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

GoAnywhere MFT vs VisualCron comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jun 8, 2025

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

GoAnywhere MFT
Ranking in Managed File Transfer (MFT)
2nd
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
44
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
VisualCron
Ranking in Managed File Transfer (MFT)
16th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
11
Ranking in other categories
Workload Automation (16th), Robotic Process Automation (RPA) (17th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2025, in the Managed File Transfer (MFT) category, the mindshare of GoAnywhere MFT is 9.2%, up from 6.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VisualCron is 1.8%, up from 1.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Managed File Transfer (MFT)
 

Featured Reviews

Joel Vinas - PeerSpot reviewer
Created a much better working relationship with our partners and saved a lot of time
While I was happy with the training and support, more of it could be beneficial. We had some basic training and support. I talked with Fortra recently, and they said that they revamped and changed their training support. I have not used it since December. I got support in February and May of last year, and it was not bad. I was just not sure which questions to ask. Trying to learn this stuff on the fly as you are handed a project is always stressful. I like that you can tweak the interface so much, but it would be nice to be able to tweak it some more. The ability to further tweak the interface would be advantageous, as our end users had some questions about modifications that we could not address. Other than that, GoAnywhere seemed to fulfill its role as a simple solution for secure file transfer.
Sourav-Dutta - PeerSpot reviewer
It's user-friendly, and I didn't need long to understand the process
We use VisualCron for all our automation needs, like connecting to FileZilla, calling APIs, generating PGP keys, creating encryption files with the PGP key login to Azure, etc. It can automatically log in to SQL Server and execute SQL script jobs in bulk. We had 2,000-3,000 users at my previous…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."
"Fortra's GoAnywhere MFT offers robust security as its most valuable feature."
"The solution provides secure, customized forms where users can input values and share details, which is very important for internal data sharing."
"We like that GoAnywhere helps to centralize the exchange of data among our systems, employees, and customers."
"When we were doing the demo, we took one project from the old system and got it running in GoAnywhere in less than 30 minutes. That says a lot. I've written queries and understand code, so I'm not a novice. Still, I think that's pretty impressive for a software product to be able to deliver a functional use case in half an hour."
"The use of this product has helped improve our organization and its ability to send or receive. It has done this by allowing us to remove any homegrown process and centralize needed actions."
"The encryption feature is very impressive in GoAnywhere MFT, and the encryption provided by the company is much stronger than other file transferring software."
"This is a very good product for managing file transfers."
"The most valuable feature of VisualCron is its ability to schedule interactive jobs so that you can have interdependencies within the job and interdependencies of a job on another job, and so on."
"What I like about VisualCron is that like its name, it's a very visual tool. In my previous company, there were a lot of scripts for all kinds of services, and through VisualCron, you get to group all flows and get a nice visual overview. VisualCron also has an alerting feature, so you receive alerts from it. VisualCron makes everything clearer and easier to maintain. Every other solution that I was looking for almost always needed a programmer, but with VisualCron, you can do what you need to do without programming skills, so this is another valuable feature of the tool."
"'ve only had a few cases where I've had to request support in the past 12 years of use, but the support response time and resolution were was extremely quick."
"I love VisualCron because we previously spent a lot of time writing Power switches to connect to SQL Server. VisualCron makes it easier to execute services or connect to FileZilla by only adding the credentials to the master credentials stored in the solution."
"We don't have to do any coding. We just plug and play and it works."
"What I found most beneficial from VisualCron is that you can directly connect it with different databases, user accounts, and credentials. You can run queries from one machine to another using the credentials, unlike PowerShell, that's run by the machine itself. With VisualCron, you can directly ask other machines and run requests through user credentials. Suppose you have an AWS or Azure environment. In that case, you can maintain the connection between on-premises and cloud-based machines, which is the type of setup in the organization I'm working for. You can directly call some of the services via VisualCron on your local on-premises machine, and I found that an excellent feature of the tool."
"The tool has reduced our operational costs by 40%."
"It has improved our organization with more automation within the business departments and less administration and development in the IT department. Usually, as the IT department, we are the bottleneck for many requirements within the business. With this tool, the business departments are able to perform many task themselves."
 

