SFTP To Go vs GoAnywhere MFT: Complete Comparison Guide

Use this guide to evaluate SFTP To Go and GoAnywhere MFT for your managed file transfer (MFT) requirements. Learn about the key differences between a lean cloud-based MFT service and a heavyweight on-premises MFT platform.

GoAnywhere MFT is a popular and rightfully trusted solution for managed file transfers. But it has all the old corporate IT hallmarks. If you want to evaluate it, you have to navigate a non-transparent pricing model, dig through the website to find documentation and specific information, get on calls with sales reps, and read pages and pages of reviews.

This guide offers an overview of what you should expect with GoAnywhere MFT as compared to SFTP To Go. It’s based on user guides, product videos, and customer reviews.

Why SFTP To Go and GoAnywhere MFT are so different

The two services have significant differences: how you add users and integrations, create and edit workflows, etc. This is because the timing of each service's development defined its core architecture and philosophy.

GoAnywhere MFT was built in the pre-cloud age and started as an on-premises solution designed for enterprise IT environments. This shaped its development around granular control, compliance, and complex built-in workflow automation. The managed cloud version (MFTaaS) arrived relatively late.

SFTP To Go, on the other hand, was built from the ground up as a lean cloud-native service focused on simplicity and developer experience. It was designed for teams that needed managed SFTP, instant provisioning, automatic scaling, and simple integration through webhooks and APIs.

Comparison criteria

First, here's why we chose these specific criteria.

Most established MFT platforms are feature-complete to do the job they were designed for. What truly sets them apart is user experience, integration capabilities, stability, customer support, documentation quality, and total cost of ownership. Those are the main things we looked into.

For user experience, we evaluate initial setup and ongoing use separately, because one does not necessarily follow the other.

Let’s get on with it.

Round 1: Onboarding and initial setup

The first impression is critical. If the registration and initial setup require lengthy product guide calls, reading documentation, and hand-holding by the support team, the user has little incentive to go on.

GoAnywhere MFT requires a pre-approved application from a sales rep. Once you have it, log in to your account, choose MFTaaS (if you are choosing the managed version), submit data locality settings, and sign the license and services agreement. The service will start provisioning resources for your instance, which takes approximately two hours.

Once it’s done and you log in again, you need to review all the settings and submit your admin IP address for the allowlist. Updating the list will take another few minutes. After that, you will be able to finally log into the actual system and start setting up workflows.

The entire registration and initial setup process is entirely different for SFTP To Go: select a plan and click on “Free trial”. Submit your work email address, pick a password, select an additional authentication method, log in, and you can get to adding users, setting privileges, and adding webhooks immediately.

This is really it.

Bottom line: In a nutshell, SFTP To Go is designed to be super easy to get started with. No pre-approvals, phone calls with sales reps, or waiting for hours for things to be set up for you.

For GoAnywhere MFT, the situation is reversed. The initial setup and configuration process takes hours and can be overwhelming. Users often mention a steep learning curve and having to dig through documentation and contact support.

Round 2: Ongoing and advanced use

Once the initial setup is done, there may be a need for workflow revisions, new data processing scripts, new filter rules for webhooks, and other changes. This is where various limitations and inefficiencies usually start accumulating.

For ongoing use, GoAnywhere MFT is somewhat overwhelming for users, especially when creating advanced workflows, such as building multi-step processes that include file transformations, conditional logic, and error handling.

Users find that while GoAnywhere MFT is a powerful platform, more complex workflows require deeper and more granular configurations than anticipated, especially when dealing with advanced permissions or custom scripts. So both implementation and testing require more time.

We found that users repeatedly point out these issues:

• Project modifications are time-consuming and don’t make use of the modern review process, continuous integration, and staged deployment.
• The interface looks outdated and a little heavy.
• GoAnywhere MFT doesn’t have a responsive design, which makes it difficult to use on mobile devices.

SFTP To Go was designed to be a fully managed service and requires minimal administrative overhead. Day-to-day operations like managing and transferring files are simple drag-and-drop operations. Preview for common file formats, such as images, videos, and PDFs, is available.

