Your results make sense. Since FTP operates over a non-encrypted channel it is faster than SFTP (which is subsystem on top of the SSH version 2 protocol). Also remember that SFTP is a packet based protocol unlike FTP which is command based.
Each packet in SFTP is encrypted before being written to the outgoing socket from the client and subsequently decrypted when received by the server. This of-course leads to slow transfer rates but very secure transfer. Using compression such as zlib with SFTP improves the transfer time but still it won't be anywhere near plain text FTP. Perhaps a better comparison is to compare SFTP with FTPS which both use encryption?
Speed for SFTP depends on the cipher used for encryption/decryption, the compression used e.g. zlib, packet sizes and buffer sizes used for the socket connection.