What is Portal used for?

Portal is a free, MIT-licensed, end-to-end encrypted command-line file transfer tool written in Go that sends files directly between computers, with a relay fallback. It is a good fit for securely transferring files between two computers and command-line file sharing without cloud storage.

Is Portal open source?

Yes. Portal is open source under the MIT licence. Its source code is on GitHub at SpatiumPortae/portal and is written mainly in Go.

Yes. Portal is open source, so the software itself is free to use. A managed cloud version is also available.

What is Portal an alternative to?

Portal is an open-source alternative to Send Anywhere. Other open-source alternatives to Send Anywhere include croc, qr-filetransfer and Airshare.

Is Portal actively maintained?

The most recent commit to Portal was on 20 August 2024, and the latest release is v1.2.3, published on 16 March 2023. The project has 1.8k stars on GitHub.

Portal: open-source alternative to Send Anywhere

About Portal

Portal is a command-line utility for transferring files and folders from one computer to another. It is aimed at developers and power users who want a quick, secure way to move files between machines without setting up cloud storage or relying on a third-party upload service.

Files are sent using end-to-end encryption via the PAKE2 password-authenticated key exchange: the sender gets a short, memorable temporary password, such as '1-inertia-elliptical-celestial', which they share with the receiver over any communication channel, and the two clients then connect through a relay server to negotiate a direct transfer when possible, falling back to relaying the encrypted data if a direct connection cannot be established. Transfers are compressed with parallel gzip for speed, and the tool includes shell completions for bash, zsh, fish and PowerShell.

Portal can be installed via Homebrew on macOS and Linux, Scoop or WinGet on Windows, the AUR on Arch Linux, or by downloading a release binary directly. It is written in Go and released under the MIT license, and it also supports running your own relay server if you plan to transfer large volumes of data.

Key features

End-to-end encrypted file transfer via PAKE2
Direct peer-to-peer transfer when possible
Relay-server fallback for NAT traversal
Parallel gzip compression
Shell completions for major shells
Self-hostable relay server

Good fit for

→Securely transferring files between two computers
→Command-line file sharing without cloud storage

Built with: Go
Tags: file-transfer; end-to-end-encryption; cli; golang; peer-to-peer; file-sharing

Portal: questions and answers

What is Portal used for?: Portal is a free, MIT-licensed, end-to-end encrypted command-line file transfer tool written in Go that sends files directly between computers, with a relay fallback. It is a good fit for securely transferring files between two computers and command-line file sharing without cloud storage.
Is Portal open source?: Yes. Portal is open source under the MIT licence. Its source code is on GitHub at SpatiumPortae/portal and is written mainly in Go.
Is Portal free?: Yes. Portal is open source, so the software itself is free to use. A managed cloud version is also available.
What is Portal an alternative to?: Portal is an open-source alternative to Send Anywhere. Other open-source alternatives to Send Anywhere include croc, qr-filetransfer and Airshare.
Is Portal actively maintained?: The most recent commit to Portal was on 20 August 2024, and the latest release is v1.2.3, published on 16 March 2023. The project has 1.8k stars on GitHub.