When comparing JDownloader 2 vs aria2, the Slant community recommends JDownloader 2 for most people. In the question“What is the best download manager for Windows?” JDownloader 2 is ranked 2nd while aria2 is ranked 5th. The most important reason people chose JDownloader 2 is:
Jdownloader can crawl all links and find downloadable content based on those links, very helpful to download entire website content, video playlist, or hidden content too.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Click and Load
Jdownloader can crawl all links and find downloadable content based on those links, very helpful to download entire website content, video playlist, or hidden content too.
Pro Advanced packaging system
You can pack files into packages for better file management.
Pro Open-source
There is no limitation.
Pro Supports multiple parallel streams
It means you can download any stream source such as youtube or similar video site with options to choose its quality and filetype.
Pro Captcha recognition
You can input captcha on some free file hosting sites directly on Jdownloader.
Pro Auto-extracts archives
No need to manually extract your downloaded archives, while Jdownloader can automatically extract them for you.
Pro Auto-saves to configured folder
Automatically save files with certain filenames to certain preconfigured folders.
Pro Batch import links
Helps to batch download files.
Pro Cross-platform
Because JDownloader runs on Java, any platform that can run Java, can run JDownloader.
Pro Small memory footprint
Due to aria2 being a CLI only tool it uses very little memory.
Pro Supports multiple download protocols
Has support for lots of download protocols including BitTorrent, Metalink, HTTP, HTTPS and FTP.
Pro Remote control over simple standartized RPC
XML or JSON-based RPCs can be used to control aria2 remotely with both APIs completely documented. Simplest client that uploads torrent to be downloaded is 3 Python lines long (no 3rd-party libraries, only stdlib).
Run aria2c --help=#rpc
to see more.
Pro Third parties offer a clean web interface
Some web interfaces consist of pure HTML+JS, no server-side needed (except aria2c of course). It uses the same RPC that can work even over WebSockets.
Pro Free and open source
Cons
Con Regular installation tries to install Adware along with program
Oughta look for the ad-ware free installer. Dubious.
Con Not safe
It seems like VirusTotal has detected something with a scan. : https://www.virustotal.com/es-ar/file/c3467621d7f2479bac6fba7afae7b32bc5f3b25f61c562543ab498cdd9c5e33c/analysis/1550301403/ .
Con Apparently not fully open source
Con ULTRA extreme file fragmentation
There is no file size allocation protocol to prevent file fragmentation. And declared that there is no plan to fix it.
Con Has ads
Which is on by default but can be disabled in advanced setting.
Con Captcha solving requires Browser extension which spies on you
Con Resource intensive
It is a Java application so you will always having the JavaVM(Java virtual machine) running alongside.
Con No native graphical user interface
While there is a web-based GUI, there is no native interface.
Con No HTTP/2 support
While the developer of aria2 is developing nghttp2 library, aria2 has no support for http2.
Con Ugly interface
Con Confusing to use
