GoAnywhere MFT Reviews

We use GoAnywhere to filter files for our clients and set up SOP connections. Our clients are primarily large corporations, and we have around 10 specialists working with GoAnywhere. 

GoAnywhere has improved productivity through automation from the source to the destination. It has improved build time because the files are transferred to them immediately.

We use the agents for other branches of our client. It's crucial that the agents enable us to extend MFT automation to remote systems because the agent is like a mini-GoAnywhere. The solution has saved time connecting securely with third parties that we need to collaborate with, especially our clients. We're dealing with SaaS, so it helped us secure our files and the cloud files being tested. 

The best feature of GoAnywhere is that transfers are straightforward if there are no other requirements from the source and destination. It doesn't require much maintenance.

The reporting could be more customizable. 

I have used Fortra's GoAnywhere for two years.

I rate GoAnywhere 10 out of 10 for stability. 

GoAnywhere can scale up to the enterprise level. 

I rate Fortra support nine out of 10. I'm very satisfied with the customer support. They can accommodate us when we need their help. 

We had another product before we switched to Fortra. Their customer support couldn't answer our technician's questions fast enough, whereas Fortra gave us the answer we needed in a timely manner. 

I rate Fortra GoAnywhere 10 out of 10. I would recommend GoAnywhere, depending on a company's needs. It's appropriate for enterprises who want to securely transfer files from service to service. 

We are mostly using it for ETL-related workloads. In our organization we have a lot of different systems that need to talk to each other. Files have to be transferred from one system to another. We use GoAnywhere to automate the file transfer processes, whether it involves an SFTP system or a Windows network shared drive.

We also use it for data translation and data load, when we want to extract the data from a database system and create a CSV file and send it to a downstream system.

And we have recently started using Cloud Connectors for things like Microsoft Azure Data Lake and blob storage. Most organizations are moving to the cloud and we have a lot of cloud-related integrations now coming into the picture. GoAnywhere MFT helps to accomplish them.

With the automation you don't have to worry about doing anything manually. You create a workflow and schedule it. You have various options to schedule your workflow daily, or at a certain date and time, and a repeat frequency. If you have complex scheduling requirements, those can also be done. 

The very quick development time is another benefit.

The most valuable feature is the ability to call a workflow from another workflow. That really gives you an edge by increasing reusability and speeding up development time. You can create a workflow which is a type of template and then call that workflow from any other workflow. That's really helpful for us. It has sped up development time by 80 to 90 percent. All you have to do is pass the parameters from the caller and everything is done by your template.

And after using it for some time and you become very comfortable with the syntax, if you want to quickly develop something you can directly edit the XML. It creates XML for all the workflows and you can directly import and edit them. That also helps with the speed of the development.

The solution is very intuitive because all the help is built-in. When you go to Help there is a developer guide there. You can search any library or function. Also, the tooltips are helpful. You can click on any label and it shows a tooltip that describes what it does. It also provides integrated development, meaning all the development can be done in the GoAnywhere portal itself, from a browser. You don't need any additional tools or an IDE. It's very user-friendly and developer-friendly.

GoAnywhere also has a very good log through which you can track any issues. 

In addition, the workflow features are able to fulfill the requirements most of the time. Only certain, very rare scenarios are not covered. But GoAnywhere also provides a custom task feature. Apart from all the built-in tasks, if your workflow demands a special task, and you have the expertise, you can create a custom task. That's a good advantage.

They need to increase the number of Cloud Connectors and speed up their development of them.

Also, there are a number of built-in tasks in GoAnywhere. One, in particular, the write to CSV task, is slow. If you have, say, 100,000 records in your row set and you want to write them to a CSV file, it takes a long time. That definitely requires performance improvement.

I have been using HelpSystems GoAnywhere MFT for more than eight years.

The solution is very stable. In all the time I've been using it, I haven't seen any deficiencies in terms of workflows or behaviors.

Any memory issues happen because of poor workflow design. Otherwise, It's very stable.

We have gone from 40 or 50 workflows to more than 600 workflows now. But we have only slightly increased the memory footprint of the server on which GoAnywhere is installed. We haven't seen any issues. The solution is scalable.

