The 10 most popular torrent sites in 2024
In this modern age, torrenting is something that many people find convenient and fun, provided you’re able to find the right place to download from. That’s not always so easy, though, considering the fact that torrent sites pop in and out like bubbles, existing one moment, and disappearing next, vanishing into thin air.
Even some of the most popular torrent sites don’t last forever.
By the way, always use a VPN. Here’s the list of the 5 best VPN providers to access the most popular torrent sites:
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The best VPN for torrenting overall
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P2P-sharing torrent VPN with infinite connections
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Affordable VPN for torrenting with extra security tools
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Torrent VPN with great P2P features
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Private & secure P2P VPN for torrenting
This list is here to remove that annoyance for you, though, and solve that problem right away. You should be able to scroll down this list and review any item and decide if it’s worth it or not for you to check it out. We’ve gone through each item and checked it thoroughly to be sure that it checks the right boxes, for what we’re looking for—the most popular torrent sites.
What is that, exactly?
When it comes to popular torrent sites, we’re going to be looking at whether each site:
- is active in 2020
- has a good UI and is easy-to-navigate
- has a safe website (no malware, spammy redirects, etc.)
- provides wide torrent libraries/large number of users
- has up-to-date torrents of recent releases
To look at these categories, we’re going to review number of users on each site, as well as check on just how many torrents are available on these sites. We’ll also look at the most recent releases in media like movies or games, and see which sites have the most up-to-date high quality torrents.
Without further ado, let’s take a look at the 10 most popular torrent sites in 2020.
Sky Torrents
The first item on our list, Sky Torrents is a rather large and well-known torrent database that houses over 18 million torrents in their index. It’s one of the most popular torrent sites.
This is already impressive enough, but their UI is very much enjoyable too. I would call it ‘minimal,’ if anything, but the good thing about it is that it serves its purpose and doesn’t need to do anything other than what it does.
You’ll also note that in the screenshot, there is a warning. This is because we are not using a VPN in this screenshot. If that seems discomforting to you, read on further down below to discover more about why VPNs are absolutely necessary for torrenting.
When you search for a torrent, it displays many different versions of the torrent, most with large numbers of uses, with very excellent seeder-to-leecher ratios on nearly all of them.
Not only that, but the file sizes are kept small and aren’t bloated, which ensures you get the content you want as fast as possible, with a level of quality to it.
The site does have some ads, but we believe that overall it’s a fairly quality experience, and one of the bigger torrent sites to use in 2020. Large libraries of newer releases, large torrent index, decent-enough UI, and releases from popular uploaders.
TorrentGalaxy
Torrent Galaxy features a little more of a starker first glance than some may find comfortable, but there are a few things to like about this site.
The first thing I noticed is that the site has inbuilt community features, such as a forum and a lobby chat.
It has a list displaying some of the most recent uploads of varying levels of quality, such as cam rips, web/HD rips, and then further on down, full Bluray/DVD quality uploads.
The number of different kinds of searches you can use is also very utilitarian, featuring different kinds of searches as well as levels of quality, genres, etc. The site offers films, music, television, comics, ebooks, documentaries, magazines, games, and more. It also has several filters, including a porn filter, to exclude content that you do not want to see.
The site features recent uploads, varying levels of quality, decent seeder-to-leecher ratios in general, as well as what seems like a large content pool of torrents to choose from.
Kickass Torrents (katcr.co)
This is a more oldschool website on our list in the third place.
Many of you reading will have probably heard of this place before, sometime in the past, depending on your experience with torrenting, of course, considering it’s one of the most popular torrent sites.
The front page is very simple, but has an almost calming look to it, if not all of the glaring white in the background. There’s several different tabs at the bottom for movies, televison series, games, music, and more.
When searching, you see everything relevant to the term that you searched. It has things laid in a pretty normal way: name, then the size of the file, how old the torrent is, as well as seeders and leechers, what have you.
There are pages and pages of the stuff, depending on what you search. You can find most current releases on here.
