Can I use an FTP client without an account or subscription?
FTP by Zaweba is free software with no account and no subscription: you accept a licence agreement once on first start and get on with your site.
You can. FTP by Zaweba is free software for Windows with no account to create and no subscription. The only thing it asks of you is to accept a licence agreement the first time it starts, and that agreement stays available under the Help menu afterwards.
A lot of tools for working on websites now want an email address before they will open, or a plan before they open up the useful parts. For a job as basic as moving files to your own web hosting, that can feel like a lot to ask.
What you get without signing up
Everything. There are no locked features waiting behind a sign in. You can connect over FTP, explicit FTPS or SFTP with a password or a private key, edit PHP, HTML, CSS and JavaScript in a proper code editor, see your page in Live Preview as you type, and sync with a preview of every change before it happens.
The image tools, with crop, resize and Save for Web, are there from the start. So is Disk, which scans your hosting and shows what is using the space, with a lens for security problems, tagging, bulk rename and a server-side trash.
Where your details live
With no account, there is no online profile holding your sites. Your site list, with host, user name, folders and settings, lives in FTP by Zaweba on your PC. Saved passwords are protected by Windows, so they only open for your Windows account on that computer. Each site has Forget saved to remove a stored password.
When you move to a new PC, Site > Export Site Settings saves one site or all of them to a file. You can choose to include passwords and private keys, encrypted with a password you pick, and import the file on the other computer. That is the job an account would usually do, done with a file you control.
Getting help and staying up to date
The Help menu has Send Feedback, Report a Problem and Check for Updates. Report a Problem is only sent when you click Send, so nothing about your sites leaves your PC behind your back. Other Zaweba Apps lists the rest of the family, and File > Open in can send a file to another Zaweba app.
Is free software good enough for real work
It depends on the work, but FTP by Zaweba is made for people who build and look after websites on ordinary web hosting, and it has the safety features that kind of work needs. Before a single file is overwritten it warns you if the server copy changed since you last fetched it. Previous versions are kept on your PC before Gets, Puts and saves overwrite them. Server deletes can go to a trash, and Disk's operations log can undo a batch of renames, moves, trashing or permission changes.
If your site runs PHP, installing Server by Zaweba lets Live Preview show PHP pages on your own PC using the PHP version set for that site, without running anything against the live server.
What to check before you switch
You will need your hosting details: the server address, the protocol your host supports, your user name and password or key, and the remote folder, often /public_html. If you are coming from another client, Site Manager can import a CSV of sites, and offers a template with the right column names.
After that, the first start is short. Accept the licence agreement, add a site and connect. There is no trial period to watch and no reminder to upgrade.
