The Best BitTorrent Client For Mac

There are a handful of excellent BitTorrent clients for Mac, but uTorrent takes the cake thanks to its great feature set, admirable flexibility, overall speed and $0 price tag.

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• Download torrents (obviously) and manage/prioritise multiple torrents
• Search for torrents directly from the app
• Automatically download torrents by subscribing to torrent RSS feeds directly in the app
• Play and stream media files with progressive download
• Remote monitoring and control
• Ratings and comments of torrent files
• Send files of any size with a simple drag and drop
• Hide any features you don’t care about to make the uTorrent interface as minimal as you like
• Run uTorrent in portable mode on a USB drive so you can take it anywhere you go
• Use themes and skins
• Add features through the uTorrent App Studio
• Automatically adjusts bandwidth usage so if you’re making a Skype video call or downloading a file from the web you won’t have to worry about uTorrent getting in the way

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What’s great about uTorrent is that it manages to have a massive feature set and still maintain a remarkable amount of simplicity. If you already know how to find torrent files you just add them and let uTorrent download. If you don’t know where to find torrents, you can search directly from uTorrent. It also supports torrent RSS feeds for automated downloads. Another really great thing uTorrent can do is manage the bandwidth it uses based on what you’re doing in other apps. If you need to download with another app, it’ll automatically free some up. If, for any reason, you don’t like a particular feature in uTorrent you can generally hide it. It gives you the full interface to start, but you can make it about as minimal as you want. Overall, uTorrent is a really solid app with great features and plenty more in the pipeline.

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There isn’t much to complain about with uTorrent. The only downside to running it on a Mac is that the Windows version tends to get new features first. If you use it on a Mac, you’re likely going to be waiting a little longer for the same features. Also, uTorrent is working on a paid version so you may end up paying for some of the features you want down the line. (Note: not existing features, but new ones.)

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Transmission (Free) is what you want if you don’t care much for the nearly endless features of uTorrent. It’s really a fantastic, super-lightweight BitTorrent client with plenty of great features like web control and full encryption. It’s also completely open-sourced.

xTorrent is a beautiful BitTorrent client with many of the great features you’ll find in uTorrent, and although it’s technically free you have to pay if you don’t want throttled download speeds. That’s kind of a deal-breaking restriction, so as far as we’re concerned it’s $US25 for a licence. While it’s really a fantastic option, there are so many free and excellent BitTorrent clients out there it’s hard to justify paying anything at all. Acquisition has the same pros and cons, but will cost you a little less for a pro licence.

The Official BitTorrent client (Free) is lightweight and simple. We prefer Transmission when you’re focusing on those criteria, but if you want to try something else it’s another decent option.

Of course, there are plenty more. If you have a favourite we didn’t mention, share it in the comments!

Lifehacker’s App Directory is a new and growing directory of recommendations for the best applications and tools in a number of given categories.