Update! I revisited this question with a modern computer and a slightly different outcome. See that article here!

Nov 17, 2015 From Tuxera vs Paragon comparison table, Paragon NTFS is revealed to be the best NTFS software compatible to all OS X version including the new MacOS Sierra. It effectively makes Mac users able to fully either read or write to NTFS Partitions mounted by USBs or External Hard Drives formatted to NTFS file system. Tuxera is another paid NTFS app for Mac. Much like Paragon, its driver integrates seamlessly, e.g. Drives are automatically recognized as read-write upon mounting. Tuxera runs on the NTFS-3G driver, which it makes available for free here. However, as NTFS-3G is freeware, the updates to this driver come much less frequently than the paid Tuxera.

If you’re like me, you use Macs and PCs on the same desk, have a pile of external disks ranging from 1-2 terabytes to a bunch of terabytes, and you’ve got a bunch of crap on all of them that needs to move around a lot. You’re probably not like me, but if you are, you probably don’t want to be using ExFAT on all of those disks, because ExFAT sucks. So you want good performance accessing those drives, you don’t want to lose all your data if a fly lands in the wrong spot in Belize, and you need read/write access from Mac as well as Windows? Sucks to be you. But luckily, there’s actually competition in this space these days. Screw ExFAT, and HFS+ is right out, leaving you with NTFS, which is read-only by default in macOS. You’ve got three options to add write support: Tuxera NTFS for Mac, Paragon NTFS for Mac 14, and NTFS-3G. But which do you chose?

Not NTFS-3g

Easy answer here. It’s a PITA to install on OSX, and the performance isn’t great. It CAN be pretty reliable, and because it’s open-source, there are lots of eyes on it. But leave it to the Linux crowd, where it’s a much more fluid experience.

Tuxera

Tuxera is actually a principle developer of NTFS-3G, and the commercial product is built on top of it with some substantial proprietary improvements to performance.

Paragon

Paragon hasn’t been around as long, but they’ve got a pretty polished product. Because it’s not based on NTFS-3G, it should be immune to some of the performance oddities of NTFS-3G, as well.

But which one?

Okay, so how do Paragon and Tuxera stack up? I wanted to know, so I did some research and ran some tests. On cost, Paragon wins. Kind of. It’s $22 USD at time of writing to buy a license, and Seagate actually partners with Paragon to offer the latest version for free as long as you only want to be able to write Seagate disks. If that’s true for you, stop here, Paragon’s what you want. You can get the Seagate-only copy here. On the other hand, Tuxera is $31 USD, so a few bucks more. But there’s a caveat – Paragon charges for each upgrade, which typically bumps macOS major version compatibility. So you’ll probably have to pay again each time Apple releases a new OS. Tuxera doesn’t – one license with free upgrades. As well, Tuxera charges on the basis of one license, one person. Paragon is one license per machine, which will add up if you’ve got more than one Mac you need write support for. On this basis, I’d say Tuxera wins on cost, though it looks more expensive. For $9, I’d rather get free upgrades and one license for all my personal machines.

Performance

But what about performance? I hooked up some external disks to see. I have two NTFS externals I primarily need support for, one of which is a Samsung SSD T3, and one of which is a Western Digital spinning disk. My Late 2011 Macbook Pro doesn’t have built-in USB3.0 support, so for the USB3 tests, I’m using a USB3 ExpressCard/34 adapter. The caveat here is that the ExpressCard/34 slot only has 2.5Gbps of bandwidth, so while it’s USB3 and much faster than USB2, it’s still a bottleneck on the up-to-5Gbps USB3. That matters for the SSD in particular, which can max the bus. For the numbers, I’m using BlackMagic’s speed test from the App Store.

So in the end, Paragon is faster, but to a degree that totally doesn’t matter unless you’ve got a ripping-fast external SSD and USB3.0.

Conclusion

On the one hand, Paragon is SUBSTANTIALLY faster on the SSD/USB3 test than Tuxera. On the other, I really prefer Tuxera’s licensing, and it’ll be somewhat rare that I’m using this machine for performance-intensive stuff on the one drive I have where it matters. I’m going with Tuxera. TL;DR: Buy Paragon if you have a ludicrously fast external SSD and need all the performance. Otherwise, Tuxera’s licensing is better, and performance as good as matters for anything else.

