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Is there really a viable Microsoft Project alternative for project scheduling software to create project plans and timing plans? Find out with our newly updated article for 2018 which provides a cheaper pay as you go version of, some great new MS Project alternatives and a downloadable how-to guide for choosing a Microsoft Project alternative for your project schedules. If your company is feeling the pinch, your request to purchase a shiny new copy of Microsoft Project might elicit a response that goes something like; “.surely there is a free Microsoft Project alternative out there that can do the job, isn’t there?” You respond something like, “Umm, well, maybe”.

And that’s the point of this article. For those of you who are on the hunt for a alternative, you’ve come to the right place. For a lot of agencies, the default project management tool for creating project plans is still Microsoft Project. If we’re really honest, though, for most of the digital projects that we manage, Microsoft Project does far more than we ever need it for – it’s got stacks of features that most people never use, hasn’t really changed that much in 30 years, and doesn’t necessarily do much to streamline process within project management. So are there any real Microsoft Project alternatives – paid, or even better, for free – that are worth using? Wait a minute though Before looking for Microsoft Project alternatives, did you know that the real deal is actually not that expensive? Why would you use Microsoft Project?

For starters, Microsoft Project is not just a fuzzy old tool that Microsoft doesn’t really care about—they’re introducing some really smart with Power BI, Internet of Things, bots and machine learning that are awesome. How much does Microsoft Project cost? It’s simple and affordable to. In fact, now you can pick up a copy of Microsoft Project on There’s also been an interesting shift in the Microsoft Project alternative world with pricing that it’s worth being aware of. The cloud-based, online Microsoft Project alternatives are now almost all charging by the user— rather than by the number of projects—which is making MS Project alternatives on average cost about $180/user/year; much more expensive than they used to be.

They’re also nearly all transitioning from being simple Gantt chart tools to trying to include project, task and resource management tools. In short, making your choice of an MS Project alternative is becoming more complex. What is Microsoft Project used for? MS Project is a project management tool used by different types of users, who have different levels of access. The software provides tables, views, filters, fields, calendars, and a database for doing things like:.

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Developing project plans. Assigning resources. Tracking time & progress. Creating Gantt charts. Creating & managing budgets. Balancing workloads.

Scheduling tasks & resources. Creating graphical reports.

Storing project data in a shared database Best Microsoft Project Alternatives For Project Scheduling Software. In this review of Microsoft Project alternatives, we break down the features, pricing, pros & cons of the following tools:. GanttPRO –. Celoxis –. Clarizen –. Wrike –. Smartsheet –.

ProjectLibre –. Tom’s Planner –. Omniplan –. Merlin Project 5 –. Team Gantt – Project Scheduling Software Selection Criteria (For A Microsoft Project Alternative) We’re project managers, right, so let’s first define the requirements. We need to properly define what our alternative needs to do. There are loads of project scheduling software alternatives out there, many of which do all kinds of things that we, as digital project managers will never make use of, so what do we actually use it for?

GanttPRO – GanttPRO is online Gantt chart software with lots of useful features. If you are not new to the world of project management, you know how painful it is to find a nice looking and powerful Gantt chart and a MS Project alternative. In GanttPRO, you will find both. This Gantt chart tool looks really nice with its intuitive UX/UI design.

Besides, it offers a wide range of project management features. Here you can easily create tasks, assign them, and connect them with dependencies, set milestones, enable the critical path to see the most important tasks or create a baseline to compare a current state of your plan with what you have initially planned. Thanks to the auto-scheduling function, any change in your tasks, dates or dependencies will be automatically reflected. GanttPRO is also a good collaboration tool.

It allows users to comment on tasks, export, import and share charts with Public URL as well as get notifications, mention team members, browse History mode, etc. You can try a 14-day free trial or book a. A plan for 1 user starts from $15 if billed annually. Team plans start from $5.90 per user if billed annually.

