Best Mac Torrent Search Websites and Clients

avatar
Written by
Updated on: June 14, 2023
Time to read: 11 minutes
thumbnail

If you’re looking for a certain download, you may end up visiting multiple Mac torrent sites. They have different rules and host different content. Wouldn’t it be useful to search all these websites at the same time?

Torrent search engines do exactly that. All it takes is one query, and you’ll have results from across the web, without needing to go to the sites individually. Save some time, and try a search engine.

Table of Contents

Best Torrent Client - macOS Apps

Torrenting is a popular activity, so the software’s been getting better by the year. At the moment, most torrent clients offer the standard set of features, including bandwidth control, priorities, and partial downloads. Rarely, a company goes out of its way to try something original. We’ll showcase both mundane and unusual clients, but you can be sure that all presented apps are good.

Folx

Do you want to solve two problems at once? Folx is a torrent downloader that can act as a tracker website, since it has a convenient built-in search bar. Using it, you can locate torrents and immediately add them to the download list.

Folx as a torrent search engine for Mac

Folx saves you time and effort – it’s an excellent magnet link Mac application. It can handle .torrent files, and direct downloads, too. With the PRO version, Folx provides unprecedented control – you can choose to split downloads into up to 20 threads, schedule them for later, start them directly from the browser, control their speed and connect to iTunes. There’s a helpful tagging system, too, that will help you sort your queue.

With its built-in torrent search engine, refined interface, and advanced features, Folx is the best torrent client Mac has to offer. It can find, start, and manage torrent downloads quickly and conveniently.

uTorrent

µTorrent is a well-known torrent manager that has garnered a lot of fame for being lightweight, feature-rich, and totally free. Things have changed, however. Starting with macOS Catalina, Mac users can only access the limited browser version. Which is why many users are looking for a uTorrent alternative for Mac. The desktop application is known for many convenient features, including sorting, bandwidth adjustment, torrent health info, partial downloads, and many others.

uTorrent is a lightweight and free torrent client for Mac.

qBittorrent

qBitTorrent, the open-source alternative to µTorrent, has managed to catch up to macOS updates. Torrents can be added via magnet links or files, you can view their available fragments and seeders, set allowed bandwidth and priority, and select files for partial download. Your own torrents can be created and seeded as well.

Best torrent client for Mac with built-in torrent search.

What is a Torrent Search Engine?

A standard tracker website keeps a list of torrents, their files, and additional data like descriptions and comments. No two trackers are the same, some have downloads available that others don’t. Torrent search engines exist to make searching all these sites easier.

A search engine collects data from all possible sources, and when you make a file search request, it tells you which websites may have the torrent you need. However, once a location is found, you may need to actually interact with the tracker to get more info or start the download.

Solution intro/disclaimer:

Even the best torrent search engines come and go, and it’s important to know about alternatives in case your favorite one goes down. We’d like to note that we don’t endorse copyright infringement, or any other improper use of the following resources. We’re not responsible for any misuse of this information.

Pirate Bay

Almost unmoderated, this resource is notorious for constant takedowns and legal attacks. And yet, it lives on as the unofficial icon of internet piracy. It’s even found on Google’s front page. While TPB is not the darkest place on the Web, its users are not safe from malware. Copyright is not enforced on The Pirate Bay.

Content is structured into 6 broad categories, such as Audio and Video, with each having up to 10 sub-categories, mostly for formats and genres. It’s not the most refined tagging method, and there are no custom tags, leaving it up to the users to make a precise search. A login is not required to use TPB. Currently, it does not allow comments, which used to be important for some torrents, as a warning or a potential solution.

Pirate Bay torrent engine

LimeTorrents

LimeTorrents is a simplistic torrent search engine with only 7 categories of content and very few sub-categories. The interface is good for assessing if the torrent is dead, since it clearly displays current seeders, leechers, and torrent health – a characteristic that indicates how many parts of the torrent are actually available.

Instead of storing .torrent files directly, LimeTorrents hosts links to other resources. The selection is “mostly verified”, but there’s no real proof of this claim. An account is not required to download, but needed to post comments.

LimeTorrents search engine for Mac

RARBG

RARBG is a multi-purpose site, with sections for news and movie box office ratings. There’s a sparse selection of categories with no tags. The uploads are centered around newer mainstream movies, games, and music, without much niche content, such as old ROMs.

The tracker is semi-legitimate, since it accepts DMCA claims. This is another limiting factor for the platform – it doesn’t host any real blockbusters. Though, its smaller scale reduces the risk of malicious files. Users are not required to log in to download or even post comments.

RARBG torrent tracker that not required to log in to download or post comments.

