uTorrent is the Most Used BitTorrent Client By Far

Ernesto, writing for TorrentFreak: With help from iknowwhatyoudownload we looked at over 25 million logged BitTorrent connections on a single day last week. This reveals that more than two-thirds (68.6%) of these were using uTorrent's desktop version. The vast majority of these users were updated to the most recent 3.5.5 release, but dozens of older versions are in use as well. Although no longer officially supported, there are also hundreds of thousands of people who still use uTorrent for Mac.

The most popular Mac client, however, appears to be Transmission. This is a notable change compared to a decade ago when its market share was much lower. Although Transmission also has a beta Windows release, that userbase is believed to be relatively small. Below is an overview of all software with at least 0.1% market share -- which translates to roughly 25,000 logged connections.

Nobody uses BitTorrent?

[o_ferguson]

I like the stock version still.

Re:

[Rockoon]

I like Transmission.

its 2020

[Anonymous Coward]

How is torrent still a thing in 2020? Its the gopher of this decade.

Re:its 2020 (FTFY: it's 2020)

[eric_harris_76]

Apparently it meets a need for its users.

Perhaps you can tell us what it is, if you know.

Re:

[nospam007]

"okay thanks please keep us informed of the other things you like or don't like"

I don't like you.

Re: Nobody uses BitTorrent?

[jasonwoods]

i like turtles

Re:

[dwywit]

Deluge for me. Remote control via browser is a winner.

Re:

[hackertourist]

That can also be done in uTorrent and qBittorrent.

Re:

[aitikin]

That's been in Transmission for years. Hell, that's the only way I control my instance of Transmission.

Re:

[ISayWeOnlyToBePolite]

I replaced transmission and utorrent when I found that they couldn't fix the security issues reported by project-zero within the 90 days embargo, even though fixes where suggested https://bugs.chromium.org/p/pr... [chromium.org]

Re: Nobody uses BitTorrent?

[cthulhu11]

Last I checked Transmission was the only *usable* OSX client. That may have changed, but tracker banning may still confound.

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Deluge

[p51d007]

I've used Deluge for years, never had an issue.

MacOS says it's evil

[thesjaakspoiler]

somehow MacOS doesn't like the new uTorrent update agent. =/

Re:MacOS says it's evil

[K. S. Kyosuke]

I thought that uTorrent has been basically malware for years by now?

Re:

[dohzer]

Yeah... I'm surprised there are still so many using it. Once bitten, forever shy.

Re:

[Antiocheian]

I'm not bitten because I'm still using uTorrent 2.04. It does what I want and that's it.

Re:

[nospam007]

"I thought that uTorrent has been basically malware for years by now?"

It's just a few settings, you're doing it wrong.

Re:

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Of course I knew that the default application for .torrent files was a setting. That's why I changed it.

Re:

[nospam007]

I meant to switch off the suggestions, ads and other crap that ruins it.

Re:

[Daralantan]

I was surprised to see this article as I feel like it became garbage ~5+ years ago? Ads all over, I feel like there was an auto playing video with sound at one point.... Funny because it used to be great as the tiny client with nothing else in it.

qBittorrent

[war4peace]

I am using qBittorrent. Rock-stable, works very well, graciously deals with high-speed downloads (gigabit fiber) and has a very nice WebUI.

Re:

[gbjbaanb]

and no adverts or trackers in it. Unlike uTorrent.

To be fair

[JBMcB]

uTorrent only installs a tracker if you install the optional software, and the ads can be disabled.

Re:

[MrL0G1C]

Or you could just avoid a bittorrent client that includes that junk.

Qbittorent gets my vote too, easy to use and moving torrent files is easy.

Re:

[vux984]

Another vote for qbittorent. It's open source, cross platform, and solid. I've been using it for years, after switching off uTorrent.

I wanted something i could trust, and uTorrent just wasn't that something.

Re:

[Zocalo]

Also like and use qBittorrent, but it's definitely not without issues and has some missing features I'd really like to see. A few issues I've personally noticed are spurious inbound packets to TCP port 1 on the host running the software, and connections that transfer work (and do if I switch to an alternate client) refusing to transfer (both are known issues). The latter is often fine if I switch to a different client, but would be a problem if you are on a torrent with only a small number of seeds and pe

Re: qBittorrent

[gsdfa]

Also a fan of qBittorrent, it has the most active development and is the future of BT clients. Much of the BT client popularity is driven by seedbox vendors and what they install by default, which is overwhelmingly uTorrent

Re:

[bsdetector101]

Also like qBittorrent for my iMac macOS Catalina 10.15.4 Don't download much like I used though....stream mostly.

Re:

[Spudboy2003]

I agree my go to client for my Apple computer.

Re:

[thegreatbob]

Same here; utorrent was relevant to me when i was stuck using a PIII 500 laptop with 320MB RAM and/or PIII 1GHz desktop with 512MB RAM until around 2010. The various bundling/crapware bits completely turned me off to it. Started using rtorrent on Linux on those older machines, and eventually qbittorent on windows, once I got a machine that wasn't ancient.

