Hydra Download Manager (HDM)

An open-source, high-performance download manager and accelerator that splits every file across parallel connections and mirror sources. Featuring dynamic range stealing and real-time stall recovery for Windows, macOS, and Linux.

Download HDM View on GitHub

Multi-Source Acceleration & Embedded Download Engine

Hydra Download Manager core is a high-performance download accelerator and statistical scheduler for byte ranges, wrapped with a frozen C ABI (libhydra). Embed multi-source downloads, dynamic range stealing, and sub-timeout stall prediction into any application or platform.

Adaptive Concurrency

Drains multiple mirrors and parallel HTTP/S/FTP streams simultaneously with per-server automatic ramp up.

Dynamic Range Stealing

Detects lagging connections mid-flight and transparently reclaims remaining byte ranges for faster peers.

Sub-Timeout Stall Prediction

Statistical CUSUM estimators flag collapsing connections seconds before standard socket timeouts trigger.

End-to-End Integrity

Per-chunk checksum manifests, Content-MD5 validation, and local Reed-Solomon erasure coding against bitrot.

Stable C ABI (libhydra)

One static/shared library and header (hydra.h) with strict ABI 1 forward-compatibility CI gates.

Android & iOS Mobile

Pre-packaged Android jniLibs and Apple Hydra.xcframework with background execution policy support.

Polyglot Language Bindings

Drop-in examples for C, C++, Python, Swift, Go, Kotlin, Dart, C#, and Zig with non-blocking event queues.

Durable Persistence

State persistence across process restarts, flat resident memory, and HTTP CONNECT / SOCKS5 proxies.

Open-Source Download Manager for Desktop (Windows, macOS, Linux)

Hydra Download Manager (HDM) wraps the acceleration engine in a native, localized desktop interface for Windows, macOS, and Linux — an open-source alternative to classic download managers like IDM, FDM, and JDownloader.

Hydra Download Manager (HDM) Desktop GUI on Windows, macOS, and Linux

Browser Extension Integration

Official browser integration for Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and Safari hands downloads to HDM over a local WebSocket bridge, with a native-messaging fallback that can launch the app on demand.

Queues & scheduler

Group downloads into queues with scheduled start and stop times, retry tracking, and one-click start or stop for the whole queue.

Power save mode

One toggle cuts interface wakeups: slower refresh, no progress animation, coarser transfer ticks. Download speed is unchanged while your battery lasts longer.

Clipboard watching

Copy a link and Hydra picks it up automatically, filtered by the file types you choose, with per-site exceptions when you want it to stay out of the way.

Speed limits & connection caps

Cap bandwidth to a fixed budget per interval and set the default connection count per download, so background transfers never starve your video call.

Categories & auto-sorting

Compressed, Documents, Music, Programs, Video: incoming files are routed to the right category and folder by type, each with its own default directory.

Lives in your tray

System tray with light and dark aware icons, launch on startup, minimize to tray, and optional hiding from the Dock or taskbar for a fully background setup.

Localized, with event sounds

A translated interface, per-event sounds for completed or failed downloads, and a completion dialog with Open and Open-folder shortcuts.

Open-Source Download Manager for Desktop & Terminal (CLI & TUI)

The same high-performance download accelerator engine drives a scriptable CLI and a full-screen interactive queue manager, giving servers, containers, and terminal users multi-source download acceleration.

wget and curl compatibility

Compat personalities accept common wget and curl flags as-is, so Hydra drops into existing scripts without edits.

Interactive queue manager

A full-screen TUI for adding, pausing, resuming, and monitoring queued downloads without leaving the shell.

Remote checksum lookup

Inspect server-advertised digests before downloading, or verify the finished file against a target hash inline.

hydra
# saturate the link across two mirrors, 8 connections
$ hydra -x 8 https://mirror1.example.org/ubuntu.iso \
        https://mirror2.example.org/ubuntu.iso

# reuse your wget muscle memory
$ hydra --compat=wget -c -O kernel.tar.xz https://cdn.kernel.org/...

# verify against a target hash while downloading
$ hydra --checksum sha256:e3b0c442... https://example.com/release.tar.gz

# open the interactive queue
$ hydra interactive

Download Hydra Download Manager (HDM)

Free, open-source download manager and accelerator for Windows, macOS, and Linux. Desktop GUI, CLI, TUI, and browser integration included.

Latest release: v0.3.6
Recommended for Windows
Windows Windows 10, 11
User Installer
x64 Arm64
System Installer
x64 Arm64
.zip
x64 Arm64
CLI
x64 Arm64
Recommended for Linux
.deb Debian, Ubuntu
.rpm Red Hat, Fedora, SUSE
.deb
x64 Arm64
.rpm
x64 Arm64
Ubuntu PPA
Launchpad PPA
Fedora COPR
Fedora COPR
.tar.gz
x64 Arm64
CLI
x64 Arm64

Looking for source code or earlier releases? View all assets on the GitHub Releases page.