comparison
Marauder vs Prowlarr
The short answer: use both. Prowlarr is the indexer manager for the *arr stack — it aggregates Torznab/Newznab indexers and keeps Sonarr, Radarr, and Lidarr in sync. Marauder monitors the forum-tracker threads Prowlarr can search but can't watch, and it happily reads a Prowlarr Torznab feed too.
TL;DR
Prowlarr's job is indexer aggregation: one place to manage every Torznab/Newznab indexer and push it to your *arr apps. It even bolts Cardigann/Jackett-style search shims onto some forum trackers — but those shims only search.
They can't monitor a specific topic —
a RuTracker release thread or a LostFilm series page — and grab the new
.torrent the moment an uploader swaps it in place. That is
exactly Marauder's job. And because Marauder speaks Torznab and Newznab
natively, one Marauder install can consume your Prowlarr feeds and
watch the forum threads Prowlarr was never built to follow.
Search is not monitoring
Prowlarr (and Jackett before it) exposes trackers through the Torznab API contract: a structured search endpoint the *arr apps query for matching releases. For forum trackers, Prowlarr ships Cardigann definitions that scrape the site's search page and present the results as Torznab.
That covers discovery by search. It does not cover the case forum trackers are built around:
- • A single topic thread that gets a new
.torrentattachment in place when the next episode or a better encode drops - • Season packs that are re-uploaded to the same URL as they grow
- • Releases that never surface in a search feed in a way the *arr matcher will reliably catch
Marauder watches the thread itself, hashes the attachment to detect the swap, and hands the new file straight to your download client. It complements Prowlarr; it does not replace it.
Feature matrix
| Feature | Prowlarr | Marauder |
|---|---|---|
| Primary role | indexer manager / aggregator | topic monitor + auto-downloader |
| Torznab / Newznab aggregation | yes (its core job) | consumes feeds (incl. from Prowlarr) |
| Forum-tracker search shims (Cardigann) | yes (many definitions) | no (monitors, not a search shim) |
| Topic monitoring (in-place .torrent swap) | no | yes (RuTracker, LostFilm, Kinozal, NNM-Club) |
| Watch one thread for new releases | no (search only) | yes |
| Hands torrents to a download client | no (syncs to *arr apps) | yes (qBittorrent, Transmission, Deluge, µTorrent, watch folder) |
| Cloudflare-gated tracker access | via FlareSolverr (search) | cfsolver sidecar (full monitoring) |
| Interactive captcha login (LostFilm) | no | yes |
| Per-topic quality selection | no | yes (LostFilm) |
| Native OIDC / SSO | no (reverse proxy in front) | yes (Keycloak bundled) |
| Multi-user with isolation | no | yes |
| Prometheus /metrics | no (third-party exporter) | yes (built-in) |
How they coexist
A common setup runs both side by side:
- • Prowlarr manages your Torznab/Newznab indexers and feeds Sonarr / Radarr.
- • Marauder monitors forum-tracker topics (RuTracker, LostFilm, Kinozal, NNM-Club) that have no usable feed — and can also consume a Prowlarr Torznab URL with the
torznab+prefix. - • Both push to the same qBittorrent / Transmission; tag categories so you can tell the sources apart.
See the integrations page for the exact Prowlarr-feed setup, and Marauder vs Sonarr / Radarr for how the PVRs fit in.
Add forum trackers to your Prowlarr stack
Marauder runs in the same docker compose stack and pushes to the same client.