Hello everyone, on this page we will give you a list of the best Bittorrent clients on Mac, before you do that, how are you all doing today? I hope you are all having a great start to your week. If not don’t worry, Monday is basically over, so let the countdown to Friday begin lol, anyway read on…
Today we will focus on the one and only P2P technology the continues to dominate the internet. BitTorrent. Before we give you the list of the best Bittorrent clients for Mac, lets find out what is a ‘torrent’ and if it is legal, safe and ultimately if it is even worth your time to use.
What Are Torrents?
A Torrent is a file extension for a BitTorrent file format used by BitTorrent clients. Torrent files contain text and point out the trackers for a download to begin downloading from distributors (known as seeders or uploaders) and requesting clients (known as leechers or downloaders).
- Are Torrents Safe?
Tricky question but mostly yes, but sometimes no because you can download a file that has a virus or some spyware/malware attached to it. Make sure you only download from validated sources. - Are Torrents Legal?
Yes and no, again it depends on where you live and what type of files you are downloading. Just use your own judgement and don’t download too much, if I can give you any advice it would be that, don’t download 10TB of files all day and be surprised when your ISP sends you an email or letter asking you, “Wtf are you downloading?”
#1. Download uTorrent for Mac
uTorrent is a the most popular BitTorrent client, distributed by the creators of the BitTorrent protocol. uTorrent was designed to use as little of the computer’s resources as possible while offering a lot of the functionality expected from ‘full-featured’ clients.
- Micro-Sized Yet Feature Filled – Most of the features present in other BitTorrent clients are present in µTorrent, including bandwidth prioritization, scheduling, RSS auto-downloading and Mainline DHT (compatible with BitComet). Additionally, µTorrent supports the Protocol Encryption joint specification (compatible with Azureus 2.4.0.0, and now BitComet 0.63) and peer exchange.
- Resource-Friendly – µTorrent was written with efficiency in mind. Unlike many torrent clients, it does not hog valuable system resources – typically using less than 6MB of memory, allowing you to use the computer as if it weren’t there at all. Additionally, the program itself is contained within a single executable less than 160 KB in size.
- Skinnable and Localized – Various icon, toolbar graphic and status icon replacements are available, and creating your own is very simple. µTorrent also has support for localization, and with a language file present, will automatically switch to your system language. If your language isn’t available, you can easily add your own, or edit other existing translations to improve them!
- Actively Developed and Improved – The developer puts in a lot of time working on features and making things more user friendly. Releases only come out when they’re ready, with no schedule pressures, so the few bugs that appear are quickly addressed and fixed.
uTorrent Screenshot
#2. Download Transmission for Mac
Transmission is a fast, easy, and free multi-platform BitTorrent client with a focus on being lightweight yet feature-filled.
Transmission runs natively on over five operating systems. Seamless configuration of your network, intelligent banning of peers who send corrupted data, protocol encryption, and built in Peer Exchange are some of the features which enable Transmission to download your files as quickly as possible. All this is done in the background, without the user having to worry about complicated settings.
Transmission is fully open source, with most code licensed under the liberal MIT License and with select code licensed under the GNU General Public License. If you are interested in helping out the Transmission project in any way, we encourage you to head over to our development page. The current developers welcome anybody who is interested in implementing new features, documentation or translations.
These days, bandwidth is a precious commodity. Transmission allows you to ration this commodity efficiently. You might want to queue your torrents for maximum performance. Or throttle their speed during peak periods. Transmission easily lets you do both, and thus only works its hardest when you want it to. Support for Growl notifications and dock badging keep you updated with what’s going on so you can get back to doing more important things.
Transmission Screenshot
#3. Download Deluge for Mac
Deluge is a full-featured BitTorrent client for Linux, OS X, Unix and Windows. It uses libtorrent in its backend and features multiple user-interfaces including: GTK+, web and console. It has been designed using the client server model with a daemon process that handles all the bittorrent activity. The Deluge daemon is able to run on headless machines with the user-interfaces being able to connect remotely from any platform.
Deluge features a rich plugin collection; in fact, most of Deluge’s functionality is available in the form of plugins.
Deluge was created with the intention of being lightweight and unobtrusive. It is our belief that downloading shouldn’t be the primary task on your computer and therefore shouldn’t monopolize system resources.
Deluge Screenshot
#4. Download qBittorrent for Mac
qBittorrent is Free Software (more than just freeware! Free as in Freedom) released under the GNU GPLv2 license. You don’t have to pay for it and this won’t change. Its code is open and available to everyone and reusable under certain conditions. qBittorrent – of course – does not contain any malware, spyware, advertisements or undesired third-party programs.
- It is Free/Libre Software (you can see the code and see what qBittorrent is doing).
- Its development team is very active and friendly.
- It is stable and it has a low footprint (generally, 20-60 MiB of RAM used), whilst providing all the features you may need.
- It uses the high-tech libtorrent (Rasterbar) library, which means greater download and upload speed as well as excellent support of the latest features of the BitTorrent protocol.
- It is easy to use and all of its features are well documented.
- It is an international program, supporting Unicode and containing translations into more than 25 languages
qBittorrent Screenshot
#5. Download Vuze for Mac
Vuze (previously Azureus) is a BitTorrent client used to transfer files via the BitTorrent protocol. Vuze is written in Java, and uses the Azureus Engine. In addition to downloading data linked to .torrent files, Azureus allows users to view, publish and share original DVD and HD quality video content.
Content is presented through channels and categories containing TV shows, music videos, movies, video games, series and others.
