Slow, not for pros, not worth the money.

I hate to write this review, I wanted to like the app. But after using it now for a few months, it’s significantly slower than any other FTP client I’ve used. I used to think pigs-is-pigs when it comes to FTP clients, but Transmit is so much slower than other apps it’s really frustrating. There are some clunky design choices too that add to the frustration, such as no progress display when synchronizing. (see below)

It has the seeds of a nicely made app, but the problems are foundational and unavoidable. And frankly, when you pay this much for an app that has countless free competitors, you expect it to be heads above the rest. I’ve talked with their support team, and this app just isn’t ready for prime time.

Pros:
-clean interface
-responsive support
-drag and drop to and from outside the app
-two-click-sync (see cons below)

Cons:
-so very slow. side by side, other apps put it to shame
-if you grab a folder to put on a server, it will load the files in that folder one at a time, regardless of your settings for simultaneous transfers. (Their support team says they are working on this, but that’s a beta level bug, not a “4.” FTP client. That’s just flat unacceptable. Their suggested workaround is to create the remote folder, then grab all the files inside and put those as a group. If you’re copying an entire site with subfolders and varying folder permissions, this just isn’t realistic.
-adding insult to injury with the above point, you can’t rely on the app to copy the files. there are errors in almost every transfer. when you grab a few hundred files, almost every time 20 or so of those files will have errors, so you have to either manually go back and find them, or use their sync option (after you’ve tried the manual way), which presents the next problem
-the sync feature is a nice idea, however it copies files one at a time. Again, amazing that an FTP client of this age hasn’t fixed these fundamentals.
-cryptic progress indicators or none at all. you can view a progress bar for each file, or in some cases (but not all) you have a combined progress bar that gives you no useful information. I think the idea is that the darker grey progress shows overall, and light grey progress shows individual files. But the dark grey progress will fill to 100% and start over seemingly at random. and using the sync feature, you get one single progress bar that resets for every file as an annoying reminder that this app is loading one file at a time.

Like I said, I really wanted to like this app, but it is a frustrating waste of money when Cyberduck, or even the ever-clunky FileZilla will give you better performance for free.

Bigphaty about Transmit