Re:

[hackertourist]

I switched to qbittorrent too. I ran the last non-malware version of utorrent for a while, but it became increasingly unusable: it'd hang if it ran for too long, or after adding new torrents.

Re:

[DrXym]

I've used qTorrent once and it seems nice enough. Best thing from my point of view is no ads, or baked in commercial crap, or anything questionable in the installer.

Re:

[Z00L00K]

That's actually a possibility.

Never underestimate that data can be wildly off. But it can also be a correlation between greater volumes and which client that's used.

At one time uTorrent also had a bit of a questionable reputation, but that doesn't seem to have impacted the numbers.

I am still using IRC

[guacamole]

They still got a great library.

Dubious claims

[mrbester]

I just looked at what iknowwhatyoudownload has for my IP the last couple of weeks. Allegedly, I've downloaded Westworld (the movie), a Westworld episode from season 3, Picard and an eclectic mix of Asian slut porn amongst many others.

Except I'm currently on my phone and never tether, so, no I haven't. So much for any LE attempting to identify people by IP with that dataset...

Re:

[thegarbz]

Not dubious here. I just looked at my peer list and 2/3rds seems about right for clients identifying themselves as uTorrent. Deluge is quite common in my list, and libtorrent (as a catch all for several Linux programs) features prominently too.

Re:

[mrbester]

I'm not disputing the identification of a program, but that my phone (at a particular IP) is using any of them. Based on the last timestamp, for example, I was actually reading this site...

Re:

[tlhIngan]

I'm not disputing the identification of a program, but that my phone (at a particular IP) is using any of them. Based on the last timestamp, for example, I was actually reading this site...

Thank carrier-grade NAT for that. LTE connections are exclusively IPv6 - the carrier is responsible for mapping your phone's IPv6 to an IPv4 at the gateway. 3G did allow IPv4 connectivity but most carriers started installing CGNAT due to the amount of phones and data being transferred.

So all t hose other things happening

Re:

[mrbester]

If I had a decent speed, I might well too. Or at the least, tether. Sadly, 12Mbps (on a good day) doesn't cut it.

Re:

[RespekMyAthorati]

That's fucking hilarious.
I haven't downloaded anything from that list.

Oh god why!

[thegarbz]

uTorrent was a fantastic client back in the day. Unfortunately like all fantastic clients it turned into a bloated smelly turd. I held onto an older version as long as I could until some private trackers banned that version due to bugs that allowed it to skew the seeding statistics.

Moved on to Deluge now and couldn't be happier. In addition the client/server architecture of Deluge is great for headless leechboxes. That said I realise the irony of complaining about uTorrent being bloated while praising Deluge. It's back end is far from the leanest.

qBittorrent FTW

[Artem S. Tashkinov]

Can't confirm. Usually most of the peers that I'm interacting with are running qBittorrent.

I used to love Azureus...

[sabbede]

...back before it became Vuze and they started jamming more and more crap into it until it stopped being a useful BT client. So now I use qBT.

Re:

[Voyager529]

I think Vuze has an interesting idea. You're absolutely right, as a torrent client, it's been long-exceeded by uTorrent, qBittorrent, Transmission, and Deluge...but as a torrent-based CDN and content provider, I think it's an interesting idea. I keep it around for expressly that purpose.

Re:

[igelineau]

Azureus was also the only client I knew that supported RC4 encryption, which I had to enable in order to download from my school (they were blocking all torrent traffic).

ktorrent

[tangent3]

Default torrent app for KDE and I suspect I'm just a statistical blip....

Re:

[tribaal]

I used KTorrent for a long time too, but a had a lot of stability problems, and too often I had to manually remove all the temporary download directories because would not start (especially after a crash), because of a few corrupted internal files (or so it seemed), and re-import every torrents (sometimes I tried to isolate the problematic downloads, but it was time consuming if my list was long) I switched to qBittorrent about months ago and everything is great so far, but I miss a few features of KTorrent

uTorrent 2.2.1

[Fuzi719]

I'm still using uTorrent 2.2.1 and see no need to change.

uTorrent was bad on Android last I looked...

[rklrkl]

I remember trying uTorrent on Android quite a while ago and it was the most horrendously buggy torrent client on that platform I'd ever seen in my life. Switched to Flud fairly quickly after that, which works well on Android.

On my Linux desktop, qBittorrent rules the roost and is just a great torrent client, easily surpassing uTorrent, IMHO. And, yes, you can get it for other platforms like Win/Mac if you really must.

Too bad Leechcraft never took off.

[ikhider]

Such a good idea, but I could never really install it because it was always too dated or always had some issue. But it looks so cool! https://leechcraft.org/ [leechcraft.org]

Transmission as a service on Windows

[Gabest]

uTorrent became bloated, moved to qBittorrent. Then got a fiber connection and qBittorrent just killed the new router, even at a few connections, moved to Transmission (running as a service with serman).