Grauw’s blog
BitTorrent clients review
I’ve compared a number of BitTorrent clients, and written up a review of them.
There is a wide choice of BitTorrent clients around, and as such it can be difficult to choose. Some clients are bloated and slow, others barely have any functionality. Based on looking at the abovementioned clients, the following are my test results:
The absolute no. 1 is… µTorrent. µTorrent is small, fast, clean and really powerful, and it is a breeze to use. It is a big improvement over TorrentStorm, both in speed, stability and features, yet it manages to keep things simple. When I look at what transfer speeds I reach now, I also have the impression that TorrentStorm was holding me back. And it will only get better, it is still in the middle of development! I recommend everyone to use µTorrent.
The runner-up is
G3 TorrentRufus. It’s a bit slow, but that need not stop you from using it. It has a nice interface and a great feature set, in particular the web-interface and RSS support are interesting.Finally, if the ability to preview videos appeals to you, you could consider BitComet. It is quite a decent client with all the functionality that you need.
You can read the full review here:
Grauw
Comments
BitLord by Grauw at 2005-11-07 20:36
Heh :).
But about BitLord, it is based on an old version of BitComet, and it’s got adware. So that’s why I didn’t review it.
Azureus & My Future Client by BLS at 2005-12-08 20:38
I have been using Azureus for about a year and I’m done with it. I decided to start doing some testing on other clients and ran across your page. I was going to try out BitComet first based on, again as with Azureus, word of mouth. Based on your reviews, I decided to give Rufus a try first. I also grabbed uTorrent but not really done much with it yet.
As for Azureus...when I first started using it, I had tried a lot of clients and none of the ones I tried were as solid as Azureus BUT that was well over a year ago and things have changed a lot. So familiarity with Azureus is probably another factor in popularity...A lot of people get something, figure out all those confusing things and are set for a long period of time and refer it to other people just starting out with BT.
As for changing... When I first got it, I was opposed to Java because of my history with anything Java (including Novell tools) but it wasn’t too bad. But now with each release, I think it’s getting slower and slower. I think part of this is also saving the “statistic” information over all that time. I’ve had times where it doesn’t launch for 5 minutes and times where Java (with only Azureus running requiring it) is reaching around 200,000 K in memory usage (ACK!!!).
So I’m giving them all a try for a few days each to see what works best for me now.
Thanks for the reviews. :)
Didn’t Take Long by BLS at 2005-12-10 10:12
OK... I’ve conceeded to uTorrent...
The reason was that Rufus was “OK” but I loaded uTorrent up to give it a whirl and it’s definitely “modeled” after Azureus without ANY bloat. ;) I quickly became familar with it and has a few of the features I liked about Azureus...
I quickly setup my columns exactly like Azureus and love the fact they added the little clickable status bar on the bottom right that allows you to change u/d rates (as Azureus does). The one thing that I miss from this and others is the active u/d split into two panes but that’s small compared to the fact that it weighs in at 108k and fires right up and looks good on my desktop. ;) hehe
Thanks for the info on this gem! :)
µTorrent by harrison at 2007-11-04 02:39
I used µTorrent for a while but then it started to make my computer randomly restart while I was using it. It can’t be my computer because it never restarted randomly before and it only does it when µTorrent is running. And it seems to do it when I am downloading a really fast torrent at a high speed with many seeders.
Any idea how to make it stop doing this? µTorrent is the greatest program out there and now its killing my computer. Mind you im only using a pentium II piece of crap with windows ME.
Re: µTorrent by Grauw at 2007-11-05 13:43
Hi Harrison,
That sounds like a hardware (e.g. network card or cooling) problem, or a network card driver problem. I don’t think it’s µTorrent’s fault, it’s just an application that puts a pretty high load on your network compared to most other applications, so because of that it could cause the problem to appear while other applications do not, but it shouldn’t by itself be able to make your system crash.
I’d try buying a new network card (they’re pretty cheap, you can get them for like €10), I think that would probably solve your issues. But then again, it might not. Maybe you can borrow one from someone :).
Anyway, you can also try posting on the forums on µTorrent’s website. The people there know a lot more about it than I do :).
you rock.... by HomeLee at 2005-11-06 00:01
i’ve been using torrents for a while... with Bitlord
(you didnt review this one, you should try it, and expand the number of reviews)
its a pretty decent program, and a lot better then bittornado (only one download at a time),
which i used before i discovered bitlord.
i’m a noob when it comes to downloading stuff. but after discovering torrents, i always wondered which client is the best.
but anyway, while reading your reviews (before reading your conclusion) i was tending towards bitcomet then azureus. but in the end i went with your number 1.... AND IT ROCKS.
maar wat ik wil zeggen is: thanx...