Mac BitTorrent Clients Reviewed
The number of user-friendly, appealing BitTorrent clients available for the platform are very few in comparison to the number of those available for Windows.
In this article we will highlight the most popular Mac BitTorrent applications and compare their features.
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Mac OS X is heralded as the most appealing operating system on the market and one of the most capable as well thanks to its BSD (Unix) core.
Sadly, the number of user-friendly, appealing BitTorrent clients available for the platform are very few in comparison to the number of those available for Windows.
In this article we will highlight the most popular Mac BitTorrent applications and compare their features.
Let’s start with the granddaddy of them all, Bram Cohen’s self-titled BitTorrent application. It’s gotten kind of confusing since he named the protocol, his company and his application all BitTorrent. BitTorrent OSX is a very (and I mean very) basic application. It’s as feature-full as Safari’s download box and that’s not saying much. Now some people wouldn’t mind something like that, but if you’re looking for simplicity Transmission is a much better choice. BitTorrent OSX also takes an age to start up on my MacBook Pro.
Transmission is my current Mac B.T. client of choice. 
It’s an Open Source project, maintained by the developer of the popular Mac DVD ripping application, HandBrake. Transmission does its job well. A neat feature it offers is the ability to view download and upload rates in the dock, so I don’t even have to open up the program to check how my downloads are going. Another great thing Transmission does is copy the .torrent file to its support folder, then trash the original file from my desktop thereby leaving no mess of files behind for me to clean up. Now just like everything Transmission has its flaws, the biggest of which is that Demonoid, a leading BitTorrent directory has banned it on ocassion! They say it doesn’t adhere to set standards.
Azureus is a cross-platfrom BitTorrent client written in Java. It’s slightly slower than all the other native Mac B.T. applications, but has features none of the others can boast of. Therefore it remains one of the most popular clients, even on the Mac. The one reason I have both Azureus and Transmission installed at any given time is because Transmission doesn’t allow me to select which files I want from a particular torrent. We call the feature ‘Selective Downloading’ and Azureus is sadly the only popular Mac B.T. client that lets me do that! There are also a number of great plug-ins for Azureus that let you do all sorts of things like subscribe to RSS feeds with .torrent enclosures.
Tomato Torrent is a very plain alternative, seriously lacking in eye-candy and begging for a new icon (and maybe a new name too). It’s based on the official BitTorrent client. I think it desrves a mention because I know a few people who swear by it. It comes with an AppleScript file that you can place in folders you want to download to. When you want to download a torrent to a specific folder, you just drag the .torrent file onto the piece of AppleScript to initiate the transfer. One pro is that it’s an extremely light client that hogs very little RAM. It’s the closet thing to uTorrent on the Mac.
Bits on Wheels is a slightly out-dated (last updated Sep. ‘05), yet popular Mac BitTorrent client. It claims to be “the first 100% native BitTorrent client for the Macintosh” as it is written in Objective-C and Cocoa.
Bits on Wheels is freeware but not Open Source. One of its main features is a visual 3D Swarm with which you can observe what’s actually going on under the hood, how many seeders and leechers you’re connected to and the bits transferring between everyone. Bits on Wheels is very OSeXy (heh!), it’s how I’d imagine the default OS X BitTorrent downloader to look if there was one. 
If not to use the first native OS X B.T. client, I’d download it just to fly around in 3D chasing bits.
Conclusion
Clearly, feature-wise Azureus is the winner. Bits on Wheels and Transmission are both great alternatives to BitTorrent OSX. If only Bits on Wheels would be updated more often and Transmission become standards-compliant and both of them allow Selective Downloading, they might start taking back some market share. And lets not forget the light weighted tomato. Tomato Torrent could use a few more features and better interface, but it too is a great BitTorrent client.
Worthy Mentions
Acquisition is a Mac p2p program like Limewire that accesses popular file-sharing networks like Gnutella to search for files. It also doubles as a BitTorrent client. Although I have never been able to achieve superior download speeds that I do with Transmission or Azureus, it’s iTunes-integration is sweet.
