The Shareaza installer ships several plugins. Shareaza implements a framework for additional plugins. Widgets include a search window, a bandwidth graph, the upload queue window (upper-right corner) and the neighbours window (center), showing 4 gnutella, 3 Gnutella2 and an eD2k server connection. Shareaza running in windowed mode with several activated skins. The filters are editable inside Shareaza, and can be exported from the application to be shared with others. The file format used for the filters is an extendable XML schema. These filters increase the chances of getting the files the user wants and decrease the chance of getting malicious or fake files. Later versions of Shareaza allow for the use of regular expressions and filtering by hash. Shareaza's security filters can also be extended with user-defined keywords and/or IP addresses. The Shareaza client has some basic content filters including a forced child and optional adult pornography filter, and some other optional filters such as a filter for files encumbered with Digital rights management (DRM). Shareaza also uses its G2 network to find more sources for torrents. When another client connected to G2 finds such a file, it is given the hash values for all networks and can search on the other networks with their respective hash values, which increases the number of sources and the download speed of the file. This allows Shareaza to download one file from several networks at once. Shareaza hashes its files for all networks, and then distributes those hash values on G2. Shareaza can connect to gnutella, G2, eDonkey and BitTorrent. On June 1, 2004, Shareaza 2.0 was released, along with the source code, under the GNU General Public License (GPL-2.0-or-later), making it free software.

Shareaza was developed by Michael Stokes until June 1, 2004, and has since been maintained by a group of volunteers. Shareaza is a peer-to-peer file sharing client running under Microsoft Windows which supports the gnutella, Gnutella2 (G2), eDonkey, BitTorrent, FTP, HTTP and HTTPS network protocols and handles magnet links, ed2k links, and the now deprecated gnutella and Piolet links. English, German, French, Spanish, Catalan, etc.

Gnutella 2 status