rsync uses ssh for remote communication.

I am sure you know this, but rsync works perfectly fine without ssh. In fact, it has its own custom protocol for remote communcation. It can use ssh to talk to remote machines, but so can any tool via the plain pipe mechanism. Followin that logic, every Linux CLI tool that does stdio is an ssh tool...

> It can use ssh to talk to remote machines, but so can any tool via the plain pipe mechanism. Followin that logic, every Linux CLI tool that does stdio is an ssh tool...

Not any others have this callout, though, from the rsync man page:

> For remote transfers, a modern rsync uses ssh for its communications, but it may have been configured to use a different remote shell by default, such as rsh or remsh.

In my experience, any time you're using scp, you'd be better off with rsync.