When I was on Windows I was an avid lover of Internet download manager app, and now after switching to Mac I had to rehung for the best Mac download manager.  Download managers come very handy when you wish to download various kinds of files from the internet, such as videos, music, books, softwares and literally everything. Specially when you are downloading a big file online, it’s better to rely on a download manager instead of your browser-based download.

Why you should prefer using a Download manager?

Download managers come with many useful features that boost up the speed of your downloads. One of the major benefit of using a download manager on your Mac is, you will be able to resume broken download. This not only helps in saving your internet bandwidth, but also helps in saving  your precious time. Many of these tools offer multi-threading downloads, meaning the download process is carried out by splitting the files into various threads and transferring their data through all of those threads at the same time, which helps finish the task with multiplying speeds and in lesser times.

The access and management of files downloaded from the internet becomes very easy with the use of download managers as they sort and put all the incoming files into specific directories, and in pre-determined paths set by the user himself. This file separation is very handy at times for the user. The most important activity that user does is search for downloaded files, and in such instances, they don’t need to look into every folder in their computer, rather they can simply go to the type folder (video, audio, documents, softwares and other folders) and seek their required file. This always heavily saves the user’s time and makes it easier to access downloaded files.

So for the above mentioned reasons, and for various others, download managers are used day in and day out by a major part of the regular internet users. In this article, let us have a look at some free applications to manage your internet downloads.

Best Download managers for Mac OS:

Most of the below mentioned Mac download managers are free, but some of them do offer pro versions which adds extra feature. The following are 5 very efficient internet download managers for Mac operating system that come for free.

iGetter

iGetter is a free tool for downloading files from the internet. It increases the download speed with the support of segmented downloading. The speed of different files can be controlled by the user, thus not making his internet surfing troublesome while downloading the files. The user can schedule his downloads for a later time, such as when the internet traffic is less heavy, like early in morning.

It can auto scan the downloaded files using the anti-virus that is present in the computer. When the connection is down and if it causes the downloads to stop, iGetter automatically detects when the internet is back on and completes those unfinished downloads.

Another great feature of iGetter is that it is integrated with fileavenue.net and this displays the latest files on their server, and can be directly downloaded from iGetter.

FOLX

FOLX splits the downloads into double threaded ones. It supports auto-resuming of files to continue their download when a network problem intervenes in the middle. FOLX auto-catches the files that are to be downloaded from browsers. Smart tagging feature is also present in FOLX, which makes the managing of your files more efficient. It has special add-ons for all the browsers. It filters the files it downloads according to their type, tag, and date.

FOLX comes in two flavors, free and purchasable. The above mentioned features are all available in free version as well.

JDownloader

JDownloader is an open source internet download manager for Mac (and other operating systems as well). It handles multiple downloads at once, and it does so through multiple connections. JDownloader has an automatic extracter that helps extract zipped files such as the rar files.

JDownloader is customizable, it comes with changeable themes. It runs with the support of Java 1.5 or higher versions. It has file resume capability to build back the broken downloads which serves the users very well.

XtremeDM

Xtreme Download Manager is a free tool for enhancing your internet downloads. It multiplies the speeds up to 500%. It has file resume capacity to preserve the interrupted file downloads with the help of various segmentation methods. XtremeDM incorporates with all the most widely used internet browsers and catches the flash videos from various video sharing webservices such as Youtube. Also, the GUI has a Youtube integrator, where you can you can paste the Youtube URL and it will grab the video in all provided formats (with varying sizes, of course).

For those who couldn’t afford to purchase IDM, this can be its best replacement and free of charge.

Progressive Downloader

Progressive Downloader is a free internet downloader for Mac operating systems. It downloads files through a multi-thread method. It can be linked with other applications of Mac OS X. It provides automatic download support for files of various filehosting websites such as Rapidshare, Hotfile and etc. It has a built-in mirror search, which looks for mirror site services for the files of large size.

At the time of writing I’m using Folx as my download manager, and it integrates seamlessly with Safari browser. If you are using Chrome or Mozilla on your Mac, you should look out for other options which support other browsers than Safari.

If you know of any other good download manager for Mac operating system, do let me know via comments. If you find this article useful and informative, do share with your friends on Facebook and Google plus.