Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

Fortra's GoAnywhere MFT vs MOVEit 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:
 

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
MOVEit
Ranking in Managed File Transfer (MFT)
3rd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
14
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2025, in the Managed File Transfer (MFT) category, the mindshare of Fortra's GoAnywhere MFT is 8.3%, up from 5.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of MOVEit is 9.2%, down from 11.5% 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.
Gijish Vikraman - PeerSpot reviewer
Provides the ability to securely transfer very large files and has great logging capability
We've faced some challenges with MOVEit as well. During the initial setup, we encountered issues with the MOVEit Transfer Gateway component, which operates in the DMZ. It frequently went down, causing disruptions in SFTP connectivity for most of our vendors. As a result, we had to implement extensive monitoring to ensure we received instant visibility whenever the gateway failed, allowing our system admins to respond quickly and restart the service. Another issue stems from the fact that MOVEit is a Java-based product, and it seems to have a memory leak, leading to system slowness and unresponsiveness at times. To mitigate this, we had to schedule weekly restarts to clear out memory, which remains an ongoing process because, without these restarts, we wouldn't have a responsive system. These are two key challenges we’ve encountered with MOVEit Transfer. Regarding MOVEit Automation, a job is typically triggered as soon as a file arrives, and it looks for the file, matches it, and moves it to the destination. However, if the expected file doesn't arrive, say on a Tuesday at 8:00 AM due to a job failure or someone forgetting to place the file, we need better visibility. Currently, MOVEit Automation offers limited capabilities for this scenario. We rely on error codes that indicate when no file was found, and we've built an email alert system around this, but for complex schedules—like jobs running on the 10th of each month—the system becomes ambiguous and occasionally generates false alerts. While MOVEit is not designed as a notification system, better alerting features would be incredibly valuable. I'd also like to see Google Cloud connectivity in future updates. MOVEit has been expanding its connectors, initially supporting Azure, followed by AWS, but connectors for Google Cloud Platform are still missing. Adding this capability would be a great enhancement. Another improvement I'd welcome is the ability to interact with message brokers. Currently, MOVEit handles file transfers and supports HTTP calls, meaning you can invoke APIs or download files over HTTP/HTTPS protocols. However, I’d like to see support for messaging protocols like MQ or AMQP. These protocols would make the platform more versatile, particularly for integrations where we need to pull messages from a queue and create files. IBM offers this capability, and if MOVEit could add it, it would make the product even more feature-rich and useful for our needs.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The usability is valuable because I am self-taught and have not had any formal training in the product. The help feature is quite handy."
"The most valuable features are the automatic processing of files and scheduled execution of the files."
"It streamlines the files. Anyone can go pick up the file that we give access to. It is great."
"Scheduling is valuable. You can schedule a transfer for any time you want. It can be hourly, daily, monthly, or yearly. You can transfer the file on AWS, Azure, or SharePoint."
"The user interface is simple."
"If it's dealing with SFTP or any kind of secure transfer, we don't hear about it. It's good. Everything works."
"GoAnywhere stands out for its user-friendly project creation, intuitive testing and troubleshooting, and especially its notification system, which keeps me informed of any issues that need attention, a feature we lacked before."
"The most valuable feature is customer data transfers for traditional SFTP. Some of our biggest customers are on the platform, and it works out very well for us as a big selling point."
"The renaming and timestamp features are great."
"The major advantage is moving files as part of a workflow."
"The tool’s GUI is very simple."
"The log findings and troubleshooting on MOVEit are pretty easy. When you go to the logs, it clearly tells you what time a transfer happened, what time it failed, what is the source path, what is the destination path, and what is the failure reason. It's pretty straightforward."
"It satisfies our requirements but they don't do new improvements as per the market."
"MOVEit's best features were the number of options available, like folder creation, and user-friendliness."
"The automation is generally very simple that helps with operational efficiency. Since we mainly created interfaces and scheduled transfers, the tool itself handled the file transfer automation."
"From an administration standpoint, it's very easy to manage, and I feel pretty confident in the security of the product. From an end-user standpoint also, it's very easy."
 

