If you’re looking for a tool to mount remote storage as a local drive, RemoteDrive and NetDrive are two of the most focused options on the market. NetDrive, developed by Bdrive, is a well-established product with a reported user base of around two million, available for both Windows and macOS. RemoteDrive is the newest addition to the FileZilla Pro family, built specifically for macOS. Both tools advertise the ability to map FTP servers, SFTP hosts, S3 buckets, and cloud drives as local volumes — but as our hands-on testing on macOS revealed, there is a significant gap between what the two products promise and what NetDrive actually delivers on Mac.
This article breaks down the key differences so you can make an informed choice.
Quick Overview
FileZilla Pro RemoteDrive is a Mac-native cloud drive mounting app from the makers of FileZilla Pro. It mounts FTP, SFTP, WebDAV, and a broad range of cloud storage providers directly into macOS Finder, letting you work with remote files as though they were stored locally. It is available exclusively on the Apple App Store for $9.99/year, with a 7-day free trial. The licence is tied to an Apple ID and works across all of a user’s Mac devices.
NetDrive is a drive-mounting client developed by Bdrive, available for both Windows and macOS. It has been available for many years and claims around two million users worldwide. It supports an extensive list of cloud services and also offers a one-time purchase option alongside its subscription plan — a flexibility that RemoteDrive does not provide. The yearly subscription starts at $19.90 per device; one-time licences start at $49.95. Both the trial and the full licence require creating a Bdrive online account before the software can be activated.
Platform Support
| RemoteDrive | NetDrive | |
|---|---|---|
| macOS | ✅ | ✅ |
| Windows | ❌ | ✅ |
RemoteDrive is currently a Mac-only product, distributed exclusively through the Apple App Store. It integrates directly with macOS Finder as a first-class experience. NetDrive supports both Windows and macOS in principle. In practice, our macOS testing showed serious reliability problems (covered below); NetDrive’s more polished experience appears to be on Windows.
Protocol and Cloud Storage Support
Both tools cover a wide range of cloud providers on paper. In our macOS testing, however, NetDrive’s FTP and FTPS connections failed entirely, and SFTP performance was severely degraded. The protocol support table below reflects both the advertised feature set and, where relevant, our test results.
| Protocol / Service | RemoteDrive | NetDrive |
|---|---|---|
| FTP / FTPS | ✅ | ❌ Failed in macOS testing |
| SFTP | ✅ | ⚠️ Works but very slow (see performance) |
| WebDAV / HTTPS | ✅ | ✅ |
| Amazon S3 | ✅ | ✅ |
| Cloudflare R2 | ✅ | ⚠️ Via custom S3 endpoint only |
| Backblaze B2 | ✅ | ✅ |
| Wasabi | ✅ | ✅ |
| Google Drive | ✅ | ✅ |
| Google Cloud Storage | ✅ | ✅ |
| Dropbox | ✅ | ⚠️ Works but noticeably slower (see performance) |
| Microsoft OneDrive | ✅ | ✅ |
| Microsoft Azure Blob | ✅ | ✅ |
| Microsoft Azure File | ✅ | ✅ |
| SharePoint | ✅ | ✅ |
| Box | ✅ | ✅ |
| OpenStack Swift | ✅ | ✅ |
| Rackspace | ✅ | ❌ |
| Nextcloud / ownCloud | ❌ | ✅ |
| Mega | ❌ | ✅ |
| Yandex Disk | ❌ | ✅ |
On paper, NetDrive’s protocol list is broad. In our macOS testing, FTP and FTPS failed to establish connections entirely. SFTP connected but transferred at a fraction of normal speed. For the cloud storage services that did work, S3, Google Drive, and OneDrive performed on par with RemoteDrive; Dropbox was noticeably slower. NetDrive does have a genuine edge on self-hosted services — Nextcloud, ownCloud, and Mega are all supported, which RemoteDrive does not cover. RemoteDrive leads on modern cloud infrastructure: Cloudflare R2 (natively), SharePoint, and Rackspace.
Interface and Usability
RemoteDrive is built around the macOS Finder experience from the ground up. Once a connection is saved, remote storage appears as a mounted volume in Finder — you open, edit, copy, and rename files exactly as you would with a local drive, including full drag and drop support. There is nothing else to learn. Configuration lives in a straightforward connection manager, and volumes reconnect automatically on startup.