Note: KickAssTorrents, while a good pick for general torrenting activity, is currently experiencing a temporary downtime as they maintenance their servers and migrate their traffic. It may take some time for the site to come back up to 100% reliability.
Overall, though, KickAssTorrents is still one of the best torrenting websites on the internet, and also one of the most popular, with large selections of media to choose from.
iDope
iDope is a self-proclaimed ‘tribute to Kickass Torrents’.
It is a torrent search engine that can be used to locate all kinds of different torrents across several different kinds of media, such as anime, movies, TV, games, music, software, and more. The first thing you’ll notice when you come onto the page is the simple display of the search bar and nothing else, despite their message on the bottom side of the screen.
iDope boasts of a large number of indexed torrents, over twelve million. It supports a large number of different trackers, users magnet links, and has an almost Google-like UI to it when searcing for torrents, as seen in the second screenshot below.
There are constant uploads, with information plainly displayed, such as seeder-to-leecher ratios, file size, age of the torrent, number of files, and torrent size.
iDope is a decent torrent engine that might hold a few gems for you that you have trouble finding elsewhere, so it’s worth investigating if you’re curious.
Torrents.me
Torrents.me is an interesting one, as it’s almost like an index of a bunch of the most popular torrent sites that you can use and find your files on, rather than a completely normal torrenting site.
The UI is actually quite pleasant to look at, featuring what appears to be some kind of cute anteater at the top as the site’s mascot.
The site does allow you to search for torrents by linking you to other websites from it. It features connections to many different sites, some more popular ones, including a few that will be later mentioned in this post, like Zooqle.
When searching, you’re brought up to several different sites, depending on what it is that you searched. In this screenshot here (as we have in the other screenshots) we searched for Deadpool 2, and it directs us to several different links, most of them from Demonoid.
There’s also a Pirate Bay link further on down. Not all of these links work, unfortunately, but some of them do, and you can change the engines you’re using to filter through links to hopefully find what you’re looking for.
Torrents.me is a decent site to connect yourself to other, different torrent sites. Its search engine feature itself leaves a bit to be desired, to say the least, but the site has other uses for those who torrent, so it remains relevant.
Seedpeer
Seedpeer is a pretty normal looking torrent site from first glance.
It features many different categories that other sites do, and a search bar in the middle. The filters are appreciated, especially as there’s one to filter out porn if you’re not interested in that sort of thing.
Searching for a fairly popular movie, like Deadpool 2, leads to a wide variety of results, with wildly varying sizes, seeders, leechers, torrent ages, and uploaders. It’s hard to check for quality control with something like this, though a few of these are decent uploads with good ratios.
One other interesting feature about Seedpeer is that it has a verified torrents section, where verified torrents that are safe to download are kept. The only thing about these torrents is a lot of them have low seeder-to-leecher ratios, and they’re spaced pretty far apart in terms of upload date.
Final verdict: Seedpeer could be useful for casual torrenting, and it definitely has a place on this list, but there might be better for your needs, depending on what you’re looking for.
The Pirate Bay
Ah, the Pirate Bay, one of the most popular torrent sites in the book.
It’s been taken down a hundred times and brought back up a hundred and one. This is probably the most well-known torrenting site there is, to the general public, and also one of the most notorious.
That logo alone on the front page, seen above, is very memorable and almost nostalgia-provoking for some. It’s certainly still one of the most popular sites. It features a simple search bar that gets the job done.
The Pirate Bay features all kinds of different torrents from different kinds of media. It’d take forever to list them all.
When searcing for a torrent, it lists the type, the name, the size, the seeders and leeders, and who uploaded it. This is probably one of the best UI designs for a torrent site, and you can see it reflected in later, newer imitators of the website who wanted to follow in The Pirate Bay’s footsteps.
In addition, the site features VIP and Trusted members, which can help a lot in verifying what users it’s safe to download torrents form.
The Pirate Bay is still alive, as good as ever, and is hard to say anything bad about. It’s what most torrenting websites wish they could be, and that’s a good thing.