Summary of GanttPRO:. Create a Gantt chart: Pass. Create a project overview chart: Pass. Import and export.mpp files: Pass. Export PDF’s or shareable project plans: Pass Score: 9.

Celoxis – More than just a Gantt chart tool, Celoxis is a comprehensive but easy to use, project management tool used by HBO, Deloitte and Rolex that handily comes in two flavours – as an online app or on-premise. When compared to MS Project, it’s a lower cost, yet fuller featured product with powerful interactive Gantt charts, handy portfolio dependencies and all the keyboard shortcuts you could want.

Just as you would with Microsoft Project, Celoxis allows you to create tasks, subtasks, milestones, assigned resources and dependencies to tasks. It is a comprehensive and enterprise-grade integrated solution that you can use to not only create Gantt charts but also use to manage your project portfolios, workflows, expenses, time sheets and resources. It is really a complete and full-featured project management tool with project tracking, resource management, risk management and reporting all rolled into one, together with the full-blown capabilities for collaboration with clients. Celoxis offer the option of a or a if you’re looking to take it for a test drive.

Celoxis costs $25/user/month for SaaS users and $450/user for on-premise. Summary of Celoxis:. Create a Gantt chart: Pass. Create a project overview chart: Pass. Import and export.mpp files: Pass.

Export PDF’s or shareable project plans: Pass Score: 9. Clarizen – Companies are quickly finding that traditional, siloed, on-premises project planning and task management tools don’t work well in today’s environment. These tools are too complex and too narrowly focused and do not have the real-time information, the responsive planning and flexibility required to keep everyone in the loop and everything on track. While, it’s easy to download a simple task management tool, they do not support the collaborative interaction needed to complete process or project related tasks. By contrast, delivers secure, cloud-based collaborative work management solutions built on the vision of business agility. Discussions, tasks, projects and portfolios are all accessible from Clarizen’s scalable enterprise platform. Wrike – To illustrate the point that the crossover between cloud-based Gantt chart creating Microsoft Project alternatives and project management tools is narrowing, it’s worth considering an all in one project management and scheduling tool like While it doesn’t fall neatly into our selection criteria (it does much more than simply create Gantt charts), it’s worth including as an alternative way of approaching the challenge to create shareable project plans.

It’s a project management tool more akin to, or – based around tasks, Wrike allows you to define and assign tasks and track their progress in real-time. You can easily import your.mpp Microsoft Project plans into the interface, although exporting is limited to.XLS. The Gantt chart view works but the control of interdependencies and predecessors is a bit cumbersome so it’s not a clean like for like solution, but it’s definitely a workable solution. For the price (which they’ve priced very competitively), you can create Gantt charts and you’ve then armed with a swathe of other project management tools and potential integrations and features that you might find useful. Wrike costs from $9.80/user/month. Summary of Wrike:. Create a Gantt chart: Pass.

Create a project overview chart: Fail. Import and export mpp files: Pass. Export PDF’s or shareable project plans: Pass Score: 8. Smartsheet – Smartsheet’s online project management tool takes some of the most useful features of Project, marries it with the ease of use of an online spreadsheet, and then layers in team collaboration and time-saving automation features. It’s a paid, cloud hosted and web-based system complete with mobile apps which enable some pretty powerful collaborative tools with alerts and reminders as the project timeline changes over time. It delivers the basics well – creating pretty drag and drop Gantt charts with tasks, subtasks, milestones, assigned resources and dependencies to tasks. It also offers a broader capability for resource management, reporting, and forms; they’ve begun to layer on a lot of features although I’m not sure how helpful they really are in the world of digital project management.

Smartsheet is one of the better-known products and with good reason – it’s a solid product. The only real snags are the inability to produce a high-level project summary and the inability to export as a.mpp; you can only export as XML. Smartsheet costs from $14/user/month. Summary of Smartsheet:. Create a Gantt chart: Pass.

