Rclonevs
Syncthing
Syncthing: Pick Syncthing when you want continuous peer to peer sync between machines you control, with no cloud provider and no command line.
Rclone
Command line sync and mount tool for around 70 cloud storage providers
As of 30 August 2026, Rclone is free to use. A single Go binary that copies, syncs and mounts data across S3, Google Drive, Backblaze B2, SFTP, WebDAV and dozens of other backends with a common set of flags. Softwr lists it under Utilities. Rclone is made by Rclone project, available on Windows, macOS, Linux, FreeBSD.
Overview
What Rclone does
Rclone presents every storage backend through one interface, so the same command syntax moves data between a local disk, an S3 bucket and a SharePoint library. It does checksum-verified copies, one-way sync, bidirectional sync, server-side copies where the provider supports them, and it can mount a remote as a filesystem through FUSE with a configurable VFS cache. A crypt overlay encrypts filenames and contents client side, so an untrusted provider holds only ciphertext. The part buyers underestimate is provider rate limiting. Google Drive throttles hard on the shared default OAuth client, and the documented fix is to register your own API client ID, which most people discover only after a migration crawls. Dropbox, OneDrive and Google all apply per-account request ceilings that turn a million-small-file transfer into a multi-day job regardless of bandwidth. Egress fees on S3-compatible providers apply to every retry. The binary is free and the transfer is not. It is used by backup engineers, media server operators and anyone leaving one cloud provider for another. The trade-off is that it is a command line tool with a large flag surface and no safety net; a mistyped sync destination deletes files at the destination by design, and the tool assumes you understood that before running it. There is no vendor to call, only a mailing list, a forum and a maintainer funded by sponsorship.
What people use it for
- Migrating tens of terabytes between two object storage providers without staging on local disk
- Encrypted offsite backup to a cheap provider that you do not want reading your filenames
- Mounting an object bucket for a media server that expects a filesystem path
- Nightly one-way sync from an on-premises NAS to cloud storage as a second copy
Related searches
The honest half
Where it falls short
Concrete and checkable, so you can decide whether any of them matter to you. This is the half of a review a vendor will not write about Rclone.
- Sync deletes files at the destination to make it match the source, so one transposed argument between source and destination can wipe a backup and there is no undo.
- Google Drive throttles the shared default OAuth client, so large jobs stall until you register a private API client ID, a step that is documented but easy to miss until a migration is already days behind.
- Millions of small files hit per-provider request ceilings rather than bandwidth limits, which makes transfer time nearly impossible to estimate from data volume alone.
- The FUSE mount is not a real filesystem; applications that expect POSIX locking, partial writes or fast directory listings will behave badly or corrupt state on network interruption.
- Support is a community forum and a single principal maintainer, so an organisation that needs contractual response times on a data movement tool has no vendor to buy that from.
Cross-shopped
What people choose instead of Rclone
Each pairing was judged by two reviewers asking whether a buyer would genuinely weigh the two against each other. The ones that failed were deleted rather than published.
- RclonevsFreeFileSync
FreeFileSync: Pick FreeFileSync when the job is folder comparison and mirroring on local or network drives and a graphical preview of what will be deleted matters.
Pricing
What Rclone costs
Taken from the vendor's own pricing page. Prices move, so check before you buy.
Rclone
Free
- MIT licence with no paid edition
- All backends and features included
- Single static binary, no runtime dependencies
- Costs come from provider API and egress charges, not from rclone
Capabilities
Features
Unified backend model
One command syntax across roughly 70 storage providers and protocols
Crypt overlay
Client side encryption of file contents and names before upload
FUSE mount
Presents a remote as a local filesystem with a tunable read and write cache
Bisync
Bidirectional synchronisation with change detection and conflict handling
Server-side transfers
Copies within one provider without pulling data through your machine
rclone serve
Re-exports any remote over HTTP, WebDAV, SFTP, FTP or NFS
Answered, with sources
Questions people ask
Each answer names the page it came from, so you can check it rather than take our word for it.
Does rclone cost anything at scale?
The software does not. Your storage provider bills egress and API requests, and a failed transfer that retries pays those charges twice.
Can I use it as a backup tool?
It copies and syncs but does not do versioned incremental backup by default. Use it under a backup tool, or use its own crypt and backup-dir options deliberately.
Why is my Google Drive transfer so slow when my link is fast?
You are almost certainly rate limited on the shared OAuth client. Create your own client ID in Google Cloud Console and configure the remote to use it.
Keep looking
Where to go from Rclone
- Rclone alternativesEvery product people weigh against it
- Rclone pricingPlans, floors and what the tiers exclude
- Rclone badgesWhich rules it meets, and the figure behind each
- All Utilities softwareThe full category
- Best Utilities softwareThe shortlist, and how it was cut
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Softwr does not host reviews and shows no star rating for Rclone, because a rating we did not collect is not ours to publish. What is here is the pricing and platform detail from the vendor’s own pages, limitations we could state concretely, and alternatives a reviewer confirmed people weigh against it. Tell us if any of it is wrong.
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