Recommended Clients
Anyone who has used torrents before will likely have a preference for a certain client. If this is the case we suggest reading the following as you may be tempted to switch to a safer & better client.
We do have some criteria before we recommend a torrent client:
- They must be fully open source
- They must be fully free - no paid versions
- No advertisements, malware or miners.
Shortlist
| Client | Windows | Mac | Linux | Github |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Qbittorrent | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | Github |
| Deluge | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | Github |
| Transmission | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | Github |
| Picotorrent | ✅ | ❌ | ❌ | Github |
| Rtorrent | ❌ | ✅ | ✅ | Github |
| Ktorrent | ❌ | ❌ | ✅ | Github |
Notes
We do not recommend utorrent as it previously bundled malware.
We do not recommend using the torrent client named literally Bittorrent as it's closed source and ran by a for-profit company.
While biglybt is open source, we do not recommend using it. It's a fork of Vuze which has ads, and it's maintained by the same team. Vuze itself was born from Azureus so there's a history of recycling names as they eventually run each one into the dirt.
While we do not currently have a torrent client whitelist, it's likely that we will at some point. When this happens, we're going to go back to the same whitelist we used circa December 2021. Basically, it's the above list of clients.