qBittorrent is a

cross-platform Within computing, cross-platform software (also called multi-platform software, platform-agnostic software, or platform-independent software) is computer software that is designed to work in several Computing platform, computing platforms. Some ...

free and open-source Free and open-source software (FOSS) is software available under a Software license, license that grants users the right to use, modify, and distribute the software modified or not to everyone free of charge. FOSS is an inclusive umbrella term ...

BitTorrent client The following is a general comparison of Glossary of BitTorrent terms#Client, BitTorrent clients, which are computer programs designed for peer-to-peer file sharing using the BitTorrent, BitTorrent protocol. The BitTorrent protocol coordinates se ...

written in

native Native may refer to: People * '' Jus sanguinis'', nationality by blood * '' Jus soli'', nationality by location of birth * Indigenous peoples, peoples with a set of specific rights based on their historical ties to a particular territory ** Nat ...

C++. It relies on Boost,

OpenSSL OpenSSL is a software library for applications that provide secure communications over computer networks against eavesdropping, and identify the party at the other end. It is widely used by Internet servers, including the majority of HTTPS web ...

zlib zlib ( or "zeta-lib", ) is a software library used for data compression as well as a data format. zlib was written by Jean-loup Gailly and Mark Adler and is an abstraction of the DEFLATE compression algorithm used in their gzip file compre ...

, Qt 6 toolkit and the

libtorrent libtorrent is an open-source implementation of the BitTorrent protocol. It is written in and has its main library interface in C++. Its most notable features are support for Mainline DHT, IPv6, HTTP seeds and μTorrent's peer exchange. libtor ...

-rasterbar library (for the torrent back-end), with an optional search engine written in Python.

History

qBittorrent was originally developed in March 2006 by Christophe Dumez from the University of Technology of Belfort-Montbéliard (UTBM). It is currently developed by contributors worldwide and is funded through donations, led by Sledgehammer999 from

Greece Greece, officially the Hellenic Republic, is a country in Southeast Europe. Located on the southern tip of the Balkan peninsula, it shares land borders with Albania to the northwest, North Macedonia and Bulgaria to the north, and Turkey to th ...

, who became project maintainer in June 2013. Along with the 4.0.0 release a new logo for the project was unveiled. In February 2023, a security vulnerability affecting versions 4.5.0 and 4.5.1 was discovered in the Web UI running on Windows systems. This vulnerability enabled unauthenticated access to all files on the host computer via a path traversal bug. This issue has been patched in version 4.5.2, which was released to the public on February 23, 2023. qBittorrent contained a remote code execution exploit caused by a failure to validate any

TLS certificate In cryptography, a public key certificate, also known as a digital certificate or identity certificate, is an electronic document used to prove the validity of a Key authentication, public key. The certificate includes the public key and informati ...

s presented to the application when downloading content via HTTP. The flaw, which had been in the application since at least 2010, was eventually fixed in version 5.0.1, on October 28, 2024, more than 14 years later. It is not believed the flaw affected downloads using the BitTorrent protocol, however the application uses HTTP(s) to check for updates, download

RSS feeds RSS ( RDF Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication) is a web feed that allows users and applications to access updates to websites in a standardized, computer-readable format. Subscribing to RSS feeds can allow a user to keep track of many ...

and manage its

Internet geolocation In computing, Internet geolocation is software capable of deducing the geographic position of a device connected to the Internet. For example, the device's IP address can be used to determine the country, city, or ZIP code, determining its geograph ...

database.

Features

Some of the features present in qBittorrent include: *

Bandwidth Bandwidth commonly refers to: * Bandwidth (signal processing) or ''analog bandwidth'', ''frequency bandwidth'', or ''radio bandwidth'', a measure of the width of a frequency range * Bandwidth (computing), the rate of data transfer, bit rate or thr ...

scheduler * Bind all traffic to a specific interface * Control over torrents, trackers and peers (torrents queueing and prioritizing and torrent content selection and prioritizing) * DHT, PEX, encrypted connections, LPD,

UPnP Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) is a set of networking protocols on the Internet Protocol (IP) that permits networked devices, such as personal computers, printers, Gateway (telecommunications), Internet gateways, Wi-Fi access points and mobile de ...

