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Fortra's GoAnywhere MFT vs IBM Sterling File Gateway comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 15, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
7.8
Fortra's GoAnywhere MFT offers cost-effective automation, enhancing security, reducing administrative efforts, and boosting revenue through efficient data integration.
Sentiment score
7.7
IBM Sterling File Gateway offers cost-effective, reliable file management for retail operations with user-friendly features and strong support.
GoAnywhere can perform the work of three people, leading to a decrease in manpower needs for automation and file transfer.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.3
Fortra GoAnywhere MFT offers responsive and knowledgeable support, with users rating it highly, despite some reported delays and limitations.
Sentiment score
5.9
IBM Sterling File Gateway's support is responsive and reliable, despite occasional delays and complexity complaints; 24/7 availability is valued.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.7
GoAnywhere MFT efficiently scales for all company sizes, managing large transactions and workflows while maintaining high reliability and uptime.
Sentiment score
6.8
IBM Sterling File Gateway offers scalable, configurable solutions supporting large volumes and protocols, despite potential licensing and configuration constraints.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.1
Fortra's GoAnywhere MFT is highly stable and dependable, with minimal downtime and rare issues mostly caused by external factors.
Sentiment score
6.6
IBM Sterling File Gateway is generally stable, but can face performance issues with upgrades, high data volumes, and resource limits.
 

Room For Improvement

Enhancements needed for GoAnywhere MFT include improved DNS, GUI, cloud mailbox support, technical support, scheduling, and user interface.
IBM Sterling File Gateway needs user interface enhancements, better stability, more storage support, and improved user management and licensing.
 

Setup Cost

Fortra's GoAnywhere MFT offers robust data transfer solutions with flexible, organization-friendly licensing, considered cost-effective by many users.
IBM Sterling File Gateway offers secure file transfers, considered costly yet valuable, with varied pricing based on specifications.
 

Valuable Features

Fortra's GoAnywhere MFT excels in automation, security, and integration, streamlining file transfers and securing data exchanges efficiently.
IBM Sterling File Gateway provides secure, adaptable file transfers with strong encryption, protocol support, user-friendly interface, and centralized management.
It provides multiple cipher options for HTTPS and SFTP protocols, utilizing AES-based algorithms for secure communication and data transfer.
 

Categories and Ranking

Fortra's GoAnywhere MFT
Ranking in Managed File Transfer (MFT)
2nd
Average Rating
9.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
37
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
IBM Sterling File Gateway
Ranking in Managed File Transfer (MFT)
1st
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
18
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2025, in the Managed File Transfer (MFT) category, the mindshare of Fortra's GoAnywhere MFT is 7.8%, up from 5.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM Sterling File Gateway is 11.5%, up from 11.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Managed File Transfer (MFT)
 

Featured Reviews

Earl Diem - PeerSpot reviewer
Key to our workflow and our workload automation strategy, helping us trade and consume files
File monitors are one of the most valuable features. We have about 400 file monitors running in GoAnywhere. They monitor the NAS locations where files arrive, and they kick off workflows. When a file arrives, GoAnywhere will identify that the file is there, move it to a consumption zone, then reach out to our enterprise scheduler through a REST API call. The solution helps centralize the exchange of data between systems, employees, customers, and trading partners. It's very central and that's pretty important. We generally move about 3,000 files a day, between our partners and internal workflows. My team really likes the intuitiveness of GoAnywhere's user interface. For example, my automation team has a file coming in from a bank, a file that needs to be unzipped, reformatted, re-zipped up, and then put into another folder where another team is going to consume it. Because of all the progressive elaboration—the project started a year ago—the format of the file is not the same. We addressed it with GoAnywhere instead of having the producer of the file change the format. That's how flexible it is for us. And looking at the comprehensiveness of GoAnywhere's workflow features, we use it pretty extensively for working with files. Stonebranch is our enterprise automation platform, but we don't really do any file work with Stonebranch. We chose to use GoAnywhere, our MFT tool, to move and manipulate files. The solution also connects to popular ICAP servers and that's pretty important to our security guys when it comes to preventing malware and other malicious content from entering our organization. The connection to popular ICAP servers, so that content is inspected for sensitive information like credit cards, is pretty important. We're a financial institution and a lot of the data we work with has PAN data and card numbers in it, coming in from partners.
Vinutha Gangadhara - PeerSpot reviewer
Ability to customize on top of the inbuilt processes, user-friendly and well-categorized
I’ve been part of this client for the last seven-plus years. It’s been close to 70 to 80 continuous improvements we have delivered. The priority ones which we always shortlist are the recurring incidents or recurring issues, which came in the initial phase of the year when we took this entire landscape under our maintenance. One such incident I can recollect is with respect to performance tuning. We committed to our users 99.99% and above as the availability metrics for Sterling Integrator. This has acted as a high-availability system, but we treat it as mission-critical. When it comes to the commitment we give to users, we have to ensure the system is kept most stable. So, the majority of the problem was in the communication channels. Whenever we enabled additional logging for the communication channel, the system used to have hiccups. So we worked with the vendor, stating that the visibility channel framework needs to be changed because the moment we enable more logging, it literally brings the system down, or the system doesn’t work as it should. They took our input and delivered a better framework in their next releases, which helped us after upgrading to have that stability intact. As the system grows, we ensure to have performance tuning triggered and optimize the business process wherever required. For example, by default, Sterling Integrator business process will have full logging enabled. We took care of those things. Not all business processes or workflows require full logging enabled. Only a few critical ones require every step logs. For the rest, we categorized and reduced the logging for those workflows. That actually helped us to increase the IO overall from ten milliseconds to six milliseconds. That was a good achievement. Apart from that, in terms of queues, how we maintain the queues, how we defined all file queues across the critical business process is one thing we felt was done better. The threads we assign for the priority queues and the business processes were configured to those priority queues, whatever is critical, so that it gets high priority to allow the threads to process. So that queue thread Sterling was taken under the performance tuning. Apart from that, I think some of the best practices which IBM recommends is what we usually run through every year. We just have the health check done through IBM, and we just ensure that all the best practice recommendations are added in the system.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Computer Software Company
8%
Healthcare Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
36%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Insurance Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Fortra's GoAnywhere MFT?
GoDrive eliminates the need to use the exchange server for file sharing.
What needs improvement with Fortra's GoAnywhere MFT?
The technical support response time has room for improvement.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for IBM Sterling File Gateway?
The cost-effectiveness of IBM Sterling File Gateway was a major factor in our decision to use it, in comparison to the higher costs associated with DataPower.
What needs improvement with IBM Sterling File Gateway?
The product itself wasn't very easy to comprehend. I required a lot of customization that didn’t meet my needs. I resolved more issues than IBM did. Sterling needs better testing for larger custome...
What is your primary use case for IBM Sterling File Gateway?
I utilized Sterling primarily for SFTP and Connect Direct. I have a complicated system involving ZOS mainframe, data power, and various complex rules as I was trying to replace everything with Ster...
 

Also Known As

HelpSystems GoAnywhere MFT, GoAnywhere MFT, GoAnywhere Managed File Transfer,
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

McKesson City of Modesto, California Kwik Trip Northwestern University Charter Communications
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about Fortra's GoAnywhere MFT vs. IBM Sterling File Gateway and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.
838,713 professionals have used our research since 2012.