Finder is an excellent software for working with files and folders. And the newer your OS X is, the more features you will discover. However, from time to time various discussions appear regarding the limited FTP support in Finder as servers are connected in read only mode and therefore there is no possibility to use it as FTP client to full extent. And users begin to search for alternatives which would be convenient for work and feature a robust FTP support. For this review I have selected 3 best alternatives to Finder. It should be noted that these three are the best among the existing ones. In reality they are far from being excellent too.
Commander One
Price – $29.99.
This utility is similar to Total Commander and has been written on Swift 2. We have already written about it in our Commander One Review. It is available in English, Russian, Simplified Chinese, Dutch, Spanish, German, French and Czech languages. Both free as well as paid versions are available. Paid version includes robust FTP support and cloud storages, archives, photo and video cameras, as well as mobile devices on iOs and Android. Commander One will be handy for those users who are used to work with Total Commander as from all the listed utilities this one is the closest to Total Commander.
ForkLift
Price – $19.99.
I like it for its file syncing feature (screenshot No 4) which is a very useful thing for developers. Sync settings can be saved as Synclets and subsequently launched with a single click. Unlike Commander One this utility has no option to work with cloud storages such as DropBox and Google Drive. Navigation through files and folders in ForkLift is exactly the same as in Finder: folders can be displayed as icons, list and Cover Flow. ForkLift also supports group renaming, multi-streaming of files and generally speaking it is the best replacement for Finder except that two-panel file managers have a slightly different ideology.
ForkLift does not offer free version and does not have FTP server files and folders search both of which are available only in Commander One.
CRAX Commander
Price – $15.99.
The most ugly and inconvenient file manager from all described here. It seems like it was developed for Linux, not for Mac. Tabs look terrible, entering path to folder directly turned out to be a difficult task too. Why then CRAX Commander features in this list? Only because it supports FTP and unlike FileZilla, using which is a real headache, it is a robust file manager. As far as FTP related functions are concerned, I would note the absence of search in attached catalogs in server.
Now lets talk about its advantages: CRAX Commander can compare catalogs in the same fashion as Total Commander does; it marks files which are absent in the other panel in red. Plus there is group renaming too.
Bottom line
As you have probably understood, there is no ideal replacement for Finder as one app works badly with FTP while the other is too expensive. If you want a robust FTP support and to manage files and folders like in Finder, then ForkLift is definitely your best choice. And if you want to have something similar to Total Commander in your Mac, then Commander One or CRAX Commander are your choices.
If you don’t want to spend money on FTP client, here’s an interesting way to work with FTP 🙂