How node-scp compares

There are good SSH file transfer libraries for Node.js. This page tries to be fair about when each one is the better choice. Numbers were checked in September 2026.

	node-scp 1.x	ssh2-sftp-client 12.x	node-ssh 13.x	scp2 0.5
Weekly downloads	about 25 thousand	about 3.1 million	about 450 thousand	about 13 thousand
Last release	2026	2026	2025	2016, unmaintained
SFTP	yes	yes	yes	yes
SCP protocol (servers without SFTP)	yes	no	no	no, despite the name
Automatic SFTP / SCP choice	yes	no	no	no
Run remote commands	through client.ssh	no	yes, a main feature	no
Remote file operations	common ones in client.fs, the rest through client.sftp	the richest API	a few	mkdir only
Parallel directory transfers	yes	yes	yes	no
Progress, filter, AbortSignal	all three	progress and filter	progress per file, filter	events only
Error codes independent of protocol	yes	partly	no	no
TypeScript types	bundled	separate @types package	bundled	none
ES modules and CommonJS	both	CommonJS	CommonJS	CommonJS
CLI and GitHub Action	yes	no	no	no

Pick ssh2-sftp-client when

• you only talk to regular servers with SFTP,
• you need its broad SFTP surface (streams to remote files, rcopy, append, extended stat handling) and its years of production use,
• you want the most widely used option.

Pick node-ssh when

• running commands is the main job and file copies are a side task,
• you want one object for execCommand, putFiles and getDirectory.

Pick node-scp when

• some of your targets are routers, embedded devices, network gear or minimal systems where SFTP is missing,
• you copy many small files and care about speed (see below),
• you want protocol independent error codes, cancellation and progress for whole trees,
• you want the same tool as a library, a CLI and a GitHub Action,
• you are on scp2 and need a maintained replacement.

About the benchmark numbers

node-scp shows a large lead for many small files:

200 files of 4 KiB in 10 directories (lower is better)

node-scp (SFTP)

52 ms

node-scp (SCP)

67 ms

node-ssh

484 ms

ssh2-sftp-client

534 ms

One 16 MiB file (lower is better)

node-scp (SCP)

53 ms

node-scp (SFTP)

57 ms

ssh2-sftp-client

94 ms

node-ssh

104 ms

Most of it comes from one setting: node-scp turns on TCP_NODELAY for the SSH socket, while the others leave Nagle's algorithm on. You can get much of the same improvement with the other libraries by calling setNoDelay(true) on their underlying ssh2 client. For single large files the libraries are close, since all of them use ssh2's pipelined fastPut / fastGet for SFTP.

The benchmarks are in bench/transfer.bench.ts. Before drawing conclusions for your setup, run them against your own server by setting NODE_SCP_BENCH_HOST, NODE_SCP_BENCH_PORT, NODE_SCP_BENCH_USER and NODE_SCP_BENCH_PASSWORD.