NetBalancer is an internet traffic control and monitoring tool designed for Microsoft Windows with native x64 support. Control every aspect of the traffic flow on your computer. Set advanced rules and filters, edit network priorities for running processes and do many other operations on your machine or on a group of machines based on tags. Browse and do any internet activity comfortably on your PC even when your download manager or torrent client downloads huge files from internet – just lower their network priority with NetBalancer. Manage your PC network traffic with rules – With traffic rules you can set priorities, limit or block your metered network traffic based on various settings like time of day, network protocol or application type. Monitor and limit unwanted traffic with DPI (Deep Packet Inspection) – With deep packet inspection you can block BitTorrent traffic, limit the Steam application and set a high network priority for your browser or games.

Don’t you hate when you’re downloading something (namely via BitTorrent) and it renders the rest of your computer nearly unusable. NetBalancer can fix this because it is a Windows program that gives you control over what apps are considered more important than others. You can, for example, designate priority to your web browser instead of your BitTorrent client. You can even specify download and upload priorities separately meaning a process can have a high download priority but a low upload priority.

With NetBalancer, you can set separate download and upload priorities for different applications (you’ve got the options of High, Normal, and Low), you can choose to block or ignore traffic altogether, or you can choose specifically how much you want to limit traffic available to a process.

The free version only allows you to shape traffic available to five applications, but most people don’t use more than five applications that require all that much bandwidth to begin with. (Consider that between your browser and download tool of choice, you’ve still got three options.) You’ll also want to keep in mind that this only works locally, so you can’t shape traffic based on what your Xbox 360 is doing.

This is one of the few traffic shaping applications out there that have a free version available, and being able to prioritize your traffic to ensure a quality of service (QOS) is pretty nice. Definitely worth the download if you’re in the market for such an app.