We have around 70 to 80 users of GoAnywhere and, at any point in time, some 10 to 20 active users. Among our 600-plus workflows, there are some running every hour or every minute or daily. On average, they transfer 100,000 files per day. 

We have four environments: dev, test, QA, and production. Dev/sandbox is a single environment, while Test, QA, and Production are clustered. We have two nodes for high-availability.

Within our company there is still a lot of demand for GoAnywhere. We are going to increase our use of it by 10 to 20 percent per year.

Their technical support is good. Responses are not really instantaneous, but they respond within their SLA. They could improve their response time.

Neutral

It's a great value in terms of our overall satisfaction. It helps automate all our processes and reduces development time, so we don't have to invest much in developing. We haven't really seen any issues using it in all this time, or challenges in terms of operations. Overall, it brings us great value.

Because every new development request requires a certain amount of effort, new development in GoAnywhere is really fast thanks to the template workflow and being able to call another workflow. It helps reduce development costs and that's a great value.

The licensing is very organization-friendly. It's a one-time license, not a monthly or recurring model. Compared to other tools it's less expensive.

If your overall requirements are related to ETL and sending files to different systems, and you want to automate these kinds of daily processes, then GoAnywhere would be the best fit. It's one of the best solutions. It's lightweight and doesn't need heavy servers or big hardware to run, and it's very scalable. All these features really add to the GoAnywhere solution.

Overall, the solution is a nine out of 10. The ease of use is definitely 9.5 and the performance is a nine. But in terms of catching up with all the new standards, it's a little behind it. On that, I would give it an eight. It doesn't have connectors to various new systems. For development, it's a 9.5.

We use Fortra's GoAnywhere MFT as an SFTP server for file transfer.

Fortra's GoAnywhere MFT supports the PeSIT protocol. The solution's Windows LDAP integration is excellent.

The solution's support for the Unix platform and AS2 should be improved. The solution's scalability needs to be improved as it has very limited scalability.

The solution could include some multi-factor authentication (MFA), one-time password, or secondary authentication.

I have been using Fortra's GoAnywhere MFT for six years.

I rate Fortra's GoAnywhere MFT a six out of ten for stability.

I rate Fortra's GoAnywhere MFT a four out of ten for scalability.

I never interacted with the solution's technical support, but their website was pretty robust with knowledge articles.

Neutral

The solution’s initial setup was simple.

One engineer and a system admin resource were involved in the solution's deployment.

Fortra's GoAnywhere MFT is an inexpensive solution.

Before choosing Fortra's GoAnywhere MFT, we evaluated MOVEit. Compared to MOVEit, Fortra's GoAnywhere MFT had a more robust user interface, and the support was more apparent on their website, making it easier to get to.

The solution has quarterly maintenance releases.

Fortra's GoAnywhere MFT is best used in a Windows environment with low utilization. It wouldn't be something I would use in a high-utilization environment.

Overall, I rate Fortra's GoAnywhere MFT a seven out of ten.

I'm using it for automated exports of reports, where we're running scripts and exporting data in various formats, as well as for sending notifications to clients, for FTP uploads and downloads. We have patient enrollment files that get posted to our FTP and I'm using monitors to determine when a file gets downloaded and processed, and then results posted back.

I use GoAnywhereMFT to kick off other applications which will then do most of my file conversions and transformations. I'm reading data back in, either from queries or file sets that get created, in order to handle other functions of the jobs.

We do use the API functions a little bit, although I'm doing most of that through other applications, kicked off by MFT.

It helps centralize the exchange of data. Controlling the syncing of databases is pretty critical for us. We need the data to be up to date. If GoAnywhere wasn't able to do it, we would either have to develop an internal solution or look for an alternative.

The solution's workflow features have definitely helped eliminate manual processes. We're still a small company, we just started up in 2020. But we're already running hundreds of jobs a day and, and without the workflow features, we would have to hire many people to be able to do those same tasks.