NetDrive’s promise on macOS is the same — remote storage mounted as a Finder volume — but in our testing this did not work. Rather than appearing as a network drive in Finder, NetDrive fell back to presenting a simple single-window file manager of its own. This is a fundamentally different experience: you cannot drag files between Finder and NetDrive, you cannot open remote files directly in other applications from Finder, and the workflow integration that makes drive-mounting tools useful is absent. The built-in file manager is also cumbersome to use compared to Finder, and does not support drag and drop from the operating system.
Beyond the interface issues, stability was a concern throughout our macOS testing: the application hung and crashed on multiple occasions during normal use.
Real-World Performance
We tested transfer speeds on macOS over a wireless connection. Results below are in Mb/s (megabits per second). FTP and FTPS are not included as NetDrive failed to connect on those protocols entirely.
| Protocol / Service | RemoteDrive | NetDrive |
|---|---|---|
| SFTP | 9 Mb/s | 0.5 Mb/s |
| Amazon S3 | 11 Mb/s | 11 Mb/s |
| Google Drive | 12 Mb/s | 12 Mb/s |
| OneDrive | 6.5 Mb/s | 6.5 Mb/s |
| Dropbox | 10 Mb/s | 3.7 Mb/s |
For S3, Google Drive, and OneDrive the two tools were evenly matched. The gap opens up with SFTP — RemoteDrive transferred at 9 Mb/s while NetDrive managed only 0.5 Mb/s, an 18× difference that would make any SFTP-heavy workflow impractical. Dropbox also showed a meaningful gap (10 Mb/s vs. 3.7 Mb/s). For users whose primary use case involves SFTP, NetDrive’s performance on macOS is a significant problem.
Pricing and Licensing
| Detail | RemoteDrive | NetDrive |
|---|---|---|
| Annual price | $9.99 / user | $19.90 / device |
| One-time purchase | No | Yes (from $49.95) |
| Multi-device use | Yes (tied to Apple ID) | One licence per concurrent device |
| Online account required | No (Apple ID only) | Yes (Bdrive account) |
| Free trial | 7 days | 7 days |
| Purchase channel | Apple App Store only | Direct from vendor |
RemoteDrive’s subscription is simpler and cheaper on an annual basis: one purchase covers all of a user’s Mac devices via Apple ID, with no separate account to manage. NetDrive requires creating a Bdrive account before the trial or any licence can be activated. Its per-device licensing means two licences are needed to run the software on both a work and a home Mac, bringing the effective annual cost to $39.80. NetDrive’s one-time purchase option (from $49.95 with one year of updates, $99.95 for lifetime updates) is a genuine advantage for users who prefer to avoid recurring subscriptions — RemoteDrive has no equivalent.
Active Development and Stability
RemoteDrive is actively maintained as part of the FileZilla Pro product family, with regular updates tracking new cloud providers and macOS releases. The FileZilla Pro product line holds CASA Tier 1 certification, confirming a verified security baseline for cloud application access. In our testing, RemoteDrive was stable throughout.
NetDrive is actively developed by Bdrive and has a long history on Windows. On macOS, however, our testing found the product to be unstable: the application hung and crashed several times during normal use. The failure of FTP and FTPS connections and the severe SFTP performance degradation suggest that the macOS version is not at feature parity with the Windows release. Bdrive’s support forums are active and the company does respond to reports, but the issues we encountered are fundamental enough that Mac users should factor them into their evaluation.
Which Should You Choose?
Choose RemoteDrive if:
- You work on Mac — it is the only tool here that reliably delivers native Finder integration
- You use SFTP: RemoteDrive transferred at 18× the speed of NetDrive in our tests
- You connect to Cloudflare R2, SharePoint, Rackspace, or other modern cloud providers
- You use more than one Mac — RemoteDrive’s per-user licence covers all of them for $9.99/year
- You want a stable, crash-free experience
Consider NetDrive if:
- You are on Windows — our testing was macOS-only, and NetDrive’s Windows version has a longer and more stable track record
- You need to mount Nextcloud, ownCloud, or Mega — services RemoteDrive does not currently support
- You strongly prefer a one-time purchase over an annual subscription
On macOS, NetDrive struggled with the fundamentals in our testing: it failed to mount as a Finder volume, FTP and FTPS connections did not work, SFTP performance was drastically below what the protocol should deliver, and the app crashed repeatedly. The experience it fell back to — a basic single-window file manager without drag and drop — is a significant step down from what a drive-mounting tool should provide.
For Mac users, RemoteDrive is the clear choice. It costs half as much per year, covers all your devices on one licence, delivers Finder-native integration, and performed reliably across all tested protocols. If you are evaluating NetDrive specifically because you need Windows support or Nextcloud/ownCloud access, it may be worth testing on your target platform — but Mac users should go in with realistic expectations based on what we found.