, NAT-PMP port forwarding support, μTP, magnet links, private torrents, v4.6.0 added (experimental) I2P support * IP filtering: file types ''

eMule eMule is a Free software, free peer-to-peer file sharing application for Microsoft Windows. Started in May 2002 as an alternative to eDonkey2000, eMule connects to both the eDonkey network and the Kad network. The distinguishing features of eM ...

dat'' or '' PeerGuardian'' *

IPv6 Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) is the most recent version of the Internet Protocol (IP), the communication protocol, communications protocol that provides an identification and location system for computers on networks and routes traffic ...

support * Integrated

RSS RSS ( RDF Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication) is a web feed that allows users and applications to access updates to websites in a standardized, computer-readable format. Subscribing to RSS feeds can allow a user to keep track of many ...

feed reader (with advanced download filters) and downloader * Integrated torrent

search engine A search engine is a software system that provides hyperlinks to web pages, and other relevant information on World Wide Web, the Web in response to a user's web query, query. The user enters a query in a web browser or a mobile app, and the sea ...

(simultaneous search in many torrent search sites and category-specific search requests, such as books, music and software) * Remote control through a secure web user interface * Sequential downloading (download in order). Enables "streaming" media files * Super-seeding option * Torrent creation tool * Torrent queuing, filtering and prioritizing *

Unicode Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...

support, available in ≈70 languages

Versions

qBittorrent is

, available on many

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ...

s, including:

FreeBSD FreeBSD is a free-software Unix-like operating system descended from the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). The first version was released in 1993 developed from 386BSD, one of the first fully functional and free Unix clones on affordable ...

Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

macOS macOS, previously OS X and originally Mac OS X, is a Unix, Unix-based operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple since 2001. It is the current operating system for Apple's Mac (computer), Mac computers. With ...

OS/2 OS/2 is a Proprietary software, proprietary computer operating system for x86 and PowerPC based personal computers. It was created and initially developed jointly by IBM and Microsoft, under the leadership of IBM software designer Ed Iacobucci, ...

(including

ArcaOS ArcaOS is a Proprietary software, proprietary operating system based on OS/2, developed and marketed by Arca Noae, LLC under license from IBM. It was first released in 2017 and builds on OS/2 Warp 4.52 by adding support for new hardware, fixing ...

and

eComStation eComStation or eCS is an operating system based on OS/2 Warp for the 32-bit x86 architecture. It was originally developed by Serenity Systems and Mensys BV under license from IBM. It includes additional applications, and support for new hardwa ...

), and

Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

. ,

SourceForge SourceForge is a web service founded by Geoffrey B. Jeffery, Tim Perdue, and Drew Streib in November 1999. SourceForge provides a centralized software discovery platform, including an online platform for managing and hosting open-source soft ...

statistics indicate that the most popular qBittorrent version of all supported platforms, 81% of downloads were for Windows computers. , FossHub statistics indicate qBittorrent as the second most downloaded software with over 75 million downloads. Packages for different

Linux distribution A Linux distribution, often abbreviated as distro, is an operating system that includes the Linux kernel for its kernel functionality. Although the name does not imply product distribution per se, a distro—if distributed on its own—is oft ...

s are available, though most are provided through official channels via various distributions. qBittorrent Enhanced is a fork of qBittorrent intended for blocking leeching clients such as

Xunlei Xunlei Limited () is a Chinese multinational technology company and an online service provider founded in 2003. The subsidiary of Xunlei Limited, Shenzhen Xunlei Networking Technologies, Co., Ltd. () was formerly known as Sandai Technologies (Sh ...

. It is hosted on

GitHub GitHub () is a Proprietary software, proprietary developer platform that allows developers to create, store, manage, and share their code. It uses Git to provide distributed version control and GitHub itself provides access control, bug trackin ...

Reception

In 2012,'' Ghacks'' suggested qBittorrent as a great alternative to

μTorrent μTorrent, or uTorrent (see pronunciation), is a proprietary adware BitTorrent client owned and developed by Rainberry, Inc. The " μ" (Greek letter " mu") in its name comes from the SI prefix "micro-", referring to the program's small memo ...

, for those put off by its controversial

adware Adware, often called advertising-supported software by its developers, is software that generates revenue by automatically displaying Online advertising, online advertisements in the user interface or on a screen presented during the installatio ...

and bundleware changes.

TechRadar ''TechRadar'' is an online technology publication owned by Future plc. It has editorial teams in the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia that provide news and reviews of tech products and gadgets. It was launched in 2008 and expanded t ...

reviewed the application in 2020, praising it for its ease of use and key features. It also pointed to its clean, ad-free interface and extensibility through plugins as features that make the software more "robust and powerful."

References

External links