Files.com vs. Axway SecureTransport
Cloud-native file orchestration — not a 2003 product retrofitted onto cloud.
Files.com is the modern alternative to Axway SecureTransport. 4,000+ companies — including Equifax, Cognizant, Michelin, TowneBank, and Banner Health — run their file transfer on Files.com instead.
Axway is built on legacy technology that has been acquired twice
SecureTransport started as a product called Valicert in 1998. It was acquired by Tumbleweed in 2003, then by Axway in 2008. The underlying technology is the same one from the 1990s, designed before the cloud existed.
Axway makes you buy the software, install it on your own servers, and hire a dedicated person whose entire job is keeping it running. To do what Files.com does, you need to buy and connect five different Axway products: SecureTransport plus Central Governance plus Sentinel plus Transfer CFT plus B2Bi. Five contracts, five license keys, five products to keep updated.
Files.com is one product, built for the cloud from day one. SFTP, FTP, FTPS, WebDAV, Automations, Inboxes, Share Links, the on-premise Agent, AS2, PGP encryption, custom domain, and the REST API and SDKs — all in one. We run it. You log in and use it. No specialist on staff.
“Our previous solution was on-prem, so we had to allow a third-party vendor onto the entirety of our network. What’s great with Files.com is that this isn’t the case. Everything is being handled at the cloud-based level, whether it’s inbound or outbound on our network.”
What real Axway customers say about Axway
“Setup and configuration are complicated. We needed Axway professional services for the initial deployment and for major version upgrades.”
— IT engineer, enterprise customer
“The administration interface is dated. It works, but it's not the experience you'd expect from a modern platform in 2025.”
— Software engineer, financial services
“Pricing is not transparent at all. Every time we wanted to add a new use case or expand to a new partner network, it was a separate sales conversation.”
— IT director, mid-market enterprise
“We have to keep a SecureTransport specialist on the team to operate the platform properly. It's not a tool that the broader IT team can pick up casually.”
— Infrastructure engineer, regulated industry
Why the architecture is the entire decision
Axway makes you do all the work:
- You buy the software.
- You install it on your own servers.
- You hire someone whose whole job is keeping Axway running.
- You pay Axway’s professional services team to deploy it and to upgrade it.
When Axway added a “cloud” option in the early 2010s, they didn’t rebuild the product. They just moved the same software onto their servers instead of yours.
Files.com does the opposite. We built our platform for the cloud from day one. We run it. We patch it. We keep it secure. You sign up. Your team logs in. The file transfer works. There’s a self-serve trial if your IT team wants to validate the technology before the procurement conversation.
That’s the entire decision: do you want to run this software, or do you want to use it?
Where Files.com wins
One platform, not a stack of modules.
SFTP/FTP, Automations, Inboxes, Share Links, the on-premise Agent, AS2, PGP, custom domain, and the REST API in one product. Axway needs SecureTransport plus Central Governance plus Sentinel plus optional Transfer CFT and B2Bi to cover the same surface.No dedicated SecureTransport specialist required.
Files.com is operated by us; your team uses the platform without maintaining an Axway expert on staff.Published pricing transparency.
Files.com publishes pricing publicly. Axway routes every quote through enterprise sales, with no commercial transparency at any point in the evaluation.White-glove migration, run by us.
Files.com’s US-based engineering team runs the migration end-to-end. Protocol endpoints, user accounts, SSO, scheduled workflows, and audit configuration all move with our team doing the work. As much onboarding as your migration requires. Axway deployments routinely require weeks of Axway professional services on top of your own team’s time.15+ years of operation, zero publicly disclosed breaches.
The multi-tenant cloud-native architecture changes the surface area.#1 in Gartner Peer Insights for Managed File Transfer.
#1 across every G2 attribute for the MFT category.
Files.com vs. Axway FAQ
What buyers ask most when comparing Files.com to Axway.
The decision
Stop running enterprise MFT as a 2003-vintage application with opaque pricing, weeks of professional services, and a permanent platform specialist on staff. Operate the same protocol surface on a multi-tenant cloud-native platform, priced transparently, with the migration run by our team. That’s Files.com.