27 Spectacular Mac OS X Tools For Building and Maintaining Your Website Or Blog

One of the most common support questions concerning Mac OS X at UK2 is what OS X software we recommend for FTP, SSH, and easy website creation! Below is a compilation based on input from our staff and customers!

Best OS X Website Creation Software

Here are our picks for the best free and paid tools to create a website on your Mac!

Best Free OS X Website Creation Software

Winner! – Nvu – Nvu Homepage
Nvu is an open source website creation tool available for OS X as well as Linux and Windows. It is easy to use and powerful. Even newbies should be able to create a site using it and their are some decent getting started guides out there. Plus it is free and constantly improving. For OS X this is the best free html creation tool and you can download it here.

Best Paid OS X Website Creation Software

Winner! – RapidWeaver – RapidWeaver Homepage
RapidWeaver is our top pick for a paid website creation software for OS X! It is easy to use, comes with forty professional designed themes to get you started, and was the best overall choice. Just a great package and you can even use it to code all your PHP in or grab user created plugins for it. For a video tour of RapidWeaver click here or download a free trial here.

Runner Up – Freeway – Freeway Homepage
Freeway is very powerful html creation tool that allows you to do just about anything to your site. It comes with templates, an easy to use GUI, and a lot more. You can browse through a list of sites created with it and a video of it in action here. This was our second choice pick for paid website creation software.

Other Contenders
Dreamweaver CS3 – Dreamweaver is a great choice but a bit too expensive for most people. It is a great option for professional development though.
Goldfish 2 – Goldfish is a graphical drag and drop HTML editor for OSX. Might work well for beginners.
Rage WebDesign – This one is aimed at coders who love the command line. Supports HTML, CSS, PHP, Javascript, ASP, and many other languages all in a nice interface with no frills.
Sandvox – A drag and drop site builder for OS X that works very well, they have a free trial as well.
Taco HTML Edit – A great choice for someone looking for a basic HTML and PHP editor with no frills and a solid interface. Great for coders!

Best OS X FTP Software

Best Free OS X FTP Software

Winner! – Fugu – Fugu Homepage
Fugu is an easy to use simple FTP client that will work great for anyone. It features a drag and drop interface with a split screen showing your local files and remote. Plus you can’t beat the price (free)! Highly recommended!

Runner Up – Cyberduck – Cyberduck Homepage
Cyberduck has so many features it would be impossible to list them all! In addition to being a rock solid FTP client it also supports Amazon S3 browsing, WebDAV, and a host of other things. This is not as easy to use as Fugu but you can do a lot more with it. Great piece of software by David Kocher!

Best paid OS X FTP Software

Winner! – Transmit 3 – Transmit 3 Homepage
Transmit 3 is the gold standard of OS X FTP software and takes the prize due to its ease of use and vast number of features. With features like tabbed multiple connections, column views, batch downloading, auto permissions, edit, it is not surprising why it won. Try the free trial and see why it has been on our recommended list for so long!

Runner Up – Captain FTP – Captain FTP Homepage
Captain FTP is another good choice and very powerful FTP software. It allows user’s to share files over a local network in order to work on a group project. A solid FTP client and well worth the small charge. For the tour and free download click here.

Other Contenders
iGet is another easy to use FTP tool and was our third place pick. Has a nice built in feature that allows you to do Spotlight searches on the local Mac as well as Mac file support.
OneButton FTP – As the name declares this is a simple FTP utility for OS X.
RBrowser – This FTP client supports a wide range of features and the GUI is quick.

Best OS X Blog Management Software

If you blog a lot it is a lot easier to use software on your home computer to update your blog than the web interface in our opinion. One of the benifits is that you can compose an entry offline and then publish it when you get online. Below are some of the OS X we recommend to do that.

Best Free OS X Blog Management Software

Winner! – Qumana – Qumana Homepage
Qumana supports just about every blog platform and makes it a lot easier to maintain your blog! It is free and available for OS X and Windows. You can easily insert videos and images as well as edit past posts and tweak every aspect of your post. They just added ad insertion as well that lets you easily insert ads into your post using their platform. For some screenshots click here.

Best Paid OS X Blog Management Software

Winner! – MarsEdit 2 – MarsEdit 2 Homepage
MarsEdit 2 allows you to easily manage and write on WordPress, Blogger, TypePad, Movable Type, LiveJournal, Drupal, Vox, and more! It has an easy to use interface and all the features you need. I use this at home and all the customers who have purchases it love it! Download a free trial here!

Runner Up – Ecto – Ecto Homepage
Ecto supports a wide range of blogging platforms and has a well laid out interface. They have a free trial if you want to try it or take a look at some screenshots here.

Other Contenders
Blog.Mac – A well written quick little application that is built for blogging on your .Mac account.
ScribeFire – A great addon for FireFox 3 that allows you to easily manage your blogs. Works with a wide range of blog software and highly recommended if you use FireFox.

Best OS X MySQL Management Software

MySQL can be a bit annoying to configure through PHPMyAdmin’s online interface, here is software for OS X that lets you manage your databases from your desktop.

Best Free OS X MySQL Management Software

Winner! – YourSQL – YourSQL Homepage
YourSQL is powerful with an easy to use interface! You can easily import or export your database or more advance functions such as running multi statement SQL scripts or SQL dumps.

Runner Up – CocoaMySQL – CocoaMySQL Homepage
It hasn’t been updated in a while but it is still a nice simple tool to manage your MySQL databases. Built for OS X and recommended for just simple management from time to time.

Best Paid OS X MySQL Management Software

Winner! – SQLGrinder 2 – SQLGrinder 2 Homepage
A very powerful solution and worth the money if you are dealing with MySQL every day. The interface makes creating and editing tables an ease and it has a lot of other great features. I have friends who develop PHP / MySQL apps all day and they swear this saves them hours of time each day.

Runner Up – RazorSQL – RazorSQL Homepage
One of the most powerful MySQL management suites available and the only reason it got second is the interface is just a tad harder to navigate than SQLGrinder. You can do anything with this software and highly recommended if you are a professional developer.

Best Free OS X SSH Software

Winner! – iSSH – iSSH Homepage
iSSH is a free SSH frontend for OS X and it works great! We recommend this for basic use and for beginners. It still has some advance and I recommend it for any SSH work. You can setup SSH tunneling pretty easy to bypass work filters as well.

Runner Up – iTerm – iTerm Homepage
iTerm offers multiple tab SSH and other terminal connections in an easy to use program. This is what I use for work and you can take a look at some screenshots here. Highly recommended for those that deal with SSH on a day to day basis.

Missing one? Tell me!

I hope you all enjoyed this list and please let me know if you have any suggestions for something I missed!