From version 9 Opera the popular cross-platform browser has implemented a simple, built-in BitTorrent client. It’s supposedly “targeted at novice users.”
.torrents are OSeXy.
Windows Clients Comparison
BitTorrent Client Features (wiki)
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The comment from demonoid about Transmission not following set standards has been confirmed. When a tracker replies to a client, it gives the client an announce interval to follow. When the interval is over 5 minutes, Transmission ignores it. With most trackers, the announce interval is 30 minutes. When you do the math, a tracker can have 6 standards-compliant clients for every Transmission client it bans.
After talking to the developer and discovering exactly how wrong-minded the reasoning for this ignoring of standards is, I banned transmission from my own trackers as well.
What about BitPump?
http://www.analogx.com/contents/download/network/bitpump.htm
You forgot http://www.bitrocket.org
It’s like Transmission, but a lot better.
Hudson, BitRocket IS Transmission apparently. Took the source, made the UI worse and published it.
This is a decent article, though it would be a lot better if you would put screenshots of the interface, so that we can see what you are talking about. Also, screen shots comparing the Mac clients to the Windows clients would be useful.
It may also be worth it to note the widget Bit Sticks. I believe it is still in beta but works well and looks great. Bit Sticks Web Page.
-ndman
After trying all of the above clients I have to say Transmission is my favourite. It almost instantly connects to peers and reaches high speeds very quickly. Azureus is a horrible slow responding Java application although it does have very tweekable features and gives you some handy stats if you are looking to tweek your port/upload speed/download speed to their optimum settings. Tomato Torrent is also fairly tweekable, especially when compared to the official BitTorrent client which is lacking in features.
I’m a registered demonoid user. I have been using Transmission with demonoid for at least a year. I have never had any problems downloading anything…
Transmission is banned on pretty much all of the members-only torrent trackers. It’s interface and RAM-footprint is amazing. It’s µTorrent for OS X, once it fixes the announce interval and gains RSS functionality.
I’m pretty sure all the changes needed to make Transmission work “properly” have been made and are in the latest SVN release of it, Don’t quote me on it but I remember reading this on the Transmission forums recently. Right Now I’m using Tomato Torrent until the Transmission “mess” is fixed because I absolutely
Is Bitpump even a mac program? From what I could tell on the site, it’s windows only.
[quote comment="11376"]I’m pretty sure all the changes needed to make Transmission work “properly” have been made and are in the latest SVN release of it, Don’t quote me on it but I remember reading this on the Transmission forums recently. [/quote]
you are wrong. check the project forums. the developers refuse to fix the problem even though a user submitted a patch months ago that would mostly fix the problem. the users are now even talking about forking the project since the only features being added are gui tweaks.
personally i still use transmission, but i’ve installed the patch in my version and faked the user-agent and peer-id so the private trackers think i’m using uTorrent.
Unfortunately all of the bittorent programs you mention (and i tried them all), the one i was using on my late ibook g4 was transmission, don’t work on my macBook pro, it seems that the bitorrent client provokes a Kernel Panic 5 minutes after starting it… does anyone has had this problem?
oh, and another major bug is that there is an underflow or overflow in the code which causes the upload amount to be misreported as some enourmous amount that screws up your ratio. they’ve know about that for months also, and have never bothered to even track down the problem because they say the only users affected are the ones trying to download warez off of private trackers and that listening to them complain makes them smile.
looks like bitrocket now uses rasterbar’s libtorrent instead of transmission. so it will kill transmission when it comes to features. bet the ‘developer’ still doesn’t honor the license and credit rasterbar.
You should’ve included the built-in Opera torrentclient. Damnit. :-)
Good review, though.
I have been using transmission on demonoid too and have not been banned. Though now I know about this problem I might have to go looking for a new client…
HMMMM……
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