When comparing BitTorrent Sync vs FreeFileSync, the Slant community recommends FreeFileSync for most people. In the question“What are the best personal file-syncing solutions?” FreeFileSync is ranked 9th while BitTorrent Sync is ranked 14th. The most important reason people chose FreeFileSync is:
It will work with MTP, FTP, SFTP, FTPS, and more.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro No service cost, storage limits, perfomance limits or privacy concerns
Since BitTorrent Sync uses P2P technology and does not require an external server from a third party, the only limitation if what is available to the user.
Pro Clients on most platforms available
BitTorrent Sync is available for Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, iOS, Windows Phone and BSD.
Pro Self hosted
If user opens a malicious website that website may create users to access your data ("When registering, http traffic for creating new user on loopback http://127.0.0.1:8888"). Being self hosted one does not need to open a site to get to their files.
Pro It supports multiple protocols
It will work with MTP, FTP, SFTP, FTPS, and more.
Pro It can copy locked files
It supports Volume Shadow Copy Service, meaning that it can copy files even if they are in use or otherwise locked.
Pro Cross-platform
It runs on Windows, Linux and MacOS.
Pro Portable version available
Pro It is quite performant
Pro Google Drive support
FreeFileSync provides direct access to Google Drive, no additional software is needed.
Pro Completely free
Source code releases are provided under GPLv2.
Pro It supports realtime sync
It can be configured to constantly monitor two folders for changes and sync them instantly when a change is detected.
Pro It lets you program batch scripts
You can program your own jobs for execution as a script.
Pro It supports case sensitive synchronization
For Unix-like systems.
Pro It supports long file paths
It can copy files and folders with more than 260 characters in their paths.
Pro It supports versioning
Versioning is keeping multiple instances of the modifications of your files.
Pro It can sync both local disks and network shares
Cons
Con Proprietary
Being proprietary, it's harder to audit.
Con Has some risky attack vectors
The only really good thing it has is that data is self-hosted (i.e. hosted on a server running on your machine with data that are on your machine).
- If user opens a malicious website that website may create users to access your data ("When registering, http traffic for creating new user on loopback http://127.0.0.1:8888")
- GetSync.com server receives many (all?) hashes in cleartext when sharing the directory.
Con Pro version for a fee
Selective Sync only available in Pro version. Business use is not allowed with free and Pro versions.
Con One peer of your network always has to be online to propagate changes to the other peers
Con Android app drains battery fast
Con Does not preserve folder timestamps when copying
Con Memory hog
It runs a little slow on computers who don't have much RAM available.
Con Limited built in history
The program only remembers the latest set of folders you synced, so you have to save your syncs or create batch files.
Con A little intimidating for novices
If you never ran a file syncing software, this can be a little tricky to configure as your first one.
Con No backup encryption
Con It doesn't run on older Linux systems
It's dependencies don't allow it to run on older systems.