Create a project overview chart: Fail. Import and export.mpp files: Fail.

Export PDF’s or shareable project plans: Pass Score: 8. ProjectLibre – ProjectLibre is a fork from OpenProj, a free, open source desktop application designed to pretty closely emulate Microsoft Project of old. It does a reasonable job of imitating the layout and interface of Project so if you’re familiar with it, you’ll be able to download it and get going with very little learning curve; it’s easy to create a simple Gantt chart with the usual workflow; creating indented work breakdown structure (WBS), set durations, create links and assign resources. It even opens.mpp files although it can’t save them back to the same format, instead saving them as XML files which are annoying. It all sounds good, but when you try using it, you can’t help but wish you were just using Microsoft Project; it’s just very clunky, ugly, and fiddly to use. Yes, it’s free, but do yourself a favour and spend a few bucks to get something that actually works properly.

ProjectLibre is free! Summary of ProjectLibre:. Create a Gantt chart: Pass. Create a project overview chart: Fail. Import and export.mpp files: Fail. Export PDF’s or shareable project plans: Fail Score: 3.

Tom’s Planner – Tom’s Planner is paid web-based Gantt chart software that allows anyone to create, collaborate and share Gantt Charts online with drag and drop simplicity. It’s billed as a more simple and collaborative alternative to Project, but is really aimed at replacing teams trying to collaborate using Excel. Because of that, it looks a lot like MS Excel – there isn’t a way to define dependencies and defining non-working time (e.g. Bank holidays). That said, if you’re looking to produce a simple project plan, it’s pretty good. It’s web based, extremely intuitive and easy-to-use. A great feature is being able to publish your charts online and invite others to collaborate on projects (a free account suffices to accept invitations), add links to other websites and other online documents and embed your schedule in your own blog/website or intranet.

The real selling point here is that it’s online, shareable, and collaborative, the downside is that it’s very basic. Tom’s Planner costs from $7.50/user/month. Summary of Tom’s Planner:. Create a Gantt chart: Fail. Create a project overview chart: Fail.

Import and export.mpp files: Fail. Export PDF’s or shareable project plans: Pass Score: 6. Omniplan – Alright, there you go, for you crazy digital project managers who are still holding on to your creative side, and are playing around on Macs, here’s a couple of desktop based option for you.

Desktop-based Microsoft Project alternatives are important because we can’t always be on the interwebs, like when we’re on planes (yes, I know, some of them offer overpriced terribly slow WiFi but you know what I mean). Omniplan is made by the Omni group – makers of Omnigraffle, so these peeps know what they’re doing. It delivers the basics well – creating pretty drag and drop Gantt charts with tasks, subtasks, milestones, assigned resources and dependencies to tasks. Powered by your own, or the Omni sync server, it also has some more advanced collaboration features which work pretty nicely. Keeping projects up-to-date is powered by whole-project sharing where change-tracking, automatic publishing, and instant updates notify you when changes are made to the timeline, tasks, or amount of work completed, Omniplan allows you to accept or reject the changes one by one, or en masse. Omniplan costs from $149.99/user. Summary of Omniplan:. Create a Gantt chart: Pass.

Create a project overview chart: Fail. Import and export.mpp files: Pass. Export PDF’s or shareable project plans: Pass Score: 8. Merlin Project 5 – In its latest iteration, Merlin Project 5 works pretty well.

It’s a great Mac alternative to Microsoft Project, and looks very similar, with many of the granular controls for creating project plans that many of the other options out there gloss over. You can create tasks and subtasks with dependencies and constraints, add work and duration separately, assign resources with an option to decrease duration or increase work, see how much work each resource has assigned, and add your own fields to each task, for which you can define the field type (e.g. Checkbox, date, etc.).

Merlin Project 5 also comes with some cool new features such as Kanban board, resource pools, mind mapping and even a standalone app available in the Apple App Store. Importing in and out of Merlin is pretty straightforward, import native MPP and export MS Project XML, but you lose a lot of formatting which is annoying. Merlin Project 5 costs $99/year. Summary of Merlin:. Create a Gantt chart: Pass.