Zooqle
Zooqle is a torrenting website that’s mostly fixated on TV shows and movies, with large amounts of torrents being available for single titles. For those specific categories, it’s one of the most popular torrent sites.
They have many different torrents to choose from, although not all of them are higher quality. One noticeable facet of the interface is how dense and tightly packed it is.
It’s a bit obnoxious at times, but not totally unbearable, although it could be better.
One of Zooqle’s key strong points is the fact that it boasts of over three million indexed torrents! As with other sites on this list, it’s quite a large number to accept and sift through. The website also lists other interesting information: number of trackers, number of TV shows and movies, and the most seeded files on the website.
It has files and torrents from recent releases, too, and features very recent releases from TV shows and movies. It has a large selection and constant updates.
Zooqle is a decent choice.
LimeTorrents
LimeTorrents is a torrent search engine and directory that has almost ten million torrents rerouted through it or connected to it in some way.
This is a big, impressive number, and it’s not something to sneeze at, because it means that a powerful, diverse selection of content is available for you to choose from. The site has a pretty UI running through it, with some nice art and a green theme throughout.
It features content from all different kinds of media, and has an easy-to-grasp download page, for the most part.
The seeder-to-leecher ratio on some of the torrents might be bad, but with so many on a site like this, it’s very likely you can just look down the list for a movie, game, or TV show, and there will be a good torrent of whatever it is you’re looking for.
Reliability, diversity, and ease-of-access are the name of game, and Lime Torrents nails it here. It’s one of the most popular torrent sites around.
Nyaa.si
Nyaa is a bit of a different beast in this article, because it’s a very specialized torrenting site, one focused solely on anime. We’re reporting on the most popular torrent sites, though, and Nyaa is well-known in circles as being one of the most popular if not the top anime torrenting website on the internet.
It has a very dense wall of torrents, but it maximizes the use of the screen space pretty well. It offers both translated anime as well as raw anime, without subtitles. Overall, the site also boasts an excellent seeder-to-leecher ratio, which is rare in torrenting sites in general.
It also lets you download directly from the list of torrents, rather than having to click on each individual link, which is pretty convenient. When you click a show episode or movie, it offers a whole host of information about the show and gives it to you in an organized fashion.
Note: the site also offers adult content, but it can be avoided if undesired.
Overall, it’s a very useful, easy-to-understand site that performs as needed and has no extra caveats or unnecessary features. Nyaa brings what it claims—nothing more, nothing less.
Stay safe while using the most popular torrent sites
If you noticed, in multiple screenshots throughout this article, we showed torrent sites while not using a VPN, and we brought it up in the text. This section is going to be used to explain why that’s a bad idea, and you shouldn’t follow it, with information about VPN’s to explain the point.
Torrenting, while convenient, is not entirely safe.
This post told you some of the most popular torrent sites on the internet, with the intention of you going to browse and peruse as you liked—but stop, let’s wait a minute here and think before proceeding.
Your ISP and your government can track your network traffic and see where you’ve been going and what you’ve been doing. It’s kind of like leaving chocolate smears all over the walls after your hands have been in the cookie jar.
This can land you in big trouble: legal claims, fines, and even things as harsh as long prison sentences technically aren’t impossible. Because of this, it’s obviously important to stay safe.
That’s where VPNs come in. A VPN is a virtual private network that allows you to hide your online activity. More specifically, a VPN hides your true IP address, concealing your location and mirroring it in another city, country, etc.
VPN’s are safe, reliable, easy to understand and use, and have little to no effect on the sites you can browse, the torrents you can download, and the clients you can use. They’re just a very, very convenient tool to keep yourself clean while you torrent.
VPN’s also have little to no effect on download speed. This can be seen in articles like this one, covering speeds in a great breakdown with some good detail.
So, if you want safety with good speeds, a VPN is the way to go.
If you’re curious about which to use, we’ve already done that, and looked over the best VPNs for torrenting, so you know you’re getting the best there is.
So, which of the most popular torrent sites listed here today are you using in 2020? Are there any major ones that we’ve missed?
Any ones that we’ve listed that are having problems? Let us know in the comments below!
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