Furk review

June 6, 2019 – 4 Comments

Furk is the community-based download tool which allows you to download torrents. But you need to prove you are a human before you are granted access to all the features. Is it worth it to connect your social media to your torrent? Is their unusual approach good or you should look elsewhere? These questions are in our minds during the testing.

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We are Torrent Alternative and our goal is to bring torrenting out of the shadows. We are developers, graphics, coders, and folks who have in common the belief that torrenting is the future of downloading for us. Our vision is that this amazing tool is not used to its full potential and in order to change we want more people to try it out. Which is why we review the online tools so your journey into torrenting can be easy and fun.

Technical design

As we briefly mentioned Furk is built around community. You need to be invited or use your own social media to log in which is their main way of preventing bots using their service. After the not user-friendly login, you are in the most technical looking downloader we have ever seen. On the first glance, you can be confused by what does what but after a few hours in it, you will be a pro at using your account and you will have a lot of things you can set for yourself. The complexity is rewarding if you invest the time into it.

The storage works fine on computers but we don’t recommend using Furk on phones. Their CSS doesn’t work on most of the screens we tried and we hope for a fix in the future. We want to mention how much is their approach to storage unique. They offer 250 GB to every user, however, when they need to make a new space on their servers, they will delete the least popular content. The popularity of content is counted by various means. If you purchase a premium account you can lock up to 250 Gb of your content, which will protect it from the auto delete. All content is shared across all users, which means that you can instantly download a thing that someone other has in their account.

Features and Functions

Design of the storage shows you a “thumbnail” of the content inside of the torrent folder. You can rename, delete or view the files inside. If you download a video file, you can use their media player to stream it online. This streaming is not that advanced (the subtitles support is below average) but it works fine, and thanks to the fact that in most of the cases you will be handed file ready to be watched, it is quick to load.

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The buffer time is most of the time quick, however, with newly added files that are not in the Furk proxy (which is how they call their cache) can have a slow buffer and drops a few frames. But if you stay within the proxy seas, you won’t find this issue. A lot of the features are in development which is why we can not review them. Unfortunately, we heard that many of the projects are abandoned and only listed to gather users.

Torrent processing and speeds

The torrenting must be reviewed in two parts. The first part is when you download (actually add) a torrent that is loaded in their cache. In this case, this particular torrent is just moved into your account which is done in a few seconds. In the case of a new torrent, you will have to wait. Their torrent client has average speed with the right amount of seeds. The highest speed we measured was around 2.5 MB per second on 130 seeds. Download from their servers is also average on our scaling. There is no decentralized network, which means that in a few places on the globe you will have a slow download and on a few places close to central servers you will have a slightly faster speed.

Conclusion

In sum up, Furk is not for everyone. If you want to have full control over your own storage, don’t use Furk. But if you don’t mind your content being deleted or sharing your files with others, then you will be using slightly below average tool. The torrenting functions are average, but the lack of other features makes our rating 3 out of 5 stars reasonable.