GoAnywhere Tops in MFT, Research Group Says
April 10, 2019 Alex Woodie
We haven’t heard a whole lot about the GoAnywhere managed file transfer (MFT) solution since HelpSystems acquired Linoma Software back in 2016. But the product is coming to life in a big way this year, thanks to a major refresh of the IBM i-supported product, as well as a top score in a reputable research group’s ranking of MFT products.
Info-Tech Research Group last week published a report ranking nine MFT products from some of the biggest names in file transfer and IT, including IBM, Ipswitch, Oracle, Adobe, and Citrix, among others. While GoAnywhere didn’t score the highest in every category, the HelpSystems product had the highest composite score (8.9 out of 10) and safely be called the winner of the MFT comparison.
The MFT report, which can be accessed here, is based on user reviews of more than 40 MFT vendors that were collected by SoftwareReviews.com, which is a website created by Info-Tech Research Group for the purpose of reviewing software. Info-Tech Research Group, which touts its capability to create “unbiased and highly relevant research,” culled the reviews down to nine final MFT vendors to create the report.
GoAnywhere achieved top scores across several categories, including vendor support, ease of data integration, ease of implementation, product strategy and rate of improvement, encryption/decryption, high performance, large file support, multi-platform report, and session monitoring.
The product reviews ranked Ipswitch’s MFT solution number one across breadth of features, quality of features, transport security, and authentication categories. The LeapFILE solution did well across several vendor and product feature categories, including ease of IT administration, ease of customization, availability and quality of training, quota and bandwidth control, session monitoring, and business value created. Adobe’s MFT solution, meanwhile, ranked number one in usability and intuitiveness, while Solarwinds offering ranked first in the data fidelity category.
But taken as a whole, GoAnywhere was the hands-down winner of Info-Tech Research Group’s product review, outscoring the LeapFile, Ipswitch, and IBM offerings when product features and satisfaction and vendor experience and capabilities are plotted on a graph.
Info-Tech Research Group’s ranking of MFT products.
“GoAnywhere captured the highest overall composite score in our Managed File Transfer category, as rated by their customers,” said SoftwareReviews President David Piazza. “In particular, their customers showed a strong appreciation for the service experience they received, with GoAnywhere receiving a +92 score on their Emotional Footprint, or overall customer experience metric.”
The positive software review comes on the heels of a major refresh of the GoAnywhere product in January. For starters, the new release features a new Web interface designed to make it easier for people to use the product.
The new UI makes it so users “can just drag-and-drop files and folders from one module to another through an added navigation menu,” without disrupting their current workflow, the vendor says. The GoAnywhere login screen can also be customized with logo, background images, and background color.
The refresh also brings new features to GoDrive, the Dropbox-like content collaboration module that Linoma added back in 2015. With this release, GoDrive can support sharable hyperlinks, which HelpSystems says will make it easier to distribute files among external partners. The sharable links can be secured using passwords, expiration dates, and usage restrictions, the vendor adds.
Finally, GoAnywhere gets support for multi-factor authentication, which is becoming a standard security feature for a variety of products these days. “The new multi-factor authentication options in this release, including time-based passwords, single-use passwords, and support for app-based methods like Google Authenticator, will continue to prevent unauthorized user access and give our users more MFA options to choose from,” says Steve Luebbe, GoAnywhere’s director of engineering at HelpSystems.
