloudflare R2, Alibaba Cloud OSS and Tencent Cloud COS are not always first-class citizens elsewhere.
- Linux with a GUI. This is where the category thins out to almost nothing.
The five options
AnyStorage: a workspace first, a mount second
AnyStorage is the app this site makes, so treat the list of facts as the argument rather than the adjectives. Release 0.2.24 shipped on 23 September 2026 for all three desktops: an aarch64 .dmg of about 8.9 MB and an x64 .dmg of about 9.7 MB for macOS 11 or newer, both signed with an Apple Developer ID certificate under Team ID V9ZRBTHDGR, plus a Homebrew cask installed with brew install --cask kilerd/tap/anystorage; an x64 NSIS installer of about 6.8 MB and an .msi for Windows 10 or newer; and an amd64 AppImage of about 88 MB or a 9.1 MB .deb for Ubuntu 20.04 and later.
The default experience is a file workspace: buckets and remote folders in tabs, one transfer area with progress and history, credentials stored encrypted on the machine, no account to create. Mounting exists but is optional, and it does not use a filesystem driver: the app runs a WebDAV server on http://127.0.0.1:3211, and Finder, File Explorer, GNOME Files, Dolphin or davfs2 mount that. No macFUSE, no WinFsp, no reduced security mode on Apple silicon.
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 their own types rather than S3 with a custom endpoint; MinIO and Wasabi do use the S3 type with an endpoint URL and path-style addressing. The free tier allows two connections with commercial use permitted, and serves WebDAV read-only; Pro removes the connection limit, makes WebDAV read-write and adds search, preview, bulk operations and drag-and-drop upload.
What it is not: there is no offline sync, no TLS on the WebDAV server in the current version (it binds to loopback for that reason), no command line, and no arm64 Linux build.
Mountain Duck: the closest thing to ExpanDrive's model
Mountain Duck is paid software for macOS and Windows whose entire job is making remote storage look mounted. It is the most direct like-for-like swap for how ExpanDrive behaves, and it is backed by an unusual asset: all of its protocol and provider documentation lives on cyberduck.io, its own free sibling, which is also why its marketing site is about five pages long.
There is no Linux build. If Linux is in your fleet, this option ends here.
Cyberduck: free, open source, and not a mount
Cyberduck has been around since 2002, is GPL, is on the Mac App Store and the Microsoft Store, and costs nothing. It browses and transfers rather than mounting, which is exactly right if what you actually needed was a bucket window. Storage vendors submit connection profiles to its registry, so obscure providers often work without you configuring anything.
Two limits: mounting is the paid sibling's job, not Cyberduck's, and there is no Linux build — as of September 2026 Flathub lists FileZilla but not Cyberduck.
CloudMounter: the other mount-first commercial option
CloudMounter, from Electronic Team, mounts cloud services and protocols as drives and is marketed hard in several languages — its site runs German, Japanese, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Italian versions of most pages. Treat its comparison pages the way you would treat ours: check what version of the rival they describe. Like Mountain Duck, it has no Linux build.
rclone: the free answer if you do not need a window
rclone supports roughly 60 storage backends, is free and open source, and is the tool every other entry on this list is implicitly compared against. rclone mount gives you the drive behaviour, at the cost of FUSE on macOS and Linux, WinFsp on Windows, and a decision about --vfs-cache-mode before many applications will write to the mount at all.
If your work is sync jobs, cron and repeatable copies, nothing here beats it. If your work is looking at files and deciding things, a GUI is not a luxury.
A note on the rest of the field, because it saves you a search: Transmit, ForkLift, Commander One and Air Explorer are macOS-only; RaiDrive, NetDrive, S3 Browser and MSP360 Drive are Windows-only. Only AnyStorage and rclone in this comparison ship for Linux at all.
Choosing in one pass
- You want a drive letter, you are one person, and macOS or Windows is the whole fleet: ExpanDrive's free tier is hard to argue with. Mountain Duck and CloudMounter are the paid equivalents if you prefer their behaviour.
- You need Linux: AnyStorage or rclone. The rest do not ship for it.
- You script more than you click: rclone, with a GUI beside it for the occasional look.
- You want a visible workspace and an optional mount with no kernel driver: AnyStorage.
- You want a free browser for S3 and protocols on Mac or Windows, nothing more: Cyberduck.
- You are past 10 users in a company: compare ExpanDrive's paid tier against AnyStorage Pro on connection types and mount model, not on price alone.
Questions
Is ExpanDrive still free in 2026?
Free for personal use, yes — that has been the case since April 2025, with no trial timer according to ExpanDrive's own announcement. Paid tiers start above 10 users at $29 per month for a team.
Who owns ExpanDrive now?
Files.com, which acquired it in January 2024. The site includes a page about migrating from ExpanDrive to Files.com itself.
Which ExpanDrive alternatives run on Linux?
Of the five here, AnyStorage (AppImage or .deb, Ubuntu 20.04 and later) and rclone. Mountain Duck, Cyberduck and CloudMounter have no Linux builds.
Which ones avoid installing a filesystem driver?
AnyStorage mounts through a local WebDAV server and your operating system's existing WebDAV client, so nothing is installed into the kernel. Cyberduck does not mount at all. rclone mount needs FUSE or WinFsp, and the commercial mount tools install their own drivers.
Is there a free alternative that allows commercial use?
Cyberduck is GPL and free without restriction. AnyStorage's free tier permits commercial use but caps you at two storage connections and serves WebDAV read-only. ExpanDrive's free tier is for personal use, which is a different thing.
Is there an ExpanDrive alternative with per-provider connection types?
That is the specific gap AnyStorage aims at: R2, B2, Google Cloud Storage, Azure Blob, Alibaba Cloud OSS and Tencent Cloud COS are separate connection types, while MinIO, Wasabi and other S3-compatible endpoints use the S3 type with a custom endpoint URL and path-style addressing.