Webhook settings are minimal and to-the-point, with the majority of the business logic stored in scripts triggered on 3rd-party web services. The additional benefit of that is that you can keep the scripts in a Git repository and run CI.

Finally, the user interface of SFTP To Go is responsive and usable on most mobile devices.

Bottom line: GoAnywhere MFT offers powerful workflow capabilities but requires significant time investment to master and modify. You will also need someone to maintain the service and install updates. 

SFTP To Go keeps ongoing administration lightweight: the service and its infrastructure are already managed for you, most complexity lives in your own scripts rather than platform configuration, and you can keep the scripts versioned and deployed through Git and CI/CD.

Round 3: Compliance and audit capabilities

Compliance is a thousand-piece puzzle: data storage locality, cross-border transfer rules, encryption requirements, access control and authentication, audit logging, and so much more. Most of that is typically covered by local standards and regulations, and there are dozens of those around the world. Мuch depends on what industry you work in and what standards and regulations you need to support. 

GoAnywhere MFT supports the usual set of frameworks, such as HIPAA and GDPR, and also includes CDR (Australia), PIPEDA (Canada), and PDPA (Singapore).

SFTP To Go supports SOC 2 Type II, HIPAA, GDPR, FERBA, and GLBA. The platform supports setting a data region for storage, so in most cases, customers will be just fine with other regulatory acts.

Audit logs store information about the user, the action, the timestamp, the location, and the IP address, and detailed, exportable audit logs are just a click away for admins.

Bottom line: while GoAnywhere MFT technically supports more local regulations, SFTP To Go facilitates compliance with key standards and regulations for companies handling US and EU data as well as supporting data locality requirements in other countries.

Round 4: Integration and automation capabilities

Setting up new workflows in GoAnywhere MFT requires time, patience, and hands-on experience with the components and variables involved. That’s why GoAnywhere MFT has workflow templates, so you don’t always have to start from scratch.

However, the software is built with legacy IT systems in mind, so users report that they are missing connectors to some newer popular platforms, such as Slack.

Automation in SFTP To Go is built around webhooks and APIs. You create a webhook that will listen for file events and then trigger a remote script or pipeline that will perform a particular job. The job could be running a local command to archive a file or interacting with a third-party service via REST API. 

The list of supported integrations includes NetSuite, Mulesoft, Make.com, Shopify, Google Spreadsheets, Automate.io, and other platforms. Or if you implement the business logic in a script, you can manage it with Git and deploy with CI.

Here, the webhook waits for a new file to show up in a specific folder and then triggers a script on Vercel that will decrypt and copy it to the `decrypted` folder.

There are alternative triggers that can send a Slack message, an MS Teams message, or an email. This is convenient for setting up event notifications. All of that is very easy to set up.

If you’re interested in more real-life scenarios, see this case study where RECUP uses SFTP To Go and webhooks to integrate their system with Shell and automate ordering and invoicing.

Bottom line: GoAnywhere MFT has ready-to-use connectors that work well in a corporate IT environment. However, if you need a lean solution to glue multiple cloud services together, SFTP To Go will be a much better fit.

Round 5: Performance

Performance issues can disrupt workflows and slow down your team. Here's how the two platforms compare when it comes to file transfer speed and infrastructure.

GoAnywhere MFT's performance depends on your on-premises hardware and network setup. Advanced configurations like active-active clustering come at a premium cost. Their MFTaaS offering is the on-premises version installed on cloud VMs, so it doesn't leverage modern cloud-native optimizations.

SFTP To Go is managed, automatically scaled, and fast thanks to the AWS global infrastructure and transfer acceleration. If you are interested in how to get the most out of SFTP To Go in terms of transfer speed, check out SFTP vs. FTPS benchmarks: file transfer speed comparison 2025 for guidance on when you should prefer SFTP over FTPS and vice versa.

Bottom line: GoAnywhere MFT can experience interface lags, SFTP To Go generally performs well. Neither service reports significant issues with actual file transfer speeds.