1337x

1337x is a curated piracy website with strict uploading rules, including the requirement to seed for the first 24 hours and to label the files correctly. The platform allows copyrighted content and does not accept copyright claims, hence the need for numerous proxies. For this reason, the newest movies and games can be found there. Comments require registration, but downloading doesn’t. Torrents on 1337x can be sorted and selected by star ratings, languages, release dates, and a wide variety of genres.

1337x allows copyrighted content and does not accept copyright claims

TorrentSeeker

When the user searches for a well-designed Mac torrent search, TorrentSeeker immediately comes to mind. The home page is very simple and modern – the user only sees the logo and the search bar. Just make a request and get the result. It searches popular torrent sites like Pirate Bay, 1337x, LimeTorrents, YTS, EZTV, Torrent Downloads, Zooqle, small torrent sites like Torlock, etc.

Besides that this torrent search engine also includes niche websites. This allows you to get more relevant results. It’s a pity that search filters only include relevance and date of results, and since there are almost no ads, it’s no surprise that TorrentSeekers’ user interface is much better than its competitors.

Use Mac torrent search engine - TorrentSeeker

Torrends.to

Torrends is a website that features a large list of healthy trackers, 132 at the moment of writing, and integrates them all into a single search engine. Unlike TorrentSeeker, it can’t display results from multiple selected sites at once, but you can make a single query and quickly switch between the results from each chosen website individually. This utility is definitely useful in some cases, but it’s very specific, and normal search engines will be preferable to it most of the time.

Torrends.to is a mac torrent site with a large list of healthy trackers

TorrentHound

This established website provides many popular and useful downloads, but potential danger from law enforcement has caused it to disable public access to its torrent search tools. Now, users can only search TorrentHound with the use of the official client. There are lots of risks associated with third-party, closed-source apps, especially if they are free, so we would recommend only running them in a sandbox, or on a separate device altogether.

TorrentHound search engine

Comparison Table

Pirate Bay Middle of the road
LimeTorrents Better interface and search
RARBG Wide download variety
1337x Focused on popular media
TorrentSeeker Lets you get more precise results
Torrends.to Almost the same as searching manually
TorrentHounds Client-based

How To Download Torrent Files on Mac?

Once you try Folx, it’s hard to come back to alternative torrent clients. With its customizability and tagging tools, Folx will help you confidently navigate your download collection, no matter how large.

1. Press the blue “+” button.

2. Select the Torrent tab.

3. Use “…” to find and select your torrent file.

4. Tag the download and change other settings, if necessary.

5. Click “Download” next to the desired torrent.

6. Press “OK”.

How to Search Torrents on Mac:

Folx doesn’t just download – it’s a torrent search engine app as well. Want to find something? Follow these steps:

1. Download and launch Folx.

2. Make sure that it’s upgraded to PRO.

3. Use the drop-down menu at the top to select “Torrent Search”.

4. Enter the query into the text field.

5. Click “Download” next to the desired torrent.

6. Use the drop-down menu to switch to “All” and track the download progress.

Conclusion

With all these changing and disappearing websites, it’s better to stick to something that works – like Folx, which combines torrent downloading and searching in one app. But if you ever decide to use one of these resources, we hope that this list helped you find the best torrent search engine. 

Frequently Asked Questions

A torrent tracker is a server which helps to transfer files between peers using the BitTorrent protocol. First, a peer informs the tracker about its interest in a torrent. The tracker keeps record of the number of seeds, peers, etc. So it responds in its turn with a list of other peers available. Once you’ve downloaded a .torrent file from any Mac torrent tracker and added it into your torrent client, the latter will send requests to other peers to get portions of that file.

Trackers can be public, or open, and private ones, which require authorization.

It depends on the country and the nature of the content. In most cases, you can safely assume that torrenting copyrighted content is illegal. Make sure not to tell any cops. If you’re worrying about being caught, another thing to watch out for is IP trackers.

The general recommendation would be to seed until you reach at least the 1:1 ratio to give back what you have taken. The BitTorrent network uses a kind of fairness system. In fact, you don’t download from the Mac torrent server, but from other users, so we should seed to be fair with them.

Moreover, the users uploading more to other users are rewarded to a certain extent. The higher seeding ratio you have, the faster download speeds you’ll get. Private torrent trackers can even ban you from downloading if your upload ratio is insufficient. All in all, unwillingness to seed degrades the quality of torrenting. Nobody likes seeing unseeded torrents on the site or experiencing slow downloads.

Yes, to perform torrent search Mac users(not only) need to use VPN, as it helps them to hide their activity and keep their data anonymous from hackers, ISP and app developers, etc.

Every torrent site comes with a search engine, but when it comes to multi-site search, TorrentSeeker is pretty much the industry standard.