In addition, we are a PBM (pharmacy benefits manager) and one of the core functions that has to be done with every client is receiving patient enrollment data. We also do inbound and outbound patient accumulation files, invoicing, reports, and status jobs. Just in those few transactions with all of our clients, that's a lot of potential manual touch points that have to be done. GoAnywhere has allowed me to automate all of that, plus additional tasks that would normally go to a reporting team.

As a company, it's allowing us to hire people who can come up with innovative ideas instead of hiring people just to do repetitive work. It's allowing us to grow and focus on new things instead of just trying to keep up and tread water on current tasks.

Another benefit is that it has PGP functionality built right in, and that gives me a good way to actually manage the keys, have a list of them, and use them. This is my one repository for all of that data and it gets picked up by the jobs. Previously, I had to have a separate PGP key management tool. Anytime that we would receive a file that was encrypted, while I might have been able to automate the transfer down of the FTP, but I would have to manually decrypt the file. Having that one core functionality can save me up to an hour a day.  Now, I can come in in the morning, log in to my inbox and get a report of everything that's happening: what has errored and what hasn't, instead of spending the day actually doing those processes.

We automate about 95 percent of all our transfers, so GoAnywhere is quite a help. We'll still have unscheduled file dumps or transfers that need to happen, of course, but I immediately use GoAnywhere to set up a job for anything that occurs on any type of regular basis.

I like the organization of resources, specifically listing out all of our FTPs and having a name and description to easily organize them. I also like the scheduler. The organization and the scheduling, being able to create the folders and the jobs, have been really helpful.

Looking at the comprehensiveness of GoAnywhere’s workflow features, I use it with other applications and, so far, there hasn't been anything I haven't been able to accomplish either through GoAnywhere exclusively, or using GoAnywhere with another application to get a task done. Everything revolves around GoAnywhere. It has a really good suite of features. It would be unlikely for us to move away from GoAnywhere because it has very good core functionality that we like to augment with a couple of additional applications.

Pretty much everything we've needed to connect to has been done fairly seamlessly.

The only issue I've had with connectivity, database or otherwise, revolved around an SSH key. I tried to create a key, but it was incompatible with a vendor's SFTP. And when that vendor has tried to create a key and share it with me, I have not been unable to import it into GoAnywhere. I had to use a third-party app to create the key and find something that was mutually compatible. I've submitted tickets on that to GAMFT for consideration.

They could possibly improve the error handling on jobs. Whenever it generates error logs, sometimes the error is very generic. It takes a little work to diagnose what's really going on. It may just say "IO Exception" and that doesn't really tell you much.

We do have to occasionally restart GoAnywhere because a job gets stuck or we are having connectivity issues. It restarts very quickly on the server. We might have five minutes of downtime at the most every one to two months. It has been pretty reliable.

From what I've seen, it would be able to scale for everything I foresee us needing in the next five to 10 years. From my understanding, we can actually turn some of that up and add servers if necessary. I don't really expect any problems there.

I now look at any new process that needs to be considered through the lens of how I would automate it through GoAnywhere. That being said, given our size, I would call our usage moderate. We have about 300 jobs a day and at our peak I would expect about 500 jobs a day. Obviously, that would increase as we grow.

As an organization, we're still adding jobs. We don't have a shortage of things that we want to automate with GoAnywhere.

Technical support has been pretty good. We've had some support directly through their chat service. I've had a couple of more urgent questions that needed to be answered and they were able to resolve them. We've also interacted with them via email and they've been very responsive and helpful.

They also have a queue-type ticket system that we've used a little bit.

Positive

They got it set up pretty quickly. A HelpSystems person was available to work through the minor issues and answer questions as necessary.

A lot of the help came from doing the demo as far as seeing what we could do. The implementation itself was pretty smooth.

In terms of the intuitiveness, there's definitely a learning curve. You have to learn how a job should really be set up and that took a little more time than I wanted, but it was good to get the knowledge by going through that process. I started out with very simplistic jobs and then started adding checks and error handling as we went.

One example of the learning curve is, to zip up files, I have to first move them to a workspace and work from there instead of a network share. Nothing in the application tells you this, but I figured it out after some job failures. Encountering things like that takes a little bit of effort.

