Review of P2P File Sharing Programs: Mospheus Vs Ares

When it comes to p2p file sharing programs, Bearshare had been a long time favorite of mine and with Bearshare I mostly found what I have been looking for but since the options are plenty I decided to download other p2p file sharing programs too and give them a try. I was quickly searching for p2p file sharing programs on Google and stumbled upon Morpheus and Ares. I downloaded and installed both of them and tried them for a week before I decided to get rid of one of them. Here is a rundown of their positives and negatives just in case you are thinking of trying either of them.

Morpheus p2p application (FREE version)

Positives of Morpheus

» The latest version of Morpheus is capable of searching through multiple P2P networks including the Neo Network, Gnutella and BitTorrent. This is very nice if you are looking for some rare files.

» The downloaded files can be scanned with the aid of existing antivirus software on your system which I find a quite good feature.

» With Morpheus burning a CD is an easy task and you can even drag and drop files for future burning jobs.

» The interface is impressive and pretty easy to understand. It also has a built-in browser in case you want to lookup a Bitzi ticket for any file before downloading it. Even the library manager is easy to handle and organizing your files is an easy task.

» Download speed seems to be much faster at least when compared to Bearshare.

» Morpheus doesn’t let you download unauthorized copies of a file. This could be considered a positive feature by some and others might want this to put under negatives section. I prefer to put it under positive points.

Negatives of Morpheus

» Sometimes, despite the fact that the client is connected to several hosts for a file that you want to download, the speed could be very very low. I just failed to understand the probable reasons but that’s what it was.

» The interface is heavily dominated with banner ads and pop ups that keeps coming all the time. This reminded me of olden days when almost every free software used to come with Adware bundled with it. This is little worse than that. There is never a time when Ads will stop showing up. When I ran Ad-aware personal edition post installation of Morpheus, it detected several instances of spywares but then I am not sure if it came along with Morpheus.

» I opted to install the browser helper objects, otherwise called toolbars for browsers to be able to use the magnet links and even after uninstalling the entire application they failed to get unloaded from the system. This is very bad.

Ares p2p application

Positives of Ares

» Ares is a clean, nice and small p2p file sharing program. I immediately liked the clean interface. The library manager is very nice and easy to organize the files.

» Ares is ad free, spyware free as well.

» It shows decent results when you search for files and download speed seems to on par with Bearshare which is quite acceptable.

Negatives of Ares

» It is quite difficult to see results for rare files which isn’t the case with other p2p applications, I suppose.

» With low number of shares, the download speed is not so good.

Conclusion: Between Morpheus and Ares, I choose to retain Ares on my system. This is primarily because of those Ads and popups in Morpheus, all the mess it brings along with it which I found difficult to handle with some good anti spyware and adware softwares.