This review compares Filezilla 3.x and WinSCP 4.x. I've been disappointed in Filezilla 3 ever since it was released. The reason being that it eliminated many good features which were in Filezilla 2. Filezilla 2 was very friendly to web developers whereas Filezilla 3 seems to want to alienate us. As a web developer, I often want to be able to have access to edit a file from within the FTP client so that I don't have to keep switching between Windows Explorer and the FTP client in order to edit and upload files.

Filezilla 2 allowed you to edit a local file using an external program. Filezilla 3 also allows you to do this but it created an annoyance by only allowing you to edit a local file if you were connected to a server. Because FTP servers often timeout quickly, you would constantly have to reconnect to edit a local file. Another annoyance is that whenever you change a local file, it pops up a window asking if you want to upload the file.

A new feature that I like in Filezilla 3 is that it allows you to edit remote files. What it does is download the file to Window's temporary directory and then upload the file when you were done editing it. A problem I have with this is that it too pops up a window to ask if you want to upload the file after you have changed it. If I was editing a local file and a remote file at the same time, I would get two pop up windows so I would have to pause for a moment to figure out which popup window was for which file. This may seem like a little thing but when you are editing multiple files a minute, like I am, it adds up to a huge waste of time and sometimes causing me to upload a local file which I didn't intend to.

Another problem I have with Filezilla 3 is that for SFTP using keys, it would only allow you to enter one key file so every SFTP site you use would try to use that key file. It's possible that there is a way to use different keys for different sites but I couldn't figure it out.

And my last complaint about Filezilla is that its developer refused to acknowledge these issues and would constantly state that Filezilla is not a file manager. Well, that's fine if that's his stance but that just means that it's not much use to me.

Googling for solutions to my disappointments with Filezilla 3, I found someone who recommended WinSCP. I've been using WinSCP for a couple of weeks now and I'm loving it. WinSCP doesn't have any of the problems I mentioned above with Filezilla 3. When you are editing a local file, no annoying popups asking you if you want to upload the file. When you edit a remote file, it's like you are editing it right on the server. You can't edit a local file unless you are connected to a server, but the keep-connect-alive feature really helps with this problem. Not only does it have all the features I'm looking for, it has other good features that I wasn't even looking for.


One of the features I like is in the location bar (local and remote) for your file, you can click on a specific folder within the path and it will switch to that folder. There's no longer any need to click the parent directory button! That is such a huge time saver. And if you click on the name of the directory you are in, you can bookmark it. I have yet to use this feature but it seems like a nice feature. You can also choose to show the directory tree if you prefer to navigate that way. It has synchronize browsing and compare directories (I believe it only shows which files are newer and not missing files).

The only problem I've found so far was that the default timeout value is set to 15 seconds which is extremely short. This can be found in Preferences > Connection. You can set a Keep-Alive value but the strange thing is that the default for that is 30 seconds (which is longer than the timeout value so it will never keep the connection alive). Just a weird thing I found. I was able to change the default Timeout value in the registry so that I wouldn't have to constantly set the value when I created a new session.

This can be set in HKEY_CURRENT_USER \ Software \ Martin Prikryl \ WinSCP 2 \ Sessions \ Default%20Settings

Add a Timeout DWORD entry and set it to how many seconds you want it to be. Don't forget to select Decimal value unless you know the Hex value.

So, the winner is clearly WinSCP! Download it here!

EDIT:
An issue I've found with WinSCP is that it crashes a lot. Especially when going out of Standby / Hibernation.