Tuxera Vs Paragon Ntfs

I’ll let you know if it nukes my data and demands a ransom in the next few months.

Last year, out of necessity to figure out which tool to use, I posted a comparison of Tuxera and Paragon NTFS drivers on macOS Sierra. I just bought a shiny new too-expensive-and-questionably-fit-for-sale MacBook Pro 2018, and the question is newly prescient. Some things have changed – we’re on High Sierra looking to Mojave now, both drivers have new versions out, and this new machine now has not only USB 3.1 Gen2, but more generally, 160GBit/s I/O that could fully saturate virtually any storage device you could plug into it. That almost includes some hypothetical external RAMdisk. Part of my plan for this machine going forward is to start running space-intense tasks like VMs and my photo library from an external NVMe SSD that can actually utilize that silly bandwidth, and may itself be shared with Windows 10 machines, so here we are.

What’s the same?

Licensing (kind of). Paragon still charges $20 for their NTFS driver, licensed per-machine with no upgrades. Tuxera still charges $31 for thiers, on a per-user basis with free upgrades to new versions. Winner: Tuxera. Except, there are some extenuating circumstances at the moment: Tuxera’s currently on sale for $18, and Paragon has released a package suite of drivers which includes free upgrades, and is $50. These factors make things a little less straightforward, but still I feel sum up in Tuxera’s favor. (UPDATE: Originally, I thought the package suite was on SALE for $50, but I think that’s actually the normal price and $100 is what you’d pay if you bought each alone. That makes Paragon a pretty darn good deal.)

What’s different?

Features and interface. Paragon has developed significantly since last year. It has some pretty looking tools and interfaces, although I don’t think they change much in a practical sense. It now comes with a pretty menu item which shows your drives and offers quick access repair/mounting/etc. If you don’t find that useful, you can turn it off.

Tuxera is pretty much unchanged.

The UI differences are sort of neither here nor there, although for my money, change is good. Minor point to Paragon for making an obvious effort to keep pace with Mojave.

Performance comparison

Long story short: Paragon pretty much smokes Tuxera. For spinning disks, the performance comparison is mostly unchanged – they’re both about the same, and performance varies ±10MB/s on the benchmark anyway depending on the direction of the wind. But the SSD performance delta has expanded from about 40% better for Paragon to more like 75% better for Paragon. Caveat emptor: this is moving from a 2.5GBit/s ExpressCard bottleneck on my old machine to the SSD’s internal flash bottleneck on the new one, but still – Paragon couldn’t quite saturate the ExpressCard on my old test, and now can just about saturate the SSD. These numbers are about what I get running a benchmark on a Windows machine with USB 3.0. Tuxera also improved over the old benchmark, as you can see, but not by nearly enough to even maintain that performance delta. Paragon is a clear and commanding winner here.

A note about caching

One thing I’m unclear on is how Paragon handles file system caching vs Tuxera. Tuxera offers the option to turn it off, at a performance penalty (that the benchmarks clearly show). Paragon offers no such option, so it’s unclear to me if the driver is doing caching or not. On Windows, I have write caching turned off by default for external devices since it improves FS resilience in sudden-disconnect scenarios, which can be tough to avoid especially with portables. This doesn’t seem to have a huge impact on performance, where it certainly does here. Oddly, Tuxera seems to be impacted even on read by having caching disabled, which I wouldn’t have expected to be noticeable in these tests.

Compare Tuxera Paragon Ntfs Software

Compare Tuxera Paragon Ntfs Download

Conclusion

Now that I’m much more performance-conscious in my driver choice, I’m much more inclined to switch to Paragon. For now, I’m going to run the trial and decide how I feel at the end of that. It seems likely I’ll buy the package deal for $50 with future upgrades, even though I don’t really need the other drivers. Plus, I already have a Tuxera license to cover other machines where I’m less performance-conscious.