Round 6: Documentation and support

Even with a straightforward UX/UI you would still need up-to-date documentation and responsive, helpful customer support.

GoAnywhere MFT keeps the documentation in two places. The installation and user guides are available as lengthy (up to ~4K pages) PDF files linked from your user account. Additional resources are available in a public knowledge base. There is a lot of information there, but it’s structured in a way that forces you to search for pretty much everything.

Some users also point out that the GoAnywhere MFT documentation could be clearer and would benefit from step-by-step tutorials covering the advanced use of the platform.

Customer support receives mixed reviews. Users report that the GoAnywhere MFT support team is helpful. However, getting a timely response could be a problem due to timezone differences, and some responses are too generic.

SFTP To Go has lean, topic-organized, task-oriented documentation for the service and a REST API reference. Users report that the documentation is easy to access and covers their needs.

According to public reviews, customer support at SFTP To Go responds quickly and addresses user issues effectively.

Bottom line: GoAnywhere includes detailed documentation that can be difficult to navigate, and the support service is friendly yet somewhat slow to respond, especially if you aren’t in the US time zones. SFTP To Go has task-oriented documentation that is easy to follow, and the support team is quick to respond.

Round 7: Total cost of ownership

The total cost of ownership (TCO) structures vary between the two platforms.

GoAnywhere MFT has non-transparent licensing, and the on-premises version has advanced features that incur additional fees. On the whole, the pricing model lacks the flexibility that would make it accessible to smaller teams or companies testing MFT capabilities. The on-premises version will also require hardware and dedicated human resources for maintenance, updates, and support. On top of that, both the on-premises and MFTaaS versions have a steep learning curve and require training. All of that adds to the total cost of ownership.

SFTP To Go uses straightforward, usage-based pricing tied to storage and data transfer. The entry-level tier is affordable and represents solid value for most use cases. You are getting highly available, durable, and scalable storage and highly available endpoints with SFTP To Go. And it requires zero infrastructure maintenance and software updates on your side. 

Bottom line: SFTP To Go offers predictable, lower-cost entry for companies of any scale. GoAnywhere MFT offers enterprise-grade features and control, but with a higher total cost of ownership, significant implementation complexity, and maintenance overhead that may discourage smaller adopters.

SFTP To Go vs GoAnywhere MFT: who's the winner? 

Both platforms deliver secure, compliant file transfers. The right choice depends on your team's technology stack, established deployment practices, and infrastructure requirements.

Choose GoAnywhere MFT if:

• You need support for specific protocols to communicate with existing partners and legacy systems.
• You require built-in connectors to enterprise systems and prefer visual workflow builders over writing code.
• You specifically need compliance with the requirements of CDR, PIPEDA, and PDPA.
• You have dedicated MFT administrators who can invest time mastering the platform's extensive features and maintaining it.
• You need granular, role-based access controls with complex permission hierarchies.

Choose SFTP To Go if:

• You want to be operational within minutes, not hours or days, and you don’t want the overhead that would otherwise come with maintaining infrastructure and software.
• You're operating in a regulated industry, such as healthcare, finance, education, or supply chain, or any industry handling regulated sensitive data.
• Your team builds file transfer workflows and processing pipelines using webhooks, APIs, and popular integration platforms.
• You prefer keeping business logic in version-controlled code rather than platform configurations.
• You need responsive support across multiple time zones.
• You want predictable, usage-based pricing without navigating enterprise licensing complexity.
• Your file transfer workflows center on SFTP, FTPS, S3 and web and don't require legacy protocol support.

Wrapping up

GoAnywhere MFT offers comprehensive built-in features for teams that prefer all-in-one platforms with visual workflow tools. However, this comes with a significant overhead. You have to maintain the platform and go through extensive training to use it efficiently.

SFTP To Go takes a lean, focused approach and delivers a managed, developer-friendly file transfer infrastructure that works with both enterprise-grade integration platforms and modern cloud environments.

If you're building managed file transfer pipelines for regulated industries on AWS, using CI/CD pipelines, and writing automation in Lambda or similar services, SFTP To Go is the natural fit.

Frequently asked questions