As you get the feel of how GoAnywhere expects to do things and you make the corrections to set your jobs up to match that structure, it works fine.

We haven't done a whole lot in terms of updates yet. We are trying to review how to best update without impacting our production jobs unexpectedly. We have someone who will be talking with GoAnywhere to facilitate that upgrade process.

This is hard to calculate exactly, but when I can spend time with my wife instead of staying late at work, I would say it is worth it.

Though cost was a consideration, it was not under my umbrella.  Ultimately, we found the tool worth the cost.

We evaluated another product called MoveIt but GoAnywhere seemed to be a better product in my opinion.

There are certain functions that GAMFT can support but I like to use other applications for. For example, file transformation is possible within GoAnywhere, but easier in another application we use.

I try to evaluate what GoAnywhere is better at doing than other applications and use them accordingly. It handles file movement very well and I like the workspace feature.

As part of the implementation process it would be a good idea to have a couple of examples, actual scenarios, you want to do. GoAnywhere has templates and they're good, but they're a little simplified compared to what you can do with the solution. That's really a compliment to the software itself. The templates are all about moving files, and GoAnywhere is capable of more than that. Having examples that involve reading data in from a database and identifying certain data lines to set variables is a good idea.

I would suggest, where applicable, to spend the time to design into the job a procedure where, if a process fails, you can retry, or reset things like filenames and locations.

We are a review website for enterprise IT, and we perform two main functions. First, we publish these reviews for other people to read, either publicly or anonymously. Second, we work directly with vendors who are interested in understanding what users think about their product.

What about the scalability of the solution?

The use cases would be to transfer files and send files of large sizes.

We have not yet collaborated with third parties. We might see benefits in the future when we have SharePoint.

Fortra's GoAnywhere MFT is easy to use, easy to set up, and the support is good.

I am not able to go in and say 'forgot password.' I need to access the admin portal to change the password from there. I would like to be able to do MFA and reset the password via email.

I have used GoAnywhere for less than a year. April will mark one year.

We hardly have any issues with lagging, crashing, or downtime.

The solution is scalable. We utilize it minimally, and it seems easy to scale up.

Their customer service is good, with decent support. They get back to us within a day with answers. Their documentation is also very helpful.

Positive

We used standard MFT, FileZilla, and just FTP protocol within Windows Server. We switched as we were concerned about security and wanted ease of use and setup.

The initial deployment was easy. It took us just a couple of days to fully set up.

We used Fortra's implementation team since it came with the package. We had to purchase eight hours of implementation time. From our end, mainly one person was involved in the deployment.

The pricing is too expensive for what we need. If we could cut it by 50%, that would be great.

We looked at other solutions, however, it was time-consuming, and since Fortra's offers very good products, we did not pursue other options further.

I recommend the solution for secure transfer and easy setup. Despite the pricing, it is a reliable product.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

We use it for trading files with partners over the internet, partners with whom we don't have a VPN connection. And we use it for internal file movement and workflows.

We are using GoAnywhere for enterprise. We have two gateway nodes in both data centers.

From an automation standpoint, it helps us trade files over the internet with partners with whom we don't have a VPN connection. For the most part, GoAnywhere is used between us and partners that we trade files with. We consume those files with internal, backend processes and we use it for moving files within those backend processes, in the workflow. It has become very important to us over these four years. It's key in our workflow and our workload automation strategy.

The workflow features eliminate the need for custom programs and scripts for file transfers. We write a few Python scripts here and there when we need to get fancy, but we can generally wire things up in GoAnywhere pretty quickly. It saves a lot of time and resources, making that ability pretty critical. We did a migration from SSIS to Informatica over the last two years, and my team wired up about 275 jobs during that time. Without GoAnywhere, that would have been a much more painful file management process.

With just shy of 500 jobs running in GoAnywhere, a conservative number would be half of our scripts, about 250, have been eliminated by centralizing things in this solution. And the automation of file transfers has helped to reduce workload in our organization by 20 percent.

Another thing that has been really important, with the ability to set SLAs on file arrivals, is that we have fundamentally set implied SLAs with our partners. That means that where we didn't really have a written agreement for an SLA on a given file, if over the last year a partner has sent us that file within X amount of time, we set the SLA alert to an hour later. That has meant we've pushed implied SLAs onto our providers.