Cons

"The reporting could be more customizable."
"The support desk has room for improvement. I keep opening tickets and they keep telling me that they're closed, but they're not resolved."
"While the technical support team is knowledgeable, their response time for critical issues needs improvement. A response within one business day is insufficient for urgent matters."
"When we restart the agent on each server, it tries to go out to the internet and it takes about a 13-minute timeout before it can move forward. Why is there a 13-minute timeout value when trying to go to the internet? ...If they could limit that timeout or give us a way to modify it so we could have a faster timeout, that would help us at least knock out a half-hour's worth of outage."
"When a monitor invokes a project to accomplish something, that gets logged as a job. I've had a little difficulty figuring out where to look to see the monitor's activities itself, to see if the monitor is having a problem. For instance, if an account on a secure FTP server has expired, the monitor that uses that account doesn't announce to us that it's having a problem. I want to work with them on this to get it fixed."
"At present, HelpSystems GoAnywhere MFT integrates with an antivirus solution, but it's a bit kludgy."
"Fortra needs to offer more use cases for GoAnywhere MFT during training."
"The process of adding a vendor is very easy. You just point and click. You create your job, schedule, and project, and off you go. You just need to know what the processes do when you add in a new job that runs daily and so on. For us, it is not a problem, but maybe the documentation on that could be a little more straightforward. We, however, have no problems figuring that out. It is pretty straightforward for us."
"Communication can be improved between the product owners and users."
"With the new other vendors coming up, they come up with certain features, in addition to the file transfer. But MOVEit does not develop their product. That's why we are looking out for other solutions."
"The initial setup is a bit difficult."
"The DR solution (DR recoveries) needs to be enhanced."
"It takes some time to learn and understand how the solution functions."
"It would be beneficial to include a feature that allows you to hide items and not be locked out if someone has made too many password attempts."
"In future releases, MOVEit could add support for some additional protocols. For example, I don't think they supported the SFTP or FTPS protocols at the time."
"If the transfers are more or the file size is big, it takes more time. It doesn't have much capacity to process multiple files at the same time. It can get stuck or take a lot of time to process the files."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"GoAnywhere's price is justified by its features and the time it saves me."
"Fortra's GoAnywhere MFT is an inexpensive solution."
"Its pricing is fair. It is not the most expensive, and it is not the cheapest. For what we get in our environment, the pricing model works pretty well."
"The cost was definitely within reason and it has definitely been worth the cost, based on how much we can automate. It has exceeded my expectations."
"The product is not cheap, but it is not expensive."
"The cost of GoAnywhere versus the value it brings to our data transfer operations is reasonable... The cost is relatively expensive but, back to the car analogy, that's to be expected with a Ferrari."
"Fortra's GoAnywhere MFT carries a higher price tag than other MFT solutions."
"When it comes to secure systems that we have used, the price point can get a whole lot higher. You might end up saving in the short term with other solutions, but are you getting a secure product? Do you feel confident in that? Will you be able to get any support afterward? From my experience, based on the price point and the service that we got, it was a good value for our money."
"I haven't really priced out many other products like this, but I feel it's reasonable. Their upgrade support after hours was going to be $6,000. I just made the decision to wing it and just do it during business hours and call support if there was a problem."
"When compared to other products I've used, I believe MoveIt is worth the money someone might pay to use it."
"Technical support is only available with a paid license."
"It's cost-effective."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Managed File Transfer (MFT) solutions are best for your needs.
839,319 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Computer Software Company
9%
Healthcare Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Government
9%
 

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 do you like most about MOVEit?
The automation is generally very simple that helps with operational efficiency. Since we mainly created interfaces and scheduled transfers, the tool itself handled the file transfer automation.
What needs improvement with MOVEit?
The product must improve its security features. Recently, there have been multiple attacks on the solution. It has ruined the reputation of clients who use the solution. The vendor must ensure that...
What is your primary use case for MOVEit?
We can use the product to transfer files. I work for a bank. The files we transfer have PGP encryption by default. The data we send or receive is encrypted, ensuring that there is no data breach.
 

Also Known As

HelpSystems GoAnywhere MFT, GoAnywhere MFT, GoAnywhere Managed File Transfer,
Ipswitch File Transfer, Ipswitch Managed File Transfer
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

McKesson City of Modesto, California Kwik Trip Northwestern University Charter Communications
Cambridgeshire County Council, Capita Document & Information Services, Enterasys, City of Guelph, Hermes
Find out what your peers are saying about Fortra's GoAnywhere MFT vs. MOVEit and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.
839,319 professionals have used our research since 2012.