Deluge: get a powerful yet user friendly Torrent client
Description: Deluge is a full-featured open source bittorrent client that runs on multiple platforms. It is designed to be low on system resources utilization while providing powerful features and a user friendly experience.
I am not sure why, but I’ve been always looking for a good alternative to Azureus or µTorrent, admittedly the two most powerful Torrent clients. I have been using the Azureus-based BitTyrant (more on that one here), but have also had my eye out for some time on the open-source Deluge. 
And although I have previously tried multiple releases of the Windows version, they have always been somewhat unreliable and buggy; until this one: from the purely subjective experience of a single user I can report that this release (v.0.5.8.9) seems to be a very good, solid torrent client.
It is worth mentioning that as of the 0.5 release, Deluge was completely re-written from the earlier code and supports more features and better stability. Here are more notes on this program:
- The user experience: the interesting thing about this program is that it is very simple and “clean” looking, perfect for regular users who do not want to deal with a lot of complexity.
- Features: as of the 0.5 release Deluge supports encryption, peer exchange, binary prefix and UPnP, and a web UI that works on Firefox (didn’t try it - sorry). Other features include global as well as individual torrent upload/download limits, moving incomplete torrents on the local drive, enabling safe “blocklists” (Safepeer, Peerguadian, Emule), peer exchange, local peer discovery, private torrents, password protection, RSS, minimizing to tray, and other features which I either do not care to mention or do not understand.
Technical comparison: for a technical features comparison with Azureus and µTorrent, click the thumbnail to the right (table adapted from Wikipedia’s torrent comparison article).- Plugin architecture: makes this program (a) adaptable and easy to work with, and (b) quite powerful. Note that many of the features mentioned above might require activating the relevant plugins. At the time of this writing, all Deluge plugins were included in the installation package.
- Memory consumption: a mere 15 megs in memory. This is important given that Torrent clients typically reside in the background doing their thing while you work on other applications.
- Installation: you will be asked to determine a number of options on first use (download/upload limits, ports to scan, etc.) If you do no know what these are go with the default value.
The verdict: I really like this program; I like that its simple yet powerful and does not consume a lot of resources, and that I can recommend it both to the torrent novice as well as seasoned torrent users as a legitimate alternative to Azureus or µTorrent.
Version Tested: 0.5.8.9
Compatibility: Windows XP, Vista. MacOS X, Linux.
Go to the program page to download the latest version (approx 9.1 megs).
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uTorrent takes up 8.5M, roughly half the size of Deluge. Azureus is a bloated, buggy hog. uTorrent is portable. Deluge does have NAT traversal. Is that really helpful? Would you expand a little more on why you think this is better than uTorrent?
I didn’t say that it is necessarily better that uTorrent. I said its a legitimate alternative.
The webUI component would be the important one for me, as the torrent client runs on the machine in my network that operates as a central file server. It’s the one that is connected directly to the wireless access point, while the webcam drivers & laptops are scattered around the house. The server & webcam drivers are all controlled remotely via VNC, & when I’m away, Hamachi as well.
bla bla bla, why would i need an alternative to utorrent?
If you are using a software and are happy with it, please don’t feel obliged to change because I suggest an alternative.
For myself I never liked uTorrent.
Looking at the screenshot,
If you changed the icon to the one used by uTorrent, I’d probably never even notice. haha!
I’ll have to see how it fares on the home network.
I’ve been using BitTorrent for a while now, and my biggest problems with it are three-fold. One, not enough people seeding a large file; two, people who seed spam, velveeta, viruses, and trojans under assumed names–I suspect most of them are just re-seeding something they downloaded, rather than deliberately trying to infect my system, but it honks me off either way; and three, my internet provider is Comcast.
A new client isn’t going to address any of those issues, but that webUI might be worth a closer look. Thanks for alerting me to the program.
@Hiram,
A new client won’t address these issues, but enabling safe “blocklists” prbably will help quite a bit. Click the following link for more info: http://deluge-torrent.org/faq.php#6n31
Thanks Samer for introducing an alternative to Transmission for Ubuntu.I like Deluge better on Linux but must admit uTorrent on Windows is great.
Personally I think U torrent is great but i’d like to know more on this deluge and so o’ll give it a try.
Sorry to see you’re getting exposed to some fanboy-ism. I do like utorrent, but I don’t like it’s not open source. I’ll give deluge a look. Thanks!
this is very bad program. only support language : kurdi and english.
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uTorrent used to be great. Then it started crashing with version 1.7.? With 1.7.7 they fixed that they said. Well, not really.
So, does anybody have crash reports on Deluge? or does anybody know/have old uTorrent version before it became a crashy program?
Thanks
@fretus, methinks a crashing uTorrent client is a problem on your system only. It doesn’t crash on any of my systems, actual WinXP or VM WinXP with Ubuntu.
If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. In your case, something is broken but it’s probably not uTorrent. Try removing it and cleaning the registry and user configurations in Documents and Settings.
Deluge .5.9.0 is ready! Maybe this is more stable! Great .torrent client though
for someone like me in Malaysia that have their torrent activity throttled by our monopoly ISP, deluge is the only client that capable of beating
I installed it. Maybe a great torrent program, but I found the GUI unappealing. Looks like the typical old timed Linux based GTK ported applications to Windows.
The Gimp is also ported from a GTK based GUI to Windows, however, it looks much better now (very close to the native UI of Windows). So does Pidgin, the open source multi-platform chat client, which again uses GTK. I hope the Deluge developers take notice of how other GTK based programs are looking fine on Windows. Until they do something, I’m sticking to uTorrent.