head to head · open source
rclone vs cyberduck
rclone has 60,740 GitHub stars, 5,640 forks, 1,273 open issues and last shipped yesterday. cyberduck has 4,892 stars, 385 forks, 506 open issues and last shipped yesterday. rclone leads on adoption by 1,142% (60,740 vs 4,892 stars). rclone is written in Go under MIT; cyberduck is written in Java under GPL-3.0. rclone has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, cyberduck 8%. cyberduck was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 3 topic tags (backblaze-b2, dropbox, ftp), so they are genuine substitutes rather than adjacent tools.
Two open source projects, one decision. Both are free and self-hostable — the differences are community size, license terms, language stack and release pace.
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Side by side
| rclone | cyberduck | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 61K | ★ 4.9K |
| License | MIT | GPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Go | Java |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 5.6K | ⑂ 385 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick rclone if
- You weight community size — 61K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick cyberduck if
- You want the cyberduck feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the GPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Java
- You evaluated both and cyberduck fits your workflow better
About rclone
Website Documentation Download Contributing Changelog Installation Forum Rclone Rclone ("rsync for cloud storage") is a command line program to sync files and directories to and from different cloud storage providers. Storage providers 1Fichier :page facing up: Akamai Netstorage :page facing up: Alibaba Cloud (Aliyun) Object Storage System (OSS) :page facing up: Amazon S3 :page facing up: ArvanCloud Object Storage (AOS) :page facing up: Bizfly Cloud Simple Storage :page facing up: Backblaze B2 :page facing up: Box :page facing up: Ceph :page facing up: China Mobile Ecloud Elastic Object Storage (EOS) :page…
read the full rclone overview →
About cyberduck
Cyberduck This is the development home for Cyberduck, a libre file transfer client for macOS and Windows. Command line interface (CLI) for Linux, macOS and Windows. The core libraries are used in Mountain Duck. Mailing Lists There is a Google Groups Cyberduck discussion mailing list. The following additional mailing lists are hosted: News Announcements of new releases Localization Notifications about changes to the translations needed Source Source code is available licensed under the GNU General Public License Version 3. Pull requests welcome! Localizations Translations to new languages are welcome. We use…
read the full cyberduck overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is rclone or cyberduck more popular?
rclone has 60,740 GitHub stars and cyberduck has 4,892. rclone has the larger community by that measure.
Are rclone and cyberduck free?
Both are open source. rclone is licensed under MIT and cyberduck under GPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between rclone and cyberduck?
rclone is written in Go and cyberduck in Java. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, rclone or cyberduck?
Choose rclone if you want the larger community (60,740 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose cyberduck if its feature set, stack or GPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.