BitComet

Official Site
Popularity Rating: 34

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Most the clients including the official client and BitTornado are written in python. Azureus is Java based. This one is taking a different approach, and is written in C++. There are several unique things about BitComet, some I like, and others I don't overly care for.

It is written in C++, which overall seems to be a good thing. It uses very little CPU, and is very quick in most of what it does. However, it does tend to eat ram, but somehow it seems almost every client does this. One thing I don't overly like is that BitComet is not open source like most the rest of the BitTorrent clients. "Seriously speaking, BitComet is totally an independent work, no relation with other bittorrent client except the protocal" according to their FAQ.

Although I would likely not use it much, it does have a bookmarks/favorates list. Some of the sites in the list are dead, but if you want you can edit this list yourself. Go to the fav directory in the Bit Comet folder. Find the .xml file for your language/region and edit it to your liking. Delete dead links, add your own, whatever.

Another interesting feature is one I have seen on other p2p networks, but have never really used much. Its a chat option, so you can talk to peers on a torrent who are also using BitComet with this option enabled. Could be useful for those questions about quality or other things you may want to know before downloading a full file.

I should add that many versions of BitComet don't support the 'private' flag. Some groups of BitTorrent users have decided to form 'private' groups. Some of them you simply must register on a website, others are closed to new registrations. Its not so much that these people don't like to share with others, actually its the other way around. Private trackers typically are centered around particular types of torrent files, and will ban users who don't strive to upload as much (or more) than they download. Many times this makes files much faster than on public trackers where some users will run off as soon as the download completes. Torrent files used on these sites are tagged as private so they won't be shared on DHT supporting clients. Some versions of BitComet ignore this flag and try to share these private files anyway, so many sites have banned some or all versions of this client.

It does have some differences as mentioned, but it also is the same in many ways. Single window GUI, global and individual upload limits. Most of the data about peers, download progress, transfer speeds, eta, and that type of thing are available. This client also can select specific files from a multifile torrent to download.

It also includes things like intelligent rate control, disk cache, disk allocating and hash scan. The disk cache and allocation can help keep your hard drive less fragmented and working better. The intelligent hash scan can scan large files faster than other clients.

But the intelligent rate control is a questionable feature in my opinion. This optimizes the upload distribution in order to get the max download rate. Sounds good for downloading right? I believe this is the same feature that does things like disconnect from a client after receiving a piece, and then reconnect to it later. This keeps other clients from knowing how much that user is sharing, which can screw up people trying to use superseeding to start a torrent. So basically it might help you download slightly faster at times, but overall it could hurt the overall health or speed of the torrent.