It’s hard to find top torrent sites that work. Regular people struggle to keep up with which one is working and which one isn’t. That’s why we put together this article, to help you find the top torrent sites that are working as of Jun 2019.
While torrenting itself isn’t illegal, the most common torrent traffic is downloading copyrighted content. You can find just about anything, games, music, movies, and apps, on the many torrent services.
Copyright holders and governments don’t want you to be able to download this material, so many of the most popular sites get shut down as fast as they can go up. It’s a constant race to see who is in the lead: government or the top torrent sites.
Introduction To Torrent Sites
Before we get into that, let’s talk about what a torrent site is. Torrenting is a way to transfer large files across peer-to-peer networks. A torrent breaks up a large file into much smaller packets that a user downloads independently of the others. In other words, you download a file like picking up puzzle pieces.
Once all the pieces are on your computer, the torrent client pieces them together into a single file, which you can use.
Once you start downloading the torrent packets, you also become a server for others. They will want some of the packets that you have, so they’ll connect to your computer to download.
You should note that this has privacy implications. Anyone who connects to your computer will also know your IP address, and they can use that to find out much more about you. We recommend using a torrent site VPN to hide your IP address and keep your private information private.
Torrent Site Terminology
Just like anything on the internet, torrenting has its own set of jargon that insiders use to make talking about it faster. If you’re not immersed in it, the words can be confusing. Here’s a list of some of the most important terminology:
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- Availability: This is the number of full copies of a particular file for the torrenting server. Each full copy adds a “1” to the number while each partial copy adds the percentage of it.
- Choked: This is what happens when a host refuses to send packets to another, which can happen for many reasons.
- Client: A program that facilitates peer-to-peer sharing through the BitTorrent protocol
- Fake: A torrent that does not contain the advertised file, frequently a virus or malware.
- Leecher: This somewhat derogatory term refers to someone who downloads files but does not upload them.
- Grab: A file is grabbed when you’ve downloaded the metadata file.
- Torrent: Either the file to be downloaded or the metadata file that directs your client to the packets you need to download.
- Tracker: A server that keeps track of the location of all the packets for a particular file.
- Seeder: A seeder is a client that hosts a file and allows other peers to download it from that client.
- Snatch: when all of a file’s packets have been downloaded.
Choosing a Top Torrent Site
When you’re evaluating which of the top torrent sites to use, you need to look at a few things. First, how long has the tracker existed. New torrent trackers pop up all the time, and many of them aren’t reliable. A tracker with a long history is usually more reliable than one that’s new.
Second, you need to know how many seeds there are for the particular file you want. The fewer the seeds, the less availability for a particular file, and the more trouble you’ll have getting the full file.
Third, you should know the seeder to leecher ratio, that is, how many computers have the files vs how many people are downloading them. The more seeders to leechers, the faster you can snatch a file.
Note About Copyrighted Files
Before we recommend the top torrent sites as ofJun 2023, we should mention this: It’s illegal to download copyrighted material from the internet. When you download movies, music, games, etc you are taking a file without paying the people who created it.
You also run the risk of government action. If you download copyrighted material illegally, do so at your own risk.
1. The Pirate Bay
The Pirate Bay is one of the oldest and most popular trackers in the world. It’s been around since 2003, which means it’s survived for years of government crackdowns on the top torrent sites.
The site was started by a Swedish anti-copyright group, Piratbyrån, in late 2003. By 2004, it was it’s own, independent entity. It is currently run as a nonprofit and is free to use for most people.
User reviews of this torrent site are very positive. They report great reliability, fast download speeds, and a huge library of files. Basically, you can get just about anything popular here.
When you browse through the most popular files, you’ll see that the site tends to have a high ratio of seeders to leechers, which means download speeds will be high. User reviews confirm this.
The Pirate Bay also rates seeders to show which seeders have proven to be trustworthy in the past. They give two rankings, trusted and VIP, with VIP being the highest. This ranking system can help you find what you want and stay away from viruses and malware.
There is a downside, though. The Pirate Bay is ad-supported, which means you will get a ton of ads. User reviews suggest that many of these ads are also “adult.” So, if you don’t want porn ads to show up while you’re downloading, you should use an ad blocker.
29 countries block The Pirate Bay. If you’re in one of them, you’ll need to use a VPN to access it.
2. Torrentz2
Torrentz2 is the successor of the now defunct Torrentz. It does not claim to be a tracker site. Rather, Torrentz2 is a search engine of other tracker sites.
We think they repeat this throughout the site to the world know that they do not actually host any copyrighted material, not even the metadata. Instead, they are like a search engine that catalogues torrent site trackers all over the internet.
Because of that, they have a vast library of torrents, with over 224 million pages. They index sites that have as few as 20 torrents and as many as 17 million.
Torrentz2 is ad supported, so you should be careful. Many torrent sites use ads that have adult content, so you may want to use an ad blocker. User reviews haven’t complained about that, however, so it is probably a safer ad experience than The Pirate Bay.
3. Torrent Downloads
Torrent downloads is one of the top torrent sites in the world. In the Torrentz2 listing immediately above this, we noted that Torrentz2 indexes a site with more than 17 million torrents. That sight is Torrent Downloads.