Cons

"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."
"The support could be enhanced a little bit... If the first echelon of support could say, 'Okay, you are trying to create a variable,' and could tell you what you have to do, that would be good."
"The speed could be better, and the user interface could be more user-friendly. In some areas, it's a bit complex and the learning trajectory is steep, so they can definitely improve on these aspects."
"At present, HelpSystems GoAnywhere MFT integrates with an antivirus solution, but it's a bit kludgy."
"Without knowledge, it can be challenging to manage as it uses XML files for configurations and has tricky variables. While it's not particularly intuitive for new users, it becomes easy once mastered."
"In terms of improvement for GoAnywhere MFT, they could enhance the support, as there have been cases where we needed support due to the application getting stuck for no reason, and usually, the issue gets fixed by restarting the application."
"Improvement in support or product relies on being ingenious, supportive, and listening to its customer base."
"There's one persnickety issue about NAS permissions. That is a problem we have run into with GoAnywhere. I would like to see more focus on compatibility with/enforcement of user roles and access permissions across NAS, among other things. We have filed a couple of tickets on that in the past."
"Our suggestion to make it better and more manageable in terms of GDPR: Implement it in a very partnership way."
"The only problem I face when I use the tool is that it doesn't contain much documentation or it doesn't have many video tutorials on its features."
"VisualCron is software, and you will experience performance degradation when you scale up. VisualCron takes too much memory or CPU power. We have to increase the hardware resources of a specific server or system."
"The documentation is a bit weak."
"I would like for VisualCron to expand audit log to show who changed job variables that are initialized per job run."
"I want to improve the UI in VisualCron, as it's not as user-friendly, particularly when setting up the task scheduler. If you're familiar with the tool, then no problem, but if not, you'll have a problem typing text because sometimes, the cursor points to other places, so there's an issue with text box alignment in VisualCron. That was painful for me when I was just a VisualCron novice, but when you become used to it, there won't be a problem."
"VisualCron seems to operate like an efficient machine when it comes to improvements and enhancements and new features. I always appreciate the quick response I get when bringing up an issue or coming up with suggestions. I've mentioned before that it would be great to see a move away from SQLCE and XML configuration files."
"There are some conditions in the mail trigger, but you can only use them as an "AND" condition, not as an "OR" condition. This is an improvement that could be useful. For example, some people put "invoice" in the subject and others put "invoice" in the body. If I want to make a trigger for everybody whose sending invoices, I have to make two jobs for this now."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Licensing can be expensive and it depends upon which features you want to buy."
"The product is not cheap, but it is not expensive."
"The pricing for GoAnywhere MFT seems reasonable when compared to other similar services, especially cloud services. Azure is significantly more expensive."
"It would be good for the company to explore a modular approach to selling the product so it could be cheaper and more attractive to users."
"I find it to be very fair. It is very good."
"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 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."
"GoAnywhere's price is justified by its features and the time it saves me."
"The price is a bit high."
"ROI is 95 percent."
"VisualCron is correctly priced because it wasn't very cheap, and it wasn't overly expensive, so the price for it was set correctly. When my previous company bought VisualCron, it was €800 per server per year. On a scale of one to five, I would rate the pricing for VisualCron a five because it was just right. The tool was affordable, and it has one of the most competitive pricing in the market."
"The pricing is extremely fair, and because of that I recommend purchasing multiple instances to split out the processing load across multiple application servers."
"We are fine with a rather cheap setup. Licensing with VisualCron is fair. You have a simple one-year licence in different sizes. There isn't a licensing jungle with hundreds of options and opt-ins."
"ROI is one month."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Managed File Transfer (MFT) solutions are best for your needs.
856,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Healthcare Company
8%
Computer Software Company
8%
Computer Software Company
28%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Insurance Company
8%
Healthcare 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 is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Fortra's GoAnywhere MFT?
The pricing for GoAnywhere MFT seems reasonable when compared to other similar services, especially cloud services. Azure is significantly more expensive.
What needs improvement with Fortra's GoAnywhere MFT?
The application uses resources such as network connections to shared directories or SFTP connections. I would appreciate seeing utilization metrics for these resources. For example, when opening a ...
What do you like most about VisualCron?
The tool has reduced our operational costs by 40%.
What needs improvement with VisualCron?
The documentation is a bit weak. The tool must provide a better set of documentation.
 

Comparisons

 

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
7 Eleven, ABB Sécheron SA, Adobe Systems Incorporated, Amazon Europe Core, Apple, Assa Abloy, Aston Martin, Banco Santander, BMW (Australia)
Find out what your peers are saying about GoAnywhere MFT vs. VisualCron and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.
856,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.