qBittorrent is a cross-platform free and open-source BitTorrent client written in native C++. It relies on Boost, OpenSSL, zlib, Qt 6 toolkit and the libtorrent-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, 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.

Features

Some of the features present in qBittorrent include:

Versions

qBittorrent is cross-platform, available on many operating systems, including: FreeBSD, Linux, macOS, OS/2 (including ArcaOS and eComStation), Windows. , SourceForge 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 distributions 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. It is hosted on GitHub.

Reception

In 2012, Ghacks suggested qBittorrent as a great alternative to μTorrent, for those put off by its controversial adware and bundleware changes.