When you think of BitTorrent, you probably think about piracy. And yeah, it’s used that way a lot—but that’s not all it’s good for. BitTorrent is just a decentralized peer-to-peer transfer protocol, and how you use it is up to you. Here are our favorite free BitTorrent clients.
Deluge torrent free download - Torrent Station, uTorrent, Vuze BitTorrent Client, and many more programs. Best Video Software for the Mac How To Run MacOS High Sierra or Another OS on Your Mac.
Are BitTorrents Legal?
BitTorrent, the company that created the BitTorrent protocol, designed it with the aim of making it easy to distribute large amounts of data effectively. The peer-to-peer (P2P) technology enables each person downloading the data also to serve that data to others (a process called “seeding”). This drastically reduces the load on a single server and has many uses aside from downloading pirated material.
So really, BitTorrent is merely a protocol—a tool that, in and of itself, is not at all illegal. It’s what you do with it that matters, just like owning a hammer isn’t illegal, but hitting someone over the head with it is. If you’re considering downloading copyrighted content, that’s illegal.
But there are also great legal uses for BitTorrent, too. A lot of software distributors—particular those that distribute the various versions of Linux—use BitTorrent to do so. You can even use BitTorrent yourself to more easily share large files with friends and family around the world.
With that out of the way, let’s look at the few of the best free BitTorrent clients around.
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Qbittorrent: The Best Overall BitTorrent Client
Back in the day, we had a wonderful BitTorrent client named uTorrent that was super lightweight and packed with features. Somewhere along the way, BitTorrent, Inc. bought uTorrent and loaded it up with crapware and advertisements.
In the wake of that, qBittorrent came on the scene. It was designed to be a free, open-source alternative to uTorrent and it pretty much fits that bill. qBittorrent isn’t the most powerful BitTorrent client out there, but it’s still one of our favorites.
That’s because it’s a simple product that does its job well. It doesn’t have loads of extra features or available plugins like some other clients, but it does have essential features like a web-based remote control, prioritization of torrents, IP filtering, selective file download, and even creating torrents.
qBittorrent is lightweight, fast, ad-free, and open source. It’s also cross-platform, and you’ll find versions available for Windows, macOS, Linux, FreeBSD, and more.
If you’re looking for a simple torrent client with essential features, qBitTorrent is an excellent choice.
Vuze: A Great BitTorrent Client for Beginners
Vuze is a simple and feature-packed BitTorrent client. Its main advantage is its interface. Unlike other BitTorrent clients that cram all their settings together, the Vuze interface is surprisingly simple to understand, even the text in the application seems written for beginners. It also includes a built-in search feature and supports numerous plug-ins for additional functionality.
Vuze comes in a free or paid version. The free version (simply named Vuze) is ad-supported, but the ads are not intrusive.
The paid version (Vuze Plus, $29.99 per year) removes those ads and offers a few additional features. The is DVD burning. If you still use DVDs, that might be important to you.
The second additional feature in Vuze Plus is built-in antivirus protection powered by Bitdefender. If you download content from unknown sources, this might be useful. You can also decline to install this antivirus during setup if you’d rather not use it.
The third additional feature and the most important one in our opinion is built-in video streaming. You can start playing or streaming videos right from Vuze, even while they’re still downloading in some cases.
Vuze is available for Windows, macOS, and Linux.
Deluge: A Customizable BitTorrent Client for Power Users
Deluge looks like most other BitTorrent clients when you first install it but don’t let its simple looks fool you. It’s a powerful BitTorrent client with some fantastic features.
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The best email client for mac 2017 holiday. Deluge is designed to be a minimal BitTorrent client out of the gate, but hugely extensible through the use of plugins. The company behind it offers some official plugins, and there is also a broad ecosystem of third-party plugins available as well. The idea here is that instead of a feature-packed BitTorrent client, you get a client that you can pack with the features you want.
Deluge is free and ad-free, and it’s the perfect client if you like to tinker around and experiment with new features. Dvr client for mac os.
Deluge is available for Windows, macOS, Linux, and BSD Unix.
So, those are our favorite free BitTorrent clients. Have any you want to recommend?
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Remember when uTorrent was great? The upstart BitTorrent client was super lightweight and trounced other popular BitTorrent clients. But that was long ago, before BitTorrent, Inc. bought uTorrent and crammed it full of crapware and scammy advertisements.
