Discussion on:

Five free FTP clients

Great product but the product stores the passwords in clear text and several hacks have been written that steal those clear text passwords. The developer does not think that storing clear text passwords on an internal network is an issue and as such has refused to offer a solution.

In his very first paragraph, he states:
"FTP is easy to use, reliable, and can be set up securely."
Since he never mentions how FTP can be set up securely, that statement is dangerously misleading at best.

FTP is absolutely, positively, in-no-way-what-so-ever secure. SFTP, yes. FTP, hell no. FTP can only be "set up securely" by using something else to encrypt the data within it prior to transmission or by placing FTP traffic within another encrypted protocol (like a VPN tunnel).

Using a password on a bare FTP transfer is arguably LESS secure than leaving it open to anonymous access. With anonymous access, it is obvious anyone can grab the file. With a password? FTP passwords are sent in cleartext, allowing any device that can see packets between the client & server to see the password. It may verify you are the FIRST person to know that password, but after you've shown it to everyone on the network it can't be assumed you're the ONLY one who knows it. Worse: even if a password is used, the payload is still unencrypted. Anyone on the network still sees everything. FTP does not support encryption of password or payload. If you want to either, use a modern protocol (SFTP) or put it in a tunnel.

Also, despite infosec's best efforts to discourage the practice, humans tend to re-use passwords. A lot. I'd rather there be no illusion of FTP transfers being secure than somebody wrongly believing they're protected by using an FTP password (likely also used to log into their webmail account, etc).

FTP is by definition a clear text environment. Why hack when you can simply read the password on the wire?

Try using Totalcmd (Total Commander) for FTP as well as a total file managment tool for copying/delet/edit, compress, search and much more
http://www.ghisler.com/

There is one more FTP (ans FTPS + SCP) client worth mentioning - WinSCP. It has 2 types of interfaces to choose from - 2 panel or explorer-like. Give it a try:
http://winscp.net/eng/index.php

putty includes psftp (or else psftp is another standalone freebie that is useful).

Regarding Filezilla storing passwords in clear text. If you have a legitimate concern about security, you shouldn't be storing passwords in the first place.

And servers have to store passwords, that's how it validates what you enter in as your password.

...only the hash values of the passwords. A password is submitted by the user, runs through the hash algorithm, and is compared to the stored hash value. If the two match, access is granted.

Another Free FTP

http://bluezone.rocketsoftware.com/products/secure-ftp

Most of the companies I work with recommend WinSCP for secure data exchange. It is nice and light weighted tool with utilities like PuTTYgen that comes handy when you need to have key generated.

How can you review an FTP client and not mention that it has a 2Gb transfer file limit?
Otherwise FireFTP works well.

Cyberduck is also free, and it works with both Mac and Windows.

Auto FTP Manager is a good free FTP client -http://www.deskshare.com/ftp-client.aspx