BucketPilot vs S3 Browser (now CS Browser)
The Windows desktop client — renamed CS Browser in 2026 — versus a browser-based, team-oriented storage console.
Last verified 18 September 2026 against the sources below. Tell us if something here is out of date and we will check it.
The short version
S3 Browser has been renamed CS Browser, and is published by Netsdk Software FZE. It is a Windows desktop client for Amazon S3, S3 Glacier and S3-compatible services — free for personal use, with a paid Pro licence required for commercial, business, government or military use.
BucketPilot runs in the browser on any OS, indexes objects for search, runs scheduled jobs on managed workers, reaches R2 and Google Cloud Storage as well as S3, and is built around a shared workspace. If your world is one Windows machine and one AWS account, CS Browser does that job and keeps everything local; past that, the per-machine model is the constraint.
Side by side
| CS Browser (S3 Browser) | BucketPilot | |
|---|---|---|
| Intended use | Working with buckets and files from a Windows interface, without the command line | Managing and copying buckets for a team, on a schedule, from any OS |
| Sources and destinations | Amazon S3, S3 Glacier and S3-compatible services | S3, Cloudflare R2, Google Cloud Storage, BucketPilot Cloud; SFTP/SSH, Windows servers and Azure Blob as sources |
| Scheduled operations | Runs on your machine, so the machine has to be on | Managed workers; the job runs whether or not anything of yours is on |
| Search / indexing | Browse and filter buckets in the client | Every object indexed; filename search across buckets, with an API |
| Backup vs synchronisation | Upload/download and sync tooling on the desktop | Backup jobs never delete at the destination; a mirror is a separate, labelled choice |
| Restoration | Download what you can see; restore from Glacier | Versioned destination; restore any version, or a folder back to its source |
| Team roles | Per-machine install, each with its own credentials | One workspace, per-bucket and per-folder grants, roles |
| Audit history | Local to that installation | Workspace-wide activity log across everyone |
| Deployment model | Windows desktop application | Browser; jobs on our workers |
| Pricing basis | Free for personal use only. Commercial use needs a Pro licence: one computer per licence, lifetime, with one year of upgrades and support | Per-workspace subscription with a 14-day trial |
Which should you use?
Choose CS Browser for a personal, Windows-based workflow against one account — a perpetual licence and keeping everything on your own machine are real advantages, and there is no subscription.
Choose BucketPilot when the job outgrows one machine: scheduled copies that must run unattended, teammates on different platforms, multiple accounts or providers, and search across everything. Start with the docs.