In computing, the SSH File Transfer Protocol (sometimes called Secure File Transfer Protocol or SFTP) is a network protocol that provides file transfer and manipulation functionality over any reliable data stream. It is typically used with version two of the SSH protocol (TCP port 22) to provide secure file transfer, but is intended to be usable with other protocols as well. Compared to the earlier SCP protocol, which allows only file transfers, the SFTP protocol allows for a range of operations on remote files – it is more like a remote file system protocol.

An SFTP client's extra capabilities compared to an SCP client include resuming interrupted transfers, directory listings, and remote file removal. For these reasons it is relatively simple to implement a GUI SFTP client compared with a GUI SCP client. SFTP attempts to be more platform-independent than SCP; for instance, with SCP, the expansion of wildcards specified by the client is up to the server, whereas SFTP's design avoids this problem.

While SCP is most frequently implemented on Unix platforms, SFTP servers are commonly available on most platforms.

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