Clients
General Info
Updates are mostly complete for this section now. Always looking for your comments on clients, if you have a second tell everyone why you like/dislike a client or two.
Most the stuff is self-explanatory on here, except maybe the 'popularity rating'. Its simply a weighted ranking of how popular the clients are, according to a poll I ran. Azureus got the most, and gets a rating of 100. All other ratings are relative to the number of votes Azureus got. For example, if a client is half as popular in the poll its rating is 50.
Official (Mainline) Client
Release Date: February 2, 2006
Obviously this is the current version of the original client, still written in Python by Bram Cohen. In the beginning this was the only one, and it had very few options. That is partially why so many other clients sprung up, and why many users prefer other clients. But recently version 4 was released, and it is a big step forward from 3.x. The GUI has changed, now you can download multiple torrents in one window. Many other things were added which other clients have previously had, like upload limiting and all downloads using a single port.
The current beta is developing 
trackerless support. Azureus recently started this as well. I don't know if I really like the direction things are going with some of the recent clients, but I will withhold judgment until I have time to play with these the new versions more.
Bit Tornado
Release Dates: March 6, 2005; Oct. 28, 2005
Formerly referred to as Shad0w's experimental client, this client is also written in Python and based on the official clients 3.x line. Many users preferred this over the official version, since it looked and worked similar but had more options and information about the torrent. Superseeding, downloading specific files from a multi-file torrent, auto-resume (no long file checking), and upload limiting were a few of these extras. This is the last client not to have all downloads contained in a single window, however there is supposedly a GUI in the works.
µTorrent
Release Date: January 11, 2006
This is one of the newcomers to the field of clients. For a while I have been wondering why most clients need to be so big and suck up so much RAM, especially when it is left running for long periods of time. Then I found this µtorrent. It is very small, in fact version 1.1.4 is only 91 KB. There is no installer - its just an executable file, so you could stick it on a floppy or something and run it from anywhere. It uses a fraction of the RAM most others do - many times around 4MB. Version 1.1.4 seems to have available virtually all the info about torrents that any of the other clients do, and surprisingly many of the features as well - superseeding, file selection/priorities, bandwidth allocation, etc. Some users may thing this clients name would be pronounced u-torrent. Actually µ is the Greek letter pronounced 'mu', which is what today would be known as M instead of U.
Azureus
Release Date: February 10, 2006
This one is the most popular one out there. The reason is because there are so many options available. Virtually everything other clients have this one likely has. Health indicator lights, picking single files from multi-file torrents, an advanced queuing system for downloading and seeding, and many other things. And if you don't see the a feature in the client, there may be a plugin for it (for example RSS support). It is written in Java, so it works on multiple operating systems, but also uses plenty of ram.
Bit Comet
Release Date: February 14, 2006
Bit Comet is one of the more unique clients available, even though it looks similar to several others. It is written in C++, and is not open source (virtually all other clients are open source). This makes it use very few CPU cycles, and is does most things very quick. A couple things unique are a favorites bar with links to lots of different sites (some of which are dead now), as well as a chat option to talk with other Bit Comet users on a particular torrent. Most of the other options like speed limiting, lots of info on the download progress, etc. are comparable to other clients.
ABC (Yet Another Bittorrent Client)
Release Date: October 2, 2005
They just recently updated to version 3.0, and it runs Bit Tornado 0.3.10 (actually 0.3.12 now) underneath the GUI. The strengths of this one are similar to those for BitTornado (like super-seeding, single file selection from multi-file torrents, text colors like BitTornado's health indicator lights, etc.) But it also puts everything in a single window and adds some "global" options for upload speeds and such which BitTornado does not have yet. It also has a queuing system with priorities you can set.
Shareaza
Release Date: October 26, 2005
You may recognize this name as a traditional file sharing program capable of connecting to networks such as Gnutella2, Gnutella, and eDonkey networks. Now it works with BitTorrent too, and I believe its the only client that does this. Since this is a regular P2P file sharing program I think I should mention that you can not simply type in the latest files on BT in the search box and download like that. You still have to find the .torrent files on websites just like any other client. Shareaza just joined the open source community with version 2. There was nearly a year between version 2.1 and 2.2, and supposedly it has many improvements. I have not tried version 2.2 yet, so I can't really comment on any changes to the way Shareaza handles BitTorrent.
Burst!
Release Date: September 2, 2004
This one is fairly unique looking, but again many of the features are similar to other clients. It has the ability to create different transfer profiles, which contain upload speed limits and which core (official or BitTornado) to use. Could be interesting if you want one set of speeds when downloading several things, and another one when seeding or while you are not there or sleeping. It puts much of the transfer information (speeds, eta, peer info, etc) in a dos-style window.
eXeem
Release Date: August 5, 2005
Ever wish you could combine the speeds and new file availability of BT with the easy searching and GUI of programs like Kazaa or Napster? The people who brought you suprnova.org bring you this program that tries to do just that. I have a full page of my eXeem thoughts, but I also need to warn you if you don't feel like reading that page. eXeem does contain adware (in some builds it is/was cydoor), while virtually all other BT clients are adware/spyware free. It is also still in the beta stage, so it is more likely to have bugs and change drastically before 1.0 is released.
