Everything unencrypted will always be faster than the encrypted counterpart. Do you also deliberately avoid HTTPS? And is that minuscule performance gain really worth the risk with FTP?
ftpes sftp and ftps are alternative solutions but I found them to be extremely incompatible between softwares. I never managed to get filezilla ftp client to connect to a secure IIS ftp server. And Visual Studio can't deploy to secure ftp, etc.
Therefore, I asked if you also avoided HTTPS (and only used HTTP), since HTTP clearly is faster than HTTPS.
But if you didn't mean to say that FTP is the fastest due to the lack of encryption, then why do you think FTP is the fastest?