File monitors are one of the most valuable features. We have about 400 file monitors running in GoAnywhere. They monitor the NAS locations where files arrive, and they kick off workflows. When a file arrives, GoAnywhere will identify that the file is there, move it to a consumption zone, then reach out to our enterprise scheduler through a REST API call.

The solution helps centralize the exchange of data between systems, employees, customers, and trading partners. It's very central and that's pretty important. We generally move about 3,000 files a day, between our partners and internal workflows.

My team really likes the intuitiveness of GoAnywhere's user interface. For example, my automation team has a file coming in from a bank, a file that needs to be unzipped, reformatted, re-zipped up, and then put into another folder where another team is going to consume it. Because of all the progressive elaboration—the project started a year ago—the format of the file is not the same. We addressed it with GoAnywhere instead of having the producer of the file change the format. That's how flexible it is for us.

And looking at the comprehensiveness of GoAnywhere's workflow features, we use it pretty extensively for working with files. Stonebranch is our enterprise automation platform, but we don't really do any file work with Stonebranch. We chose to use GoAnywhere, our MFT tool, to move and manipulate files.

The solution also connects to popular ICAP servers and that's pretty important to our security guys when it comes to preventing malware and other malicious content from entering our organization. The connection to popular ICAP servers, so that content is inspected for sensitive information like credit cards, is pretty important. We're a financial institution and a lot of the data we work with has PAN data and card numbers in it, coming in from partners.

There's one persnickety issue about NAS permissions. That is a problem we have run into with GoAnywhere. I would like to see more focus on compatibility with/enforcement of user roles and access permissions across NAS, among other things. We have filed a couple of tickets on that in the past.

We've been on HelpSystems GoAnywhere MFT for about four years.

It's rock-solid. I can't remember the last time we had a GoAnywhere outage.

It's well-architected. With the frontend gateway servers and the backend servers, you can scale to meet your needs. We're not anywhere near having to address that point, but if we got to a point where we needed to scale, we could just put another gateway server and another application server in play, and that would be able to take on more traffic. It's easily scalable.

The help has always been great. Anytime we have had an issue, the response has been good and they've been on top of it. We're pretty happy with the support.

Positive

We were a Cisco Tidal house before we went to Stonebranch and GoAnywhere. We made the decision to put GoAnywhere in when we bought the new automation platform, instead of going with Stonebranch's file movement platform. We went with GoAnywhere because it met more of our needs, especially when it comes to trading files with partners over the internet. That really wasn't the focus of Stonebranch, which was really just for the workflows.

The initial setup was a piece of cake. And upgrading the platform and dropping the .jar files has been really painless as well. By comparison, my IBM upgrades take four hours.

The return on investment was in the initial purchase, as it was 30 percent less than the other product we looked at.

The ease of use and learnability of the interface also help. It took my guys no time to learn the interface and the product, and to start turning out value, working with it in workflows. The learning curve was short. It didn't take a lot of training. The time to value was great, and that is great ROI.

GoAnywhere was the most attractively priced product that met our needs. In our PoC it really came down to MOVEit and GoAnywhere, and GoAnywhere's pricing was about 30 percent less.

GoFast is an additional license. We're not using it but we might. We're all going to be hybrid at some point in time and I'm getting my arms wrapped around it. Do I put a file replication solution in place that's bi-directional, like Peer? Or do I put GoAnywhere out in AWS with a high-speed adapter so that I can send files from on-prem to AWS where compute is happening for ETLs?

We have three MFT platforms in-house. One is IBM Sterling File Gateway and we use that to move about 15,000 files a day. But that's really B2C, with our 2,400 or credit unions. We move files from Fiserv and other vendors, and from PSU, to the institutions through IBM File Gateway.

Before going with GoAnywhere, we looked at Axway, Ipswitch, and MOVEit. We did a PoC with Ipswitch, MOVEit, and GoAnywhere, and went with GoAnywhere. The products did the same thing but GoAnywhere had a better interface than MOVEit, and the price was more attractive. I hear that Ipswitch was bought out and is called something else now.

