The best WebDAV clients for Mac: Finder, Cyberduck, Mountain Duck and more compared

Your Mac can do WebDAV out of the box: Finder, Go, Connect to Server, type the address, done. For one file a week that’s fine. As soon as you work daily with a Nextcloud, a NAS or a Hetzner Storage Box, you find out why Nextcloud warned about Finder in its manual for years: slow folder listings, aborted uploads, helper files with underscores on the server. The good news: there’s a better client for every purpose, and several of them cost nothing. This comparison sorts twelve clients by what you actually want to do – a drive in Finder, transferring files, streaming video, searching content or keeping folders in sync.

What Finder can do, and where it gives up

Apple’s help page on the subject is three sentences long: open “Connect to Server”, enter the address as https://server/path/, connect. Apple documents nothing more – nothing about certificates, file sizes or speed (Apple Support: Connect to a WebDAV server). That’s fine for a built-in tool, but it doesn’t explain why it stutters in daily use.

The server vendors explain that. The Nextcloud manual for versions 29 through 31 puts it this way: “The macOS Finder suffers from a series of implementation problems and should only be used if the Nextcloud server runs on Apache and mod_php, or Nginx 1.3.8+” – and in the same paragraph recommends Cyberduck, FileZilla, Mountain Duck, ForkLift, Transmit and Commander One (Nextcloud manual 31, Accessing files using WebDAV). The current English manual for Nextcloud 35 drops the warning; the recommendation of dedicated clients remains.

The symptoms you find in forums match:

• Slow folder listings. Finder sends several requests per file, noticeable in large folders. A Nextcloud moderator sums it up: “The native implementation is known to create a lot of requests and probably performs not very well” (Nextcloud forum: WebDav unusable). A second thread is simply titled “Poor WebDAV performance with Mac OS Finder”.
• Aborted uploads. In the ownCloud forum, uploads over 20 MB fail with “Error code -36”; an ownCloud employee replies: “Finder is notoriously bad with WebDAV” (ownCloud Central).
• Helper files on the server. macOS stores extended attributes in files prefixed with ._ and writes .DS_Store into folders. On a shared server, everyone else sees them. Apple’s DSDontWriteNetworkStores switch is officially documented for SMB only (Apple Support 102064).
• No offline files, no certificate management. A network drive is gone the moment the network is. With a self-signed NAS certificate you get a “Continue” dialog – no fingerprint check and no warning if the certificate changes later.

If you stick with Finder: always use https://, for Nextcloud the full path /remote.php/dav/files/USERNAME/, and add the volume to Spotlight’s privacy list so indexing doesn’t eat bandwidth permanently.

The clients compared

The table shows the seven clients that most often make the shortlist in practice. Where a vendor only claims a feature without documentation, we say so; where we couldn’t verify anything, there’s a question mark instead of a guess.

Three things stand out. First, the subscription wave has reached the Mac App Store: Mountain Duck and Transmit are subscription-only there, and you can buy either outright only from the vendor. Second, “drive in Finder” and “good with video” almost rule each other out – a mount passes data through to other apps but doesn’t buffer like a player. Third, search across server contents is a question mark for almost every client, because a network drive indexes nothing.

A drive in Finder: Mountain Duck, ExpanDrive, CloudMounter, WebDrive

If you want your Nextcloud or NAS to show up like an external disk in every Open dialog, you need a mount client. Four are worth considering:

Mountain Duck is the incumbent. It builds on Cyberduck, mounts WebDAV, SFTP, SMB, S3 and the big cloud services as a drive, and knows three modes: “Online” (everything live), “Smart Synchronization” (opened files stay local, so they work offline) and, since version 5, “Integrated” via Apple’s File Provider API without a driver (Mountain Duck docs: Connect Mode). Price: $49 per seat and major version direct from the vendor, 14-day trial; in the App Store since version 5 only as a subscription, $5.99 a month or $59.99 a year. Two points from the vendor docs you should know: Spotlight only searches in Integrated mode, and Finder occasionally reports “Connection Interrupted” even though the connection is fine (Known Issues).

ExpanDrive has belonged to Files.com since 2024 and has been free for personal use since April 2025; only companies pay ($29 a month for up to ten users). It also uses File Provider and promises on-demand streaming and a local cache – both vendor claims that the docs don’t describe in more detail. For the price it’s still the first stop if you simply want a drive. Minimum macOS 11.

CloudMounter sells itself as a cloud drive with encryption. Important fine print: the free version mounts three cloud services, WebDAV, SFTP and FTP are subscription-only – $39.99 a year or $69.99 once in the App Store. Self-signed certificates can be allowed when creating the connection, according to the vendor guide.

