RN
Almost everything a download manager was invented to solve has quietly been fixed somewhere else.
That is worth saying before any recommendation, because the category is full of software that was genuinely excellent in 2012, has not been meaningfully updated since, and is still being recommended by articles that copy each other's lists. Installing an abandoned network utility to solve a problem you probably no longer have is a bad trade twice over.
What the trick actually was
A download manager opens several connections to the same file at once, asks each for a different byte range, and writes the pieces into one file as they arrive. The mechanism is a standard part of HTTP — range requests — and every part of it depends on the server agreeing to play along.
In the era this was worth doing, a single connection was frequently throttled well below what your line could carry, either because the server limited per-connection bandwidth or because congestion control on a long, lossy path never let one stream reach full speed. Eight connections got eight times the allocation. It felt like magic and it was really just arbitrage against a per-connection limit.
Two things ended that. Modern congestion control fills a fast link with one connection far better than the old algorithms did, so the ceiling that segmentation was climbing over often is not there any more. And the servers that do impose limits now overwhelmingly impose them per account or per IP, which segmentation does nothing about — split a capped 2 MB/s into eight streams and you get eight streams of 250 KB/s.
What still works
Resume. This is the feature that has aged well and it is the reason to have one at all. A large transfer that dies at 94% and has to start over is the actual pain point, and a manager that stores its state and re-requests the missing range fixes it properly. Browsers have got better at this and are still not reliable about it across a restart, a sleep, or a changed network.
Queueing. Twenty files, three at a time, in an order you set, without twenty browser tabs. Unglamorous and genuinely useful.
Retry policy. Hosts that fail intermittently are better handled by something that will patiently try again for an hour than by you noticing.
Link extraction. Pulling a set of links out of a page or a container file and queueing them together, which is the one job browsers have never attempted.
If none of those describe your situation — you download the occasional file, your connection is fast, nothing has failed recently — you do not need this software, and that is the most common case.
How the category makes money now
This matters more than any feature comparison, because free download utilities have been one of the more persistent homes for bundled software in the Windows ecosystem.
The pattern to watch for is an installer that offers extras, a browser extension requested at setup, or a "recommended" configuration screen with pre-ticked boxes. None of that is universal and none of it is new, but it is common enough in this specific category that the installer deserves reading rather than clicking through, and a download from the project's own domain is worth insisting on over an aggregator's mirror.
The other model is a paid licence, which is more honest and which raises a different question: whether the software is still maintained. Check when it was last updated before you pay for it. A network tool that has not shipped a release in several years has not shipped a security fix in several years either.
The other half of the question
A download manager is a transport. It does not care what it is moving, and the rules that apply to what you are moving are the same as they would be without it.
Ripping paid content out of a subscription you hold and redistributing it is the thing that has made every creator-facing platform hostile to the entire category, and it is the reason the tools that specialise in it live in a rougher part of the internet than a general-purpose utility does. Downloading something a site offers for download is not that, and the distinction is not subtle.
Practically: sites that publish direct file links expect them to be downloaded and this is a non-issue. Sites that stream, do not, and the tools built to defeat that are a different category of software with a different risk profile — often distributed outside app stores, frequently unsigned, and updated in response to platform changes rather than to a release schedule.
If you do want one
Prefer open source, because you can see whether it is alive. Prefer a project with a visible release history. Prefer one that installs nothing you did not ask for, and verify that by watching the installer rather than by reading a review.
Then check whether your browser already does the part you cared about. For most people, in most situations, it does.
The free download sites section covers destinations that publish files rather than streams, and the forums are where link collections tend to live.