Create a project overview chart: Pass. Import and export.mpp files: Pass(ish). Export PDF’s or shareable project plans: Pass Score: 8.5. Team Gantt – TeamGantt is swanky looking and reasonably robust Project alternative. It’s a paid, web-based (and mobile-friendly) project management tool that delivers the basics of creating pretty Gantt charts, with the ability to create tasks, subtasks, milestones, assign resources and dependencies to tasks.

It places considerable emphasis on individuals, giving them the ability to see what they’re scheduled to work on that week as well as an overview of all the projects they’re working on. This enables an interesting feature to support in-project conversations and file uploads for team collaboration (although I’m not really sure it does it as well as a tool like or ). The real selling point is that it’s pretty and does the basics well. The downside is that the functionality is a bit too limited without support for import and export of.mpp files. Team Gantt costs from $29/10 x projects/month.

Summary of Team Gantt:. Create a Gantt chart: Pass.

Create a project overview chart: Fail. Import and export.mpp files: Fail. Export PDF’s or shareable project plans: Pass Score: 8. Microsoft Project Online Professional – Well done for making it all the way down to the bottom. Here’s your prize. Not many people seem to be aware of this product, and even Microsoft keep pretty quiet about it, but there’s an alternative to spending $500 on a Microsoft Project licence, you can pay as you go. And get the control and capabilities of Project Professional 2016 from virtually anywhere as an always up-to-date desktop subscription through Office 365.

The upside is that you get what you wanted from the start; you don’t need a Project alternative when you can actually pretty much have the real deal. The downside is that all those bells and whistles and add-ons that you can get with some of the other products might actually be quite useful after all. Summary of Microsoft Project Pro for Office 365:. Create a Gantt chart: Pass. Create a project overview chart: Pass. Import and export.mpp files: Pass. Export PDF’s or shareable project plans: Pass Score: 10.

Microsoft Project for Mac Microsoft doesn’t produce Microsoft Project for Mac users. In fact, the last time that there was a version of Microsoft Project for Apple users was back in 1993 with Microsoft Project 4.0 for Mac. Sadly, that doesn’t work now!

So if you’re on the Apple train and you’re trying to create a Gantt chart on a Mac, the first thing to remember is that you could just use Bootcamp or to get Windows on your Mac, and then use the PC software we’ve listed above. If you can’t do that, as well as the obvious web-based alternatives, there are a few dedicated Microsoft Project for Mac, Gantt chart options that you can install on your Apple Mac or iPad.

X Plan ($79) –. Project Plan 365 ($99) –. Omniplan ($149.99) –. Merlin Project 5 ($349) – Other project scheduling software alternatives worth considering: There are some new kids on the Gantt chart block! I haven’t had a chance to review these properly, but if none of the above work for you, it’s worth checking some of these out:. Edraw Project –.

GanttProject –. ProjExec –. Rational Plan –. Ganttology –.

SmartDraw –. Creately –. Instagantt –. ProjectManager.com –.

WorkZone –. TaskRay –. Teamweek –. Hyper Plan –. Office Timeline –. Tiemchart – The Best Microsoft Project Alternatives So what is the best to use as a Microsoft Project alternative? It really depends on whether or not you subscribe to the requirements we set out above.

If you’re actually looking for something a bit more than that, then one of the cloud-based solutions like would probably work out well. As I often find myself offline, on planes and in the wilds of BC, I would miss having a desktop app to churn out my.mpp’s on the road.

So in short, my preference would be for Microsoft Project Pro for Office 365 – it does everything I want it to do, in the format I need it. Yes, it’s kind of a cop out but it works – and it’s actually no more expensive than any of the better, paid, alternatives. And if you’re a Mac user, you’re probably best off getting a PC, or failing that, try using Omniplan. So in short, my preference would be for Microsoft Project Pro for Office 365 – it does everything I want it to do, in the format I need it. Yes, it’s kind of a cop-out but it works – and it’s actually no more expensive than any of the better, paid, alternatives.

