BitTorrent Client Comparison
Written by Ernesto on April 22, 2006What is the best BitTorrent client? Although it’s not an easy question to answer, we will give it a try. We compared more than 20 BitTorrent clients (windows) on 9 features and the overall impression. Some features are of course more important that others, depending on the users needs.
The following features are considered in this comparison:
Essential features:
There are a couple of features that every client should have. How important these features are depends on your personal preferences and usage of BitTorrent. If you use BitTorrent only to download linux distro’s “RSS support” is probably not that important to you. However, if you use BitTorrent to download TV-shows you might consider RSS support as an essential feature.
Overall these nine features are considered more or less essential.
Priotarization: Is the client able to assign download priorities to the torrents? This option allows you to assign more bandwidth to a torrent.
DHT: Does the client support “trackerless” torrents. DHT keeps the torrent alive if the tracker goes offline.
Selective Downloading: Can you select files within the torrent that you want to download (or not). Can be very useful to check samples (most movies have samples) or to download 1 album out of a “complete discography” torrent.
Encryption: Does the client support “protocol encryption”. To protect yourself against traffic shaping / throttling ISP’s.
Tracker: Does the client have a (built in) tracker. Can be useful if you’re publishing torrents.
Remote Control: Does it support (web based) remote control. A web Gui allows you to access your torrents from any computer in the world.
Super Seeding: Are you able to super seed. Super seeding is different (more efficient) from seeding because it tries to send out pieces of the file that have not been sent before.
RSS: Does the client have RSS support. With RSS you can automatically download your favorite torrents.
UPnP Port Mapping: Is there UPnP support. If your router supports UPnP, you don’t need to forward any ports
A quick comparison on these features shows us that only six clients (that I’m aware of) support more than half of the features.
Here are the results. I have experience with all 6 clients mentioned here and came to the following conclusion.
1st place: uTorrent
uTorrent is the absolute winner, without a doubt. It supports all the features that I mentioned. Is is extremely lightweight, it uses only 7000K memory instead of 50.000K that a clean install of Azureus uses.
Another great option, especially for starting users, is the “setup wizard” that helps you to configure uTorrent’s settings.
uTorrent is actively under development and the developers carefully listen to their users.
uTorrent supports 9 out of 9 features.
2nd place: Azureus
Azureus is the runner up. They do support all the features that are listed (some via plugins), Azureus and uTorrent are in fact the only clients that support all these features. Azureus is a great client, and especially for those who don’t care about memory and cpu usage but like to get all kinds of fancy features to pimp up their BitTorrent client.
But it uses 7x as much memory as uTorrent, and requires Java, which some people might consider a problem.
Azureus has an outstanding dev team that is constantly improving their client, the runner up, but a really great one.
Azureus supports 9 out of 9 features.
3rd place: Bitcomet and XBT
Bitcomet and XBT are two totally different clients.
Bitcomet had some troubles in the past and was banned from several private trackers for ignoring the “private flag”. In the meanwhile those problems are solved and Bitcomet is regaining its credibility. It removed the IE toolbar in the latest release, and the torrent encryption is now compatible with Azureus and uTorrent. Bitcomet doesn’t have a Remote Control feature and it doesn’t support Super Seeding. The memory usage is on average 30.000k.
Bitcomet supports 7 out of 9 features.
XBT is a no-nonsense client. No great looks, but it does what it has to and is very lightweight like uTorrent (10.000k memory). So if you don’t care about looks, XBT might be something for you. XBT does not support BitTorrent encryption, RSS, and DHT.
XBT supports 6 out of 9 features.
5th place: ABC
ABC (another BitTorrent client). Decent client, nice interface. ABC does not support BitTorrent Encryption, RSS, DHT and it doesn’t have a tracker. BitTorrent is based on Bittornado, and added a queuing system.
ABC supports 5 out of 9 features.
6th place: Bittornado
Bittornado has the same options as ABC but without the queuing system. It is the successor of Shad0w’s Experimental Client, one of my all time favorites (used it for almost a year). Bittornado was the first client to implement the Super Seeding feature.
Bittornado supports 5 out of 9 features.
Horrible Mention: Artic Torrent
Developed to use low memory and cpu, and it does. But it doesn’t support any of the nine features we listed. Artic supports 0 out of 9 features.
You can find out more about the features that are supported (or not) on Wikipedia
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87 Responses
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uTorrent is also far and away the best. But I had no idea it included the remote control option.
Will check it out.
Nice little review here. Thank you.
uTorrent gets my vote too. Azureus is just too bloated and java is slow and cumbersome. It is a shame that uTorrent’s developer is doing business with an anti-p2p company. I still use it but am a little nervous now.
Great review. Could not agree with you more! Why anyone would want to use anything other than uTorrent is beyond me. Also just a quick mention of a typo.. under “Horrible Mention: Artic Torrent” you say that “Bitcomet supports 0 out of 9 features.” Shouldn’t it be “Artic Torrent”?
u torrent works great for me, and there was no real comfirmation that its developer s working for a anti p2p company. I find it nonsense.
Well i believe bitcomet is the best bittorent client and its the fastest amongst all
I really like the extra functionality provided by the plug-ins in Azureus.
In my opinion it outweighs the heavy nature of the client.
SafePeer all the way!
µTorrent is not free software, which some people might consider a problem!
not free? where are you getting it?
Utorrent is FREE
http://www.utorrent.com
I think he meant open-source. Its not open source, but it is free.
