Hacker News Reader

Comment by bcrack | Hacker News Reader

In what ways do you find SyncThing lacking when compared to BTSync? I started using it for work (cautiously) a couple of moths ago and have found it to be very similar (with respect to stability and ease of use) with BTSync, if not superior. Note though that I haven't used BTSync since its first days.

View on HN

My guess is this:

> I was able to share 15 GBs of vacation videos with 10 of my non-techie friends by sending them a read only key to a shared folder. All of them got it right away with no technical questions or issues.

I appreciate SyncThing's security first stance, but it would be incredibly helpful if it was a bit easier to share specific synced things with non-techies.

This is the one thing that I was looking for in an alternative to Sync. It made me sad that the main alternative to it didn't have this.

1) Punching holes through Firewalls - BTSync has the strong upper hand for that.

2) Much easier share structure. Synchthing still feels very fiddly compared to BTSync

I had a large corporate job that BTSync would do but I dug in my heels and tried out SynchThing and I had to buy licences for BTSync. It is working out very well.

The exceptional mobile app (iOS client) is the platform's killer feature IMO. A lot of folks use their phones as their main computer outside of work these days. I couldn't find an equivalent for SyncThing.

Aside from that what I really like about it is:

- consistent UI across platforms

- unlimited folders

- free

- Web GUI for FreeNAS plugin is excellent

- local downloads on the same network are FAST

- share keys without needing approval

- BitTorrent protocol

- "It just works" (it really does)

I have no experience with SyncThing. But to me, open source is the only thing SyncThing has going for it over BTSync. At least on paper.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com