comparison
Marauder vs Sonarr / Radarr
The short answer: use both. They live in different worlds and they complement each other cleanly. Sonarr and Radarr are the PVRs that dominate the Torznab/Newznab indexer ecosystem; Marauder fills the forum-tracker gap they were never built to handle.
Comparing the indexer manager specifically? See Marauder vs Prowlarr.
TL;DR
If your tracker exposes a Torznab or Newznab API, Sonarr / Radarr / Prowlarr is the canonical answer — they have years of polish on quality profiles, library tracking, metadata scraping, and file organization.
If your tracker is a forum thread you browse to — RuTracker, LostFilm, Kinozal, NNM-Club, Anidub, Anilibria, Toloka, and so on — Sonarr cannot help you. Forum trackers don't expose Torznab. Marauder is built specifically to scrape these sites (with account login where required, or anonymously where not), and it speaks Torznab and Newznab too so a single Marauder install reaches both worlds at once.
Why Sonarr can't see RuTracker
Sonarr / Radarr / Prowlarr are built around the Torznab API contract: a tracker exposes a structured search endpoint that returns JSON or XML, categorised by content type, with a stable field set (title, size, seeders, category, publish date).
Forum-style trackers don't work this way. RuTracker is a phpBB-style forum. LostFilm is a bespoke per-series CMS. NNM-Club is a phpBB variant wrapped in Cloudflare. Kinozal is yet another phpBB skin. What they share is:
- • Content discovery by browsing topic threads, not by querying an API
- • Updates in place — the same topic URL gets a new
.torrentattachment when a new episode drops - • Most require account login via an HTML form (RuTracker, LostFilm, Kinozal…); some like NNM-Club work anonymously via magnet links
- • Cloudflare interstitials that need to be solved before the page can be reached
Jackett bolts a Torznab shim onto these sites for the *arr stack, but the shim only does search, not topic monitoring. You cannot use Jackett + Sonarr to watch a specific RuTracker thread for in-place updates — that's not what the contract supports.
Marauder is built for that case. It is a complement to Sonarr / Radarr / Prowlarr, not a replacement.
Feature matrix
| Feature | Sonarr / Radarr | Marauder |
|---|---|---|
| Torznab indexer support | yes (native) | yes (torznab plugin) |
| Newznab Usenet indexer support | yes (native) | yes (newznab plugin) |
| Forum-tracker scraping (RuTracker) | no | yes (rutracker plugin) |
| Forum-tracker scraping (LostFilm) | no | yes (lostfilm plugin, with quality) |
| Forum-tracker scraping (Kinozal) | no | yes (kinozal plugin) |
| Forum-tracker scraping (NNM-Club) | no | yes (nnmclub plugin, w/ Cloudflare bypass) |
| Auto-monitor Sonarr's forum grabs | no (can't track in-place updates) | yes (Sonarr integration) |
| Quality profiles + library tracking | yes (best in class) | no (out of scope) |
| Metadata scraping (TVDB / TMDB) | yes | no (out of scope) |
| File renaming + Plex/Jellyfin paths | yes | no (hand off to client) |
| Native OIDC / SSO | no (Authelia in front) | yes (Keycloak bundled) |
| Multi-user with isolation | no | yes |
| Audit log out of the box | no | yes |
| Prometheus /metrics | third-party exporter | yes (built-in) |
| Memory footprint (200 topics) | ~300-500 MB | <150 MB |
How they coexist
The same qBittorrent instance happily accepts torrents from Sonarr, Radarr, and Marauder simultaneously. Tag the categories so you can tell them apart in the UI:
- • Sonarr drops things into
tv-sonarr - • Radarr drops things into
movies-radarr - • Marauder drops things into
tv-marauderormovies-marauder— set per-client in the Marauder UI
That's the zero-config baseline — both push to the same client. For forum trackers there's an optional deeper handoff: Marauder can auto-monitor what Sonarr grabs. Enable the Sonarr integration (Integrations → Sonarr in the Marauder UI), and when Sonarr grabs a release from a forum tracker like RuTracker or Kinozal, Marauder automatically takes over watching that updateable topic for future torrent changes — delivering updates to the same category Sonarr imports from. See the Sonarr integration guide.
Try Marauder alongside your Sonarr
It runs in the same docker compose stack and uses the same qBittorrent.