head to head · open source
rclone vs ffsend
rclone has 60,740 GitHub stars, 5,640 forks, 1,273 open issues and last shipped yesterday. ffsend has 7,423 stars, 206 forks, 33 open issues and last shipped 12 months ago. rclone leads on adoption by 718% (60,740 vs 7,423 stars). rclone is written in Go under MIT; ffsend is written in Rust under GPL-3.0. rclone has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, ffsend 3%. rclone was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (encryption), 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 | ffsend | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 61K | ★ 7.4K |
| License | MIT | GPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Go | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2025-11-20 |
| Forks | ⑂ 5.6K | ⑂ 206 |
| 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 ffsend if
- You want the ffsend feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the GPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You evaluated both and ffsend 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…
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About ffsend
[![Build status on GitLab CI][gitlab ci master badge]][gitlab ci link] [![Newest release on crates.io][crate version badge]][crate link] [![Project license][crate license badge]](LICENSE) [crate license badge]: [crate link]: [crate version badge]: [gitlab ci link]: [gitlab ci master badge]: Notice: the default Send host is provided by [@timvisee][timvisee] (info). Please consider to [donate] and help keep it running. ffsend Easily and securely share files from the command line. A [Send][send] client. Easily and securely share files and directories from the command line through a safe, private and encrypted link…
read the full ffsend overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is rclone or ffsend more popular?
rclone has 60,740 GitHub stars and ffsend has 7,423. rclone has the larger community by that measure.
Are rclone and ffsend free?
Both are open source. rclone is licensed under MIT and ffsend under GPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between rclone and ffsend?
rclone is written in Go and ffsend in Rust. 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 ffsend?
Choose rclone if you want the larger community (60,740 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose ffsend if its feature set, stack or GPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.