Make sure you size it properly.

Also, in the grand scheme of things, what I've learned is that you don't have to be on an IBM platform or Ipswitch, or Axway—the big names, the competitors. One of the players in the industry that is a little smaller, like HelpSystems, has a product that gets the job done for less money. We're really not that big as far as revenue goes. We're less than a billion-dollar-a-year corporation, with 2,500 people. But we are a not-for-profit and we work with Fiserv so we have a lot of IBM footprint on the ground. That is not typical of a company that is doing less than a billion dollars a year. Traditionally, the mentality is to just use the big-name products, Big Blue and HPE, but that is just not necessary. That's one of the valuable things that I've learned. GoAnywhere gets the job done for a lot less money than the big traditionals.

Our users include three guys who are automation engineers and two guys who are MFT engineers. We also have a handful of folks, four or five, in the network operations center, who do ad hoc file-sends to credit unions.

Overall, it's a great product.

GoAnywhere MFT tool is used to transfer files from one end user to another. 

Traditionally, you would transfer a file as an attachment to an email. However, that does not always work very well, especially if you want to continuously transfer files. For example, sometimes you need to transfer files every hour. In such cases, traditional ways of file transfers do not work very well. This is where GoAnywhere MFT is helpful. You can just place a file at a location and it automatically gathers the file and transfers it to the destination or wherever you want to transfer it. 

It provides the easiest and safest way to transfer files. There is security and multiple advantages to using an MFT tool like GoAnywhere MFT.

It enables you to easily transfer files and not bother about sending them manually through emails. You can automate it. You do not want to log in and attach files in an email. You can just place them at a specified location, and they are picked up by the GoAnywhere MFT server. If you want to transfer a file to an external vendor, you can either use the vendor's location or your own location to put the file. If the external vendor provides you with a location, you can use that. Otherwise, you can create a folder and provide access to the external vendor. There are two options. It is very easy and secure.

Scheduling is valuable. You can schedule a transfer for any time you want. It can be hourly, daily, monthly, or yearly. You can transfer the file on AWS, Azure, or SharePoint. These are the main advantages.

It is easy to use. You just need to create a template and then the sequence is already provided to you. You just have to input the details that you got from the requester. You do not need to put any code, but if you have to do PGP key and encryption, it is a little bit complicated because all users are not aware of all the cases. You have to tell them what exactly you need in a particular case and what you are going to provide them. You need to interact with them.

They should have some training courses. Usually, everything is available on YouTube today, but I have not found any videos for this solution. For training, there should be some sites or resources on YouTube or Udemy. They do not have that currently.

Feature-wise, I do not have any areas for improvement. Whenever we work for a company, they have certain restrictions, and we cannot use all the features of any MFT tool. In my previous company, we had a few restrictions, and the feature usage was limited, which made it hard to say if it lacked any features or not. I have not found any issues with most of the features I worked with. I could do whatever was required using GoAnywhere MFT.

I used this solution for four years and seven months.

GoAnywhere MFT is very good in terms of stability. You would not find many issues related to stability. If there are any issues, they are rare or once or twice a year.

We can easily scale up and scale down. If they want to use GoAnywhere MFT, most companies get it for a year. People usually do not scale down. They usually scale up because it has many services.

I believe it was being used at multiple locations because we had four servers. If any one of them went down, we had other servers.

I never contacted them. We had an on-site team for that, but I have attended calls with them. They are very prompt. They will schedule a meeting and help you out until the issue is resolved.

Positive

In the market, there are multiple MFT tools, but I only have experience working with GoAnywhere MFT. When I joined the company, GoAnywhere MFT was already there. I was trained on that and started working with it.

In my previous company, it was on the cloud. I was not involved in its deployment. It was already being used in my previous company. 

If you want to deploy it, you need to contact GoAnywhere. You can raise the ticket and ask them to provide that particular service. They will charge you and provide the service. 

I am not sure, but it seems that it does not require any maintenance. We just have to restart it, and we get all the updates and patching activities done.

I would rate GoAnywhere MFT a seven out of ten.