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Fortra's Globalscape WAFS vs GoAnywhere MFT comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 22, 2026

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 Globalscape WAFS
Ranking in Managed File Transfer (MFT)
20th
Average Rating
4.0
Reviews Sentiment
5.3
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
GoAnywhere MFT
Ranking in Managed File Transfer (MFT)
1st
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
123
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2026, in the Managed File Transfer (MFT) category, the mindshare of Fortra's Globalscape WAFS is 1.4%, up from 1.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of GoAnywhere MFT is 8.5%, down from 9.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Managed File Transfer (MFT) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
GoAnywhere MFT8.5%
Fortra's Globalscape WAFS1.4%
Other90.1%
Managed File Transfer (MFT)
 

Featured Reviews

it_user2754 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Manager at a construction company with 51-200 employees
We dropped the product because of the corruption issue.
Two main issues. 1) It can be a bandwidth resource hog over a small WAN link. We would routinely saturate a 3Mbps link with WAFS. This can be mitigated with tuning what gets replicated. 2) In some cases, it can look like the files get replicated because the files have the correct date, file size, etc. However, the file itself was actually all nulls. In our replication case, we had more than 10,000 files get corrupted this way (out of 1.2 million). GlobalScape support basically said that there were issues with W2K8 R2 but the problem actually dated back to 2008 on a W2K3 server.We dropped the product because of the corruption issue.
Anuj Bhagwat - PeerSpot reviewer
Dev Ops Engineer at a computer software company with 11-50 employees
Has enabled secure, centralized file sharing while saving significant time and resources
The best features in GoAnywhere MFT are that it's fast, reliable, and secure. First, the improvement is that we have resolved one of our security points with compliance. So that compliance point we resolved. And also it's a centralized file sharing system. All the users are able to access the file. There is no one-to-one sharing. It's improved about 80 to 85%. It saves about 80 to 90% resources. In terms of time, we can say 90 to 95% time is also saved because it avoids the one-to-one sharing and simply a user can put one centralized directory and all the users are able to access this solution and access the file. So it's 95%.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"When it works, WAFS is a good way to keep data synchronized between multiple servers in multiple locations."
"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."
"It has become very important to us over these four years, as it is key in our workflow and our workload automation strategy."
"I have not seen any lagging, crashing, downtime, or any sort of instability with GoAnywhere MFT."
"The system is user-friendly and has significantly helped us meet our goals, particularly in file transfer."
"It is probably the best software that I've had for the money that we spend for it."
"The encryption feature is very impressive in GoAnywhere MFT, and the encryption provided by the company is much stronger than other file transferring software."
"The SFTP and encryption functionality works well, and SFTP is the bulk of what we use."
"We like that GoAnywhere helps to centralize the exchange of data among our systems, employees, and customers."
 

Cons

"In some cases, it can look like the files get replicated because the files have the correct date, file size, etc. However, the file itself was actually all nulls."
"In terms of scalability, I would rate it around five, as it needs further scaling. The interface built should be more stable, as performance varies across different browsers and deployed versions."
"If the hostname has a dash in it then it does not work."
"Security measures still have a long way to go, but since GoAnywhere MFT focuses on IT automation, this enables the company to provide IT staff with more productivity on other aspects of their jobs."
"I think GoAnywhere MFT can improve in UI/UX redesigning and better cloud-native deployments."
"One area for improvement in GoAnywhere MFT is that they don't have a real debugger. You have to manually walk through your projects. If you build a big scripting project, you have no way at the beginning to step through; you can't skip straight to a line, nor can you put a breakpoint and say, 'stop here' as in any normal debugging process."
"Overall, GoAnywhere MFT is a solid platform, but there are a few areas where I think it could improve."
"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."
"Recently, Microsoft published an article stating that GoAnywhere MFT can be attacked by ransomware, indicating there was a vulnerability in the product."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"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."
"Licensing can be expensive and it depends upon which features you want to buy."
"To have a solution like this for the price we're paying makes it cheap. Considering the time that it has saved us, and considering the development that we don't need to do, such as connectors and handling servers, the price is really affordable."
"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."
"Compared to other tools it's less expensive."
"GoAnywhere was the most attractively priced product that met our needs. In our PoC it really came down to MOVEit and GoAnywhere, and GoAnywhere's pricing was about 30 percent less."
"Pricing is based on a one-time license."
"It is very attractive. In terms of the capacity of the product and functionality, it is a good price."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Outsourcing Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Computer Software Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business115
Midsize Enterprise33
Large Enterprise57
 

Questions from the Community

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Fortra's GoAnywhere MFT?
Our experience with GoAnywhere MFT's pricing, setup cost, and licensing structure has been highly positive because it is completely module-based. Instead of hitting us with a rigid, monolithic ente...
What needs improvement with Fortra's GoAnywhere MFT?
I think GoAnywhere MFT is already strong from the stability and security standpoint, but it can improve more in UI modernization and advanced analytics. Features including smart monitoring and AI-b...
What is your primary use case for Fortra's GoAnywhere MFT?
I use GoAnywhere MFT for secure file transfers between internal teams such as vendors. As my domain is in banking-related services, I use it for banking systems and cloud platforms. GoAnywhere MFT'...
 

Also Known As

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

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
McKesson City of Modesto, California Kwik Trip Northwestern University Charter Communications
Find out what your peers are saying about Fortra, BMC, IBM and others in Managed File Transfer (MFT). Updated: June 2026.
902,417 professionals have used our research since 2012.