Motrix

The download-manager landscape is unusually bad: throttling, pop-ups, three extra programs after install, full speed behind a subscription. Motrix exists to give that slot a clean answer — mature aria2 underneath, an interface that leaves you alone on top, MIT-licensed, 52,466 stars.

Multi-connection downloading is what you notice in daily use. For ordinary HTTP links it opens several connections in parallel by default, which on many overseas mirrors is several times faster than a browser's built-in downloader. BitTorrent and magnet links work too, though it is no match for qBittorrent as a seeding client.

One problem must be stated: releases have stalled. The latest stable build is v1.8.19, published in May 2023 — over three years ago. The repository still sees occasional commits, but no new stable version has shipped.

What that means in practice: it still works fine as a downloader, since the aria2 core and the protocols have not meaningfully changed. But you should not expect newly discovered issues to be fixed, or new features to arrive. If you want something that installs and immediately replaces an adware download manager, it does the job. If you want an actively maintained project, use aria2 from the command line directly, or hand the BitTorrent side to qBittorrent.

We list it anyway because it is genuinely free, ad-free and open source, and it has not regressed at what it does well — but you deserve to know about the stall before you install.