The Best BitTorrent Client for Windows




Platform: Windows, Mac OS X
Price: Free
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  • Download torrents (obviously) and manage/prioritize multiple torrents
  • Search for torrents directly from the app
  • Automatically download torrents through torrent RSS feeds
  • Play and stream media files as you download them
  • Label torrents for easy sorting
  • Rate and comment on torrent files for other users
  • Add features through the uTorrent App Studio
  • Many more advanced features

Where It Excels


Where It Falls Short

There's very little wrong with uTorrent. If you are a very advanced user, you might prefer something like Vuze, but for the vast majority of users, uTorrent has all the features they could ever need. If you're opposed to closed-source software, you might want to look elsewhere (uTorrent is even coming out with a paid version sometime in the near future), but other than that we've found it's easily the best client around. Its ads are pretty annoying, but you can remove them easily enough.

The Competition

uTorrent has pretty much killed most of the competition, but there are still a few other apps worth looking at. Vuze is a popular client for the more advanced crowd, offering more features than you'd ever know what to do with—which would be great, if it didn't make the app so much slower. If you want to tweak the inner workings of BitTorrent, or stream movies from BitTorrent to your TV, Vuze is worth checking out, but be prepared for a much heftier program than uTorrent.

While uTorrent is still very lightweight and simple, some very minimalist users would prefer something with less "add-on" type features, and for them, there's Tixati. It's less feature-bloated than uTorrent, but about the same on system resources. It still supports advanced features like magnet links, bandwidth management, RSS, and more, so if uTorrent isn't doing it for you, Tixati could be a good alternative.