And azureus does provide a lot fo features, but its java based, and takes upwards of 100 mb, in some cases.
no thx. Just run peerguardian if u insist with uTorrent. It adds up to 14mb max!
µTorrent is just GREAT piece of software. Well done!!! My recomendations…
???
How does a closed source, windows only program beat out a GPL Java app that runs on damn near every operating system? YEAH µTorrent runs on BSD & Linux and OS X!! (Oh wait, it doesn’t.)
µTorrent doesn’t even have a software license on it. Just says ‘Copyrighted’ like its a book.
The whole point of GPL code is you don’t have to:
1) Trust their word, cause you can trust the code instead. On his homepage theres a bit of controversy ‘µTorrent is not associated with any anti-P2P organization’. WE BELIEVE YOU. YOU MUST BE HONEST ‘CAUSE YOU HAVE YOUR OWN WEB SITE.
2) Pay money today for code that was free yesterday.
3) Beg the Developer who’s going to school/doesn’t care/now has a job to add features.
4) Fix every last bug in your pet project yourself. GPL code is usually high quality cause everyone is busy trying to fix it.
Azureus & ABC will be here in 2 years time, GPL stays GPL.
“How does a closed source, windows only program beat out a GPL Java app that runs on damn near every operating system?”
Well, if you’re running on windows and as long as you aren’t paying for the software, then the criteria mentioned in the article is enough justification.
“1) Trust their word, cause you can trust the code instead. On his homepage theres a bit of controversy ‘µTorrent is not associated with any anti-P2P organization’. WE BELIEVE YOU. YOU MUST BE HONEST ‘CAUSE YOU HAVE YOUR OWN WEB SITE.”
There are really good software that you don’t pay for that don’t release their own source code, and their integrity is seen in their product. Until spyware is found, there’s no reason to think otherwise.
“3) Beg the Developer who’s going to school/doesn’t care/now has a job to add features.”
As it is, uTorrent already has the 9 features shown, and is matched only by Azreus. uTorrent isn’t exactly lagging behind in features, compared to a lot of the other open-source clients.
“4) Fix every last bug in your pet project yourself. GPL code is usually high quality cause everyone is busy trying to fix it.”
Again, a lot of Softwares that people don’t pay for have their code maintained pretty well by themselves.
There are strengths and weaknesses to Open Source. One of it’s weaknesses in p2p clients is branching off into different directions with regards to implementation. You get clients that are banned or super-leech; you get different applications of “quota”, etc. With the splintered approaches, you get an overall less efficient network.
The article’s criteria is for program efficiency and effectiveness of p2p transfers, not crossplatform compatibility, nor longevity.
And if the developer decides to make the product commercial later on, in order to get paid for his sweat, then what’s wrong with that? Doesn’t everyone who works get paid a salary?
By The_Man on 04.28.06 11:51 am
???
How does a closed source, windows only > program beat out a GPL Java app that runs on damn near every operating system? YEAH µTorrent runs on BSD & Linux and OS X!! (Oh wait, it doesn’t.)
µTorrent doesn’t even have a software license on it. Just says ‘Copyrighted’ like its a book.
Hey Man, you’re barking at the wrong tree. Personally I use Winblow$ only for having my PC constantly on wireless ineternet and running eMule/uTorrent 24/7. For _everything_ else I use OS/2 and many Java programs with it, Limewire for instance. But I KNOW how much any Java app is memory hungry. Therefore I prefer to have native solution, and in Winblow$ world I use uTorrent. Eventually, one of these days I will make my OS/2 system wireless ready and switch all filesharing use to it via amule/Limewire and OS/2 version of torrent program.
ABout copyright, honestly, I COULD NOT CARE LESS. I never paid a single dime for software in my life. :-) International law suck big time anyway, I learnt it hard way… Its USA way or bomb way, anyway, so screw them… :->
i agree, utorrent is a great torrent handler… it only lacks some speed. for me, bitcomet has always beaten all other torrenters on different computers and settings.
i would go for utorrent if it would be as fast as bitcomet.
utorrent is the best client.
bitcomet is the one I used before, I always had crashingproblems after several hours[more than 20] down- or uploading.
So utorrent is a big improvement.
And bitcomet has the dht problemthingy.
For me utorrent is the fastest and best client I ever had. And I tried them all, except the mac- or linuxversions.
And yes it`s 100% free but so are most clients.
i dont know why bittorrent client is considered the worst…i have gotten some pretty wicked speeds off of it(350+)that i have yet to get off a dedicated server. and i have still yet to get 200+ off of bitcomet, but ill try it some more
I haven’t tried Utorrent, but I like Azureus. The optimal setting is quite complex to get at first but there’s plenty of tutorial to help you with it.
One thing I wonder : my Azureus won’t established connexion with ABC client… Is it a known bug??
OK forget that. I finally solved the problem. It juste because somewhere I’ve configured it to refuse non-encrypted connexion…
One thing to add about BitTorrents : on some private site, it doesn’t send the d/l and u/l information right, therefore breaking your ration…
you have an error at the bottom line at arctic about the features supported….you name bitcomet there
oohps, thanks ;)
Hopefully, this review will be helpful for me. Was using BitTornado for the last seven odd months.
After reading this review i will go for µTorrent and see how it goes.
Thank u guys
Nice review, but the features labeled essential are better described as desirable.
The ability to run is essential. All of the features of uTorrent are useless if I’m not running Windows. Best choice if I run Windows? Sure! Not even the worst choice if I’m not - it isn’t a choice at all.
Platform is essential. It should be listed at least, if not included in the ratings.
Thanks, was looking for a good comparison!
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