What to consider But with so many options on the table, what are the things worth considering when choosing a Microsoft Project alternative? I think it’s worth thinking about three areas when choosing a Microsoft Project alternative:.

Functionality – does it do what I need it to do? (we’ve covered this already above). Workflow – how nicely does this play with my other project management toolkit?.

Cost – is this actually cheaper than Microsoft Project? Considering where the Gantt chart and project schedule is used in your workflow This is a bit of a catch-all, but in choosing a Microsoft Project alternative, it’s worth thinking about how you’re managing estimates, tasks, resources, budgets, risk, time sheets and project reporting. There are features within Microsoft Project that support this, and many of the alternatives include them too.

What do you do with your project plans and schedules? If they are just Gantt charts that get created at the beginning of a project and are then not updated, it’s very different from the requirement for a tool that needs daily updates. Consider what you actually use project timelines for; do you print them off every day and baseline progress? How do you share that information with the project team and executive?

Consider too how you’ll be updating the timeline throughout the project. Who will be using it? It’s worth considering if it will be just the project manager updating the project plan, or if the team will need to do it too. If the project timeline needs to be actively updated by the project team, it’s worth considering tools which are easy to use, and require minimal onboarding. What other tools are you using? Microsoft Project integrates and plays nicely with its Microsoft buddies, SharePoint and Project Server which are enterprise based solutions capable of some incredibly smart things with Power BI, Internet of Things, bots and machine learning.

Microsoft Project integrates with a lot of other applications and tools too, including JIRA using the Ceptah Plugin and Daptiv PPM. Are you always online? Cloud-based project timeline apps can be great, and they can be kept more up to date with ‘live’ information but consider that they require an active internet connection to work. If you’re ever working offline, and got no cell reception, for example on a plane, you’ll be hooped and want a desktop application instead. Considering the cost of MS Project Alternatives The cost of Microsoft project tends to be one of the primary reasons that people look for an alternative.

Microsoft Project isn’t cheap, but did you know that if you do a quick search on Amazon you can find the latest version of Projects vs users Most of the Microsoft Project alternatives are priced on a cost per user basis. So in working out which solution is the most affordable, consider what makes most sense for you; is it a tool that many people in the organization will need to use, or will it be used principally by the project manager? Lifetime cost of ownership While web-based apps might seem affordable in the short run, typically costing around $15/user/month, the cost of ownership over 3 years is actually the same as. About Ben Aston I’m Ben Aston, a digital project manager.

I've been in the industry for more than 10 years working in the UK at London’s top digital agencies including Dare, Wunderman, Lowe and DDB. I’ve delivered everything from video virals to CMS’, flash games to banner ads and eCRM to eCommerce sites. I’ve been fortunate enough to work across a wide range of great clients; automotive brands including Land Rover, Volkswagen and Honda; Utility brands including BT, British Gas and Exxon, FMCG brands such as Unilever, and consumer electronics brands including Sony. You got right list of Microsoft alternatives and summarized in detail. As you said you will love to hear about any other alternative 🙂 I want to share proofhub.

Its a feature rich tool and we are using it since 2012, we are quite happy with their service so i thought sharing can help your post to keep it refreshing ProofHub costs from $49/ Unlimited USERS /month Summary of ProofHub: Create a Gantt chart: Pass Create a project overview chart: Pass Import and export mpp files: Fail Export PDF’s or shareable project plans: Pass Overall score: 4/5 I will share more if i found more competitive alternative! Also please let me know where I am wrong. Ben, Really liked the article and the brief listing format for the comparisons, proved very useful and timely, just had the experience you open with.

