INDEPENDENT
RATINGS,
REAL RESULTS_

Backbone ownership, retention depth, completion rate and connection headroom, benchmarked weekly from three continents.

NZB handling, par2 repair throughput, indexer integrations, and how hard each one leans on your CPU during unpack.

Three replicated regions on its own NVMe spools, post-quantum encryption on the NNTP port before anyone else bothered, SlickVPN free on every recurring plan, and a payment page that takes almost anything including six cryptocurrencies. The deep archive’s lineage is contested and its own pages quote six different retention numbers, but nothing else here covers this many axes without a hole.

UsenetExpress owns its hardware instead of quietly reselling a bigger network, and it is unusually candid about how the machine runs: a fast local spool covers roughly the last three years and does most of the work, while partner networks backfill anything older. It will also let you share your account without pretending not to notice. Fast and honest, if rough around the security defaults.

One of the plainest no-monitoring statements in the category, covering bytes transferred only and nothing about which groups you read, bundled with OctaneVPN and running on the UsenetExpress spool. Deep retention and gigabit pulls come with it. So does the fact that there is no infrastructure of its own behind the brand.

The efficiency king: an open-source NZB downloader written in C++ that does what SABnzbd does in a fraction of the memory, which is why it lives on routers, ancient NAS boxes and single-board computers. Abandoned by its original author in 2022, revived by a maintained community fork, and still free.