So, you know it has a vast library of torrents for you. It’s so vast that there’s no way you could make it through it all.
The site is not complicated at all. You enter a search term, and you can find a torrent that matches. It’s simple and straightforward.
That’s also a problem, however. The site doesn’t explain how it works and what systems it uses to verify files. On the listing, there’s a green check box next to some files, but Torrent Downloads doesn’t tell us what the checkbox means. We assume that means it’s verified, but assumptions aren’t a great idea on the internet.
4. Limetorrents
Limetorrents stands out for several reasons. First, it’s really easy to use. While some of the top torrent sites look like they were designed in the 1990’s (and have the same user experience), Limetorrents looks nice and is easy to use.
It displays information about the torrent well, too. The site displays the number of seeders and leechers, the date the file was added, and the health bar. Limetorrents also places a green star next to files that have been verified.
Another bonus: We didn’t see any ads on Limetorrents’ website. That means you won’t have to worry about using an ad blocker or seeing something NSFW. If you have kids in the house, this will set your mind at ease.
5. RARBG
RARBG is a top torrent site that focuses on movies and TV. Of course, you can find video games, apps, and music, too. But, when you look at their recommended torrents, they’re all movies.
ONe of RARBG’s best features is the ability to sort their listings. You can sort by the number of seeders to get the fastest download speeds, by size of file, by date, and others.
This feature is great for people who are browsing through RARBG’s catalogue. If you know what you’re looking for, you can search for it and find the best download.
When you browse, however, you’ll see a lot of files that have no seeders. If you try to grab that file, you won’t get to download it at all. Once you sort by seeders, you get files that have people online from which to download.
We caution using this site, though. When we clicked on the menu’s at the top of the page, like “Box Office,” “Catalog,” and others, they sent us to advertisements instead. Any page that will hide an ad behind a link is one with which you should take caution.
6. TorLock
TorLock calls itself “The No Fakes Torrent Site.” They focus on verified torrents to keep you from downloading viruses or malware. To do this, they pay people for spotting and reporting fake torrents.
When you look at TorLock’s site, you’ll quickly see that most of the torrents are verified. It’s a nice feeling seeing more verified ones than not.
Torlock seems to have a problem with the seeders to leechers ratio, however. On their main page, you can see a number of torrents with nearly equal numbers of seeders to leechers. It might not be a big deal, but that can slow your download speeds.
Like many other torrent sites, we were immediately assaulted with porn ads as soon as we clicked past the home page. We were so surprised at how in-your-face it was that we physically cringed before heading back to the main page.
If you don’t want adult content in your face every time you use the site, enable an ad blocker. Once we enabled ours, it was a much more pleasant experiene.
7. Zooqle
Zooqle says that it specializes in “verified torrents.” The most distinguishing feature is how great its interface is, especially for movies and TV.
Unlike many of its competitors, Zooqle looks like it was designed in the 21st century. Movie and TV listings include cover images so you can see what you’re about to download. It’s especially helpful for people who just want to browse the catalog.
Their advanced search feature also sets it above the rest. Most “advanced” searches aren’t really that advanced. This one allows you to narrow results by excluding terms, limiting file size, language, and genre.
8. 1337x
1337x is one of the best looking torrent site of the bunch along with Limetorrent and Zooqle. With nice graphics and a simple interface, it’s a great site for beginners.
This is definitely among the top torrent sites for movies. Right on the front page, 1137x has a rotating carousel of popular movies. You don’t have to know much about the site or the software to browse their collection. Just go to the home page and click on a movie image you like.
We loved that there weren’t a ton of ads on every page. In fact, we only found a few. Most pages were ad-free. If you don’t want to worry about porn flashing up on your screen this one is the way to go.
9. iDope
iDope looks and feels a lot like Google. While most of the top torrent sites have busy backgrounds and poor design, this one feels good. The white background makes it easy to read and easy to use.
The search feature gives you some advanced search categories right away. You can quickly arrange your search results by number of seeds, size of files, and age of the torrent. It’s much easier to order your results than other torrent sites.
While iDope is ad supported, the only ad we saw was for VPN services to hide your IP address from snoopers (how helpful!). All the ads were small and didn’t get in the way of the user experience.
10. YourBittorrent
YourBittorrent is on a lot of people’s lists of top torrent sites, but it barely made ours. There’s a reason we put it at the bottom.
While it works well as a torrent site, and you can access files like any other, it looks and feels unfinished. The site uses symbols without explaining them, which is confusing.
The oddest feature is how they display the health of a torrent. They have a category for “health” in the search results, but they are all the same. There’s no health bar. Instead, it just reads “health.”
We didn’t see any ads, however, which makes this much more pleasant to use than some of the other sites above.
Conclusion
That’s it for our review of the top ten best torrent sites for Jun 2023. Hopefully, by the time you read this, they’ll still be up and unblocked in your country. They’re a great way to transfer files over long distances.
Remember to use a VPN when you download a torrent from these sites. Not only will it keep your info safe, it will also protect you from government snooping. Then you’ll be able to download whatever you with peace of mind.
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