Screw that. Whether you need to download a Linux ISO or…well, do whatever else you do with BitTorrent, you don’t have to put up with what uTorrent’s become. Use a better BitTorrent client instead.
qBittorrent: an Open-Source, Junk-Free uTorrentQbittorrent
We recommend qBittorrent. It aims to be a “free software alternative to uTorrent”, so it’s the closest thing to a junkware-free version of uTorrent you’ll find.
qBitTorrent strives to offer the features most users will want while using as little CPU and memory as possible. The developers are taking a middle path–not cramming every possible feature in, but also avoiding the minimal design of applications like Transmission.
The application includes an integrated torrent search engine, BitTorrent extensions like DHT and peer exchange, a web interface for remote control, priority and scheduling features, RSS downloading support, IP filtering, and many more features.
It’s available for Windows as well as Linux, macOS, FreeBSD–even Haiku and OS/2!
Deluge: a Plug-In Based Client You Can Customize
Deluge is another open-source, cross-platform BitTorrent client. Overall, Deluge and qBittorrent are fairly similar and have many of the same features. But, while qBittorrent generally follows uTorrent, Deluge has a few of its own ideas.
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Instead of being a feature-filled client, like qBittorrent, Deluge relies on a plug-in system to get you the advanced features you want. It starts off as a more minimal client, and you have to add the features you want through the plug-ins–like RSS support, for example.
Deluge is built with a client-server architecture–the Deluge client can run as a daemon or service in the background, while the Deluge user interface can connect to that background service. This means you could run Deluge on a remote system–perhaps a headless server–and control it via Deluge on your desktop. But Deluge will function like a normal desktop application by default.
Transmission: a Minimal Client Overcome by Security IssuesTorrent Client For Mac
Transmission isn’t as popular on Windows, mostly known as a client for macOS and Linux. In fact, it’s installed by default on Ubuntu, Fedora, and other Linux distributions. The official version doesn’t support Windows, but the Transmission-Qt Win project is an “unofficial Windows build of Transmission-Qt” with various tweaks, additions, and modifications to work better on Windows.
Warning: Since the original writing of this article, Transmission has had some serious security problems. In March 2016, Transmission’s servers were compromised and the official Mac version of Transmission contained ransomware. The project cleaned things up. In August 2016, Transmission’s servers were again compromised and the official Mac version of Transmission contained a different type of malware. That’s two major compromises in five months, which is practically unheard of. It suggests there’s something seriously wrong with the Transmisison project’s security. We recommend staying away from Transmission entirely until the project cleans up its act.
Transmission uses its own libTransmission backend. Like Deluge, Transmission can run as a daemon on another system. You could then use the Transmission interface on your desktop to manage the Transmission servicerunning on another computer.
Transmission has a different interface that won’t be immediately familiar to uTorrent users. Instead, it’s designed to be as simple and minimal as possible. It dispenses with a lot of the knobs and toggles in the typical BitTorrent client interface for something more basic. It’s still more powerful than it first appears–you can double-click a torrent to view more information, choose the files you want to download, and adjust other options.
uTorrent 2.2.1: a Junk-Free Version of uTorrent That’s Old and Out of Date
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Some people prefer sticking with an older, pre-junk version of uTorrent. uTorrent 2.2.1 seems to be the old version of choice. But we’re not crazy about this idea.
Sure, you get to keep using uTorrent and you won’t have to worry about updates trying to install garbage software onto your system, activating obnoxious ads, and pushing BitCoin miners on your PC. But uTorrent 2.2.1 was released in 2011. This software is over five years old and may contain security exploits that will never be fixed. It will also never be updated to contain new BitTorrent features that could speed up your downloads. So why waste your time when you could use the similar and much more up to date qBittorrent?
Deluge The Best Bittorrent Client For Mac
It may have made sense to stick with uTorrent 2.2.1 years ago, but modern alternatives have improved dramatically.
Sure, there are many more BitTorrent clients for Windows, but these are our favorite ones that won’t try to install junkware on your system. With the exception of the old versions of uTorrent, they’re all open-source applications. Thanks to community-driven development, they’ve resisted the temptation to overload their BitTorrent clients with junkware to make a quick buck.
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