BitTorrent is a great and easy way to transfer large files quickly, but your downloads are only as good as the client you use. Last week, we asked you for your favorites, then looked at the five best BitTorrent clients. Now we’re back with the winner of our poll, and your community fave.



The most controversial nominee took the top spot this week: µTorrent, pulling in over 42% of the overall vote, took the top spot. Most of the discussion around it revolved around the turn of events when µTorrent was purchased by BitTorrent, Inc: An event that led to in-app advertising, bitcoin mining and other adware and bloatware that comes with your install, and so on. Others of you praised the client for being fast and flexible, offering the best feature set and the best UI you can get, getting the job done, and for giving you the option to not install said bloatware and to turn off the ads if you want to. Those of you aware of the issues suggested you just run an older version of µTorrent to escape its ads and bloatware. Either way, there’s no disputing it was contentious—and popular.

Second place, and 21% of the vote, went to Transmission, a cross-platform, lightweight client that’s thin enough to run even on a Raspberry Pi. Many of you touted it as your preferred feature-rich alternative to µTorrent, and others praised it on its own merits, saying it’s rock solid, has the remote management options you love, and more. Third place went to qBittorrent, the open-source, free software successor to the number one pick. Designed to be open source, above board, and feature-by-feature comparable, qBitTorrent is another cross-platform alternative with just enough bells and whistles to get the job done. It picked up just shy of 19% of the vote. Fourth place and just shy of 11% of the vote went to commenter-favorite Deluge, another cross-platform tool with a huge plugin library that adds to its already impressive feature set. Bringing up the rear is relative newcomer Tixati, which offers a fast, streamlined feature set in a simple to use package.

For more on each of these and the honorable mentions not listed here, make sure to head back to the full Hive Five feature to read more.

The Hive Five is based on reader nominations. As with most Hive Five posts, if your favorite was left out, it didn’t get the nominations required in the call for contenders post to make the top five. We understand it’s a bit of a popularity contest. Have a suggestion for the Hive Five? Send us an email at tips+hivefive@lifehacker.com !

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