Is there nothing else out there etc? As a result, found your article. Coming from an equipment manufacturing environment, dealing with large scale consultants & Construction companies, the ability to develop, share and reiterate schedules in a consistent format, that they can readily import and export in and out of the clients larger project databases is important. (in some cases it’s a contractual, project communications requirement).

Hence the ability to import & export in.mpp is critical, it’s a shame that the developers for some of the online packages don’t provide this as a defacto standard feature. If there was consistent import/export format across multiple platforms, I think more of these smaller packages would be used more readily, especially by smaller contractors/equipment suppliers supplying into larger projects, where MS Project is simply not cost effective solution. Having said that, from this same perspective, Primavera Project scheduling software is also prevalent on these larger projects and having a similar capability would be useful. I know Excel data can be imported and passed around, but it can be a bit of nightmare, trying to maintain the spreadsheet structure, maintaining the correct data types in fields etc. I’d be interested to hear back from readers, if there are any workable, or proven standard file formats for transferring data between these smaller scheduling software packages, into the larger Project schedule software systems. Thanks again for a clear and informative article.

Thank you, Ben, for your review. I just start experimenting after using MS Project for a long time. How do you think is Arike good for small projects? I can also share with you my personal discovery – GanttPRO – user-friendly online project planning soft which is free and will stay free forever for everyone who sign up now (well, developers promise it 🙂 ). For me I’ve found 5 features: – extremely untuitive interface – after using MS Project GanttPRO is like a child toy) – 360 view of my projects with a critical path and zooming – export to pdf, jpg, xlsx, ical – possibility to share my project plans with colleagues and clients giving the right to edit or the right to view project – perfect visibility – graphic interface is hotsy totsy)). Hi Ben, Great list!

We’re a small company and we’ve found that our main criteria is we need “fixed work” resource allocation (versus “fixed duration”). Other than Project 365 and OmniPlan, it seems all the other solutions use the fixed duration model. We’re trying to get away from Project because we don’t want to continue having to use an outside solution like Basecamp for file sharing and discussions, and we don’t have Macs (OmniPlan also requires an outside platform for file sharing). We signed up for Wrike because we loved the feature set, only to find they are fixed duration only. Do you (or anyone else reading this thread) have any recommendations for a cloud-based DPM platform that uses/allows a fixed work model and also integrates discussions, file sharing, etc. So we don’t have to run on two separate platforms like we are now? I just used Gantter.com and man did love the intuitive old time feel.

It worked beautifully for a basic 12 item 56 point steel construction schedule. Thanks for the Recommendation. I like bells and whistles as much as the next person but simplicity is also a wonderful thing sometimes. It was straight forward and quite like using MS project 2003. I also took a look at the Rational plan that is suggested above and as far as I can tell that too looks very good for a good price.

I would likely purchase that if I did these schedules more often. I am not sure if that really works but a possible solution would be to use a PM tool from a provider that runs on an AWS GovCloud (US). The service seems to be in compliance with ITAR: That would mean that instead of hosting the program on your internal server and handle version updates, the software producer would do it for you on a dedicated AWS GovCloud (US) machine and you would have the exact same benefits of a cloud/web-based PM tool. We haven’t tried that yet with RationalPlan but it could be a viable solution Interesting point of view, thanks! Fantastic review, thank you! I was just a bit surprised about the Merlin evaluation though. I use a Mac and found it to be the best Microsoft Project alternative I have tried.

It looks very much like Project, and is sufficiently advanced. That is: you can create tasks and subtasks with dependencies and constraints, add work and duration separately, assign resources with an option to decrease duration or increase work, see how much work each resource has assigned, and add your own fields to each task, for which you can define the field type (e.g.

Checkbox, date, etc.) This last feature is why I dropped Omniplan – the devil’s in the detail! I needed to add, and filter by, a number of checkboxes and custom dates next to each task (like “urgent” flag, “important” flag, date task was requested etc.). The only downside I found was being unable to save straight to mpp – you can save to xml and whoever has the latest Project version can open it, but older versions don’t.

