April 4, 2019

Torrentsafe vs Boxopus

In this a friendly clash, we will watch two popular and highly rated services, Torrentsafe and Boxopus. Who will win in a series of harsh test, which service will get the final recommendation?

I the following paragraphs I will take information which I gathered for the single service reviews (Pssst, you can dig deeper into Boxopus here and into Torrentsafe here), and compile them here to find out who is the number one and who is the number two. The first category (and the only subjective) is the looks:

Looks

Yes, I know, this seems like a lousy category, but believe me, if you are using something daily, you want to look at something pretty. Who wants to look at ugly duckling when you can look at the beautiful swan. Unfortunately, this is not the story about duckling.

Torrentsafe has a super simple design that is easy to use, but Boxopus looks better. And that counts my personal bias towards Astronauts because I’ve always wanted to be one. But our rocket goes to the torrent client section, where I will compare how quick these services are.

Torrent Client

Now, let’s look at the core of these services, which is a torrent downloader. So, if the downloading is terrible, I have no reason to continue using this or that service. But torrenting is not the same as usual downloading because it also depends on seeds. So use only highly seeded files, if you want to have fast downloads. That is also why I tested these downloaders on multiple files with different seeds so that you could get the whole picture. However, since not all seeds are the same and behave similarly, your results could be slightly different.

(P.t. stands for Private tracker)

Services	5 seeds	10 seeds	50 seeds	100 seeds	P.t. 14 seeds
Boxopus	120 KB/s	400 KB/s	2 MB/s	7 MB/s	203 KB/s
Torrentsafe	132 KB/S	390 KB/s	2,3 MB/s	7,2 MB/s	189 KB/s

With these results, we see that Boxopus is slightly slower than Torrentsafe. We have now our torrent on their servers, but we want to have it on our computer, so the next category is the download speed.

Download Speed

This part is the hardest of any review because it is less accurate for all users. Download speeds rely on the Internet service provider, the connection to central server, route, and on many other small details that made this very hard. Generally saying, we can imagine this as the post office. With distant geographical location from the server, the speed will be slower (if you are not directly connected to the direct route). It is a complicated question without any simple answer. I will simplify the test here to try to give some general feeling.

Of course, I tried downloading to my very location and speeds were maybe too much similar. Both were faster at this attempt than at the continuous tests.

Testing at other locations showed that these speeds are closely tied. Both had dropdowns in India, and both were fast in North America. It would be nice if they added more options for endpoint servers, but since none of them has it, I need to say: “There is no winner in this category.” With that being said, we need to look at extra features.

Extra features

Now is the time to look at everything else this service offers. I will look at the streaming capabilities, connection to other sources and all other features that work as the wow effect.

The first point we focus our look is connectivity. Boxopus offers Google Drive, Torrentsafe offers only your computer, which can be a turn back to some people. Boxopus also used to provide Dropbox, but they were prohibited from using Dropbox API, which was a significant strike to the whole service.

Video streaming is also edging Boxopus because Torrentsafe uses the basic way HTML handles video files.

Torrentsafe API is planned to be added, but Boxopus already has its own “mutation” which is not the standard endpoint API but a web crawler that can be used as API.

Browser Extension is something all users can enjoy. Torrentsafe has their version for Chrome, which Boxopus has as well.

Boxopus also has an Android app, which simplifies torrent downloading on your Android device. Torrentsafe doesn’t have anything like this.

This table shows, who has the edge on extra features categories.

	API	Video streaming	Google Drive	SFTP / FTP	Browser Extension	Server network	Extras
Who is winner?	Boxopus	Boxopus	Boxopus	None	Tied	None	Boxopus

Conclusion

Boxopus and Torrentsafe were overall active fighters, but duel needs to end with a precise result. This article did its best to compare and show differences.

It was a good duel, in which I had the chance to see all the features and test these features against each other. Torrentsafe is a user-friendly and straightforward service that is easy to use and easy to manage. But it is a weaker service than Boxopus. The extra features proved its victory, even though the initial loss in download speed sections. However, the speeds were too similar to give the edge to Torrentsafe.