WebDrive is the enterprise tool: $150 a year, needs macFUSE and targets companies with many seats. For a personal Mac it isn’t worth it.

Transfer instead of mount: Cyberduck, Transmit, ForkLift, Commander One, FileZilla Pro

The second group are classic transfer clients: two panes, drag and drop, a queue. They’re faster than a mount because they transfer files deliberately instead of passing through every access by another app – but you work with copies, not the original.

Cyberduck is free, open source (GPL) and the tool that Nextcloud and Hetzner recommend in their guides. It speaks WebDAV, SFTP, FTP, SMB since version 8.7, and practically every object store. With a self-signed certificate it asks properly and remembers the exception (Cyberduck docs: WebDAV). The download is free, a donation key from $10 removes the donation prompt; the App Store version costs $23.99.

Transmit 5 by Panic is the most polished transfer client for the Mac, $45 once – or $24.99 a year in the App Store. The former Finder drive “Transmit Disk” has been gone since version 5.6 (Panic help). The App Store privacy label lists usage and diagnostic data, not linked to you.

ForkLift 4 is file manager and transfer client in one, with its own search and Spotlight integration. The license model: “Lifetime” with one or two years of updates, from $19.95 for one user; after that the last version keeps running. Needs macOS 14.6. Whether ForkLift 4 can still mount servers as drives is no longer documented in the manual – it was for version 3.

Commander One is free in its basic version, but WebDAV lives in the PRO pack ($29.99 in the App Store). FileZilla Pro brings WebDAV to the familiar FileZilla, as a subscription for $12.99 a year; free FileZilla can’t do WebDAV.

Stream, search, offline: WebDAV Browser for Mac

The third group has been missing on the Mac for a long time: a client that treats WebDAV neither as a hard disk nor as an FTP replacement, but as what’s actually on the server – photos, videos, scans, PDFs. That’s exactly why we built WebDAV Browser for Mac, as a native Mac app for macOS 15 or later.

What it does differently from the other two groups:

• Streaming instead of downloading. Videos start straight from the server, with SRT subtitles, Picture in Picture and resume – via AirPlay on Apple TV or Chromecast on your TV. Your credentials stay on the Mac.
• Search that knows content. A local index searches all connected servers at once; optional text recognition also finds text in scans, images and PDFs. With Apple Intelligence you ask your documents questions and get answers with source links – all on the Mac, no file contents go to an external service.
• Offline, deliberately. You mark files for the road instead of mirroring an entire folder.
• Finder drag and drop in both directions, Quick Look with the space bar, list and grid views, an inspector for the selected file, a separate transfers window.
• Certificates with a memory. Self-signed NAS certificates are pinned by fingerprint on first connect; if a certificate changes, the app raises an alarm. Passwords live only in Keychain, there’s no tracking and no servers of ours in between – the App Store privacy label reads “Data Not Collected”.

And what it isn’t: not a Finder drive, not an SFTP client. It speaks WebDAV only and doesn’t mount your storage into other apps’ Open dialogs. Uploads continue while the app is open; after quitting there’s no promise. Folder sync runs from the Mac to the server only and belongs to Premium. One server is free, with limits on the search index and offline files; Premium lifts them and covers Mac, iPhone and iPad together – with seven days free on your first subscription.

Special cases: Nextcloud Desktop, Synology Drive, rclone, Infuse, VLC

Not every tool that shows up in lists about “WebDAV on Mac” is a WebDAV client:

Rule of thumb: sync clients keep folders identical, players play, WebDAV clients let you work on the server. For a Nextcloud you use daily, the official client is the right choice – plus a browser or player for everything that shouldn’t live locally. For a Synology NAS, use Synology Drive for sync and a real WebDAV client for the “WebDAV Server” package; QuickConnect doesn’t carry WebDAV, as we explain in more detail in the guide to WebDAV on iPhone and iPad.

How to decide

Ask yourself three questions and the list gets short:

1. Does the storage have to appear in other apps’ Open dialogs? Yes: Mountain Duck ($49 once) or ExpanDrive (free for personal use). No: on to question 2.
2. Is it mostly about moving files back and forth? Yes: Cyberduck, free. If you want Panic quality and sync features: Transmit.
3. Do you want to view, search and take content offline? Then WebDAV Browser – player, search index with text recognition, offline files, one server free. Pure movie library: Infuse.

And Finder? Stays the tool for the day you need a file quickly on someone else’s Mac. For everything else there’s now something better – in every price range, including free.

Frequently asked questions