And a quick note about Omniplan: a great feature for those who frequently change task dates and assignments is that you can define whether to adjust duration or work in a clear option button, rather than indirectly by adjusting dates and work/duration values. Hope you find this helpful! HI Ben, Interesting review but not quite sure how you missed Planner from PROJECT in a box. Now quite a mature product and completely free for ever for all organisations to download. We found in our commercial products that 80+percent of the plans people created in MS Project used a very basic set of functions, tasks, dependencies, groupings, resources etc so we provided these in a simple to use tool five years ago and now there are well over 100,000 users. We find many people ditching MS Project to use this instead at an organisation wide level as well as on a new user at a time basis. Over the years we have added a lot to Planner so it now includes project accounting and costing model and uniquely is also a risk and issue/RAID tool so users can collect all their key project controls data in one place.

Of course we also provide reports and all data and charts etc can be exported and dropped to clip board. We even provide two way exchange with MS Project and Excel. We know of other customers who transfer to Primavera through this interface. Planner is used by many of our biggest global customers on some huge projects and also by the complete novice to create there first ever plans. A full set of training videos and free technical support is also provided. Although it is free forever it doesn’t mean it is some simple trial tool, we continue to add interesting new features to it based on the dialog with our many customers.

Hope your readers find this a helpful update. Regards Malcolm West MD PROJECT in a box. Hi, Ben It is a great article and a rich collection of MS project alternatives. Like you said you would like to hear about others too. I would like to represent TIEMCHART Tiemchart have been helping some of the largest organisation where were initially on MS Project.

We have delivered a system that is also taking into account for Human, Material and Assets to account for project progress. Please visit our website to understand bit more about how we are helping the industry. We would love to hear back from you and also will be thankful if you can kindly include our name in your list. Thanks & Regards.

ForkLift is an FTP client for Mac. While many FTP programs look like they were designed by people who are only concerned with functionality and not form, ForkLift presents a more familiar, accessible design. Someone who is not comfortable with advanced computer operations such as FTP transfers should still have no problem sending or receiving files with this program. Pros Modern design: Many FTP programs look as technical and complicated now as they did 10 years ago. Excel powerpoint templates. ForkLift looks much more modern by contrast. It has a navigation structure built into the program that mirrors the Finder in OS X so that it is more or less familiar and comfortable to search through for files.

Easy connection: A single button on the top toolbar opens a connection setup box, where everything is clearly labeled and straightforward. Confusion is sometimes an issue with FTP programs, especially when there are many more text boxes and menu options that are strictly necessary for a basic file transfer. ForkLift keeps it to the essentials, which is great for first-time attempts at file transfer.

Smooth, quick operations: ForkLift completed a smooth and quick file transfer in the background without slowing other operations. Cons Lack of help: Despite its relative ease of use, FTP programs still have huge potential to be complicated or confusing. There is no help feature to speak of in this app, which is an unfortunate omission. Bottom Line ForkLift is a great FTP app for Mac. If you need to a do a lot of file transfers, especially if you're inexperienced in the area, this program should make learning the ropes and transferring files easy for you.

Ultimately, it is quick and painless, which is what you want from this type of program. Editors' note: This is a review of the trial version of ForkLift for Mac 2.6.2. ForkLift is a powerful file transfer solution.

It allows you to transfer files using FTP, SFTP, FXP, WebDAV, Amazon S3 and even Bluetooth. Its dual pane view maximizes productivity, a Cocoa based interface with smart preview and spring-loaded folders lets you browse your local and remote folders and use Favorites just like in Finder. Use it to edit files or preview images stored in a remote folder, even within archives.

ForkLift integrates a full featured batch rename tool, an application deleter and a small code called droplet, which enables you to create automated upload shortcuts for your most used remote folders, and place them anywhere in your file system.