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Quark Pan vs Baidu Pan for downloads outside China: what we measured on real SVIP accounts

Updated 22 September 2026 · 5 min read

Two Chinese clouds dominate the links you get sent from China: Baidu Pan (pan.baidu.com) and, increasingly, Quark Pan (pan.quark.cn, Alibaba's). Both are painful from outside China for the same reason — a mainland phone number to register, and a throttle on free accounts that turns a 2 GB file into an afternoon.

We have run Baidu Pan links for people outside China for months. On 22 September 2026 we bought a Quark SVIP membership and measured it the same way we measured Baidu: same server (Finland), same day, real paid accounts, real files. Here are the numbers.

The short version

	Baidu Pan	Quark Pan
Free account	0.05–0.07 MB/s	0.06 MB/s
Premium (SVIP), 1 connection	~1 MB/s	0.7 MB/s
Premium, 32 connections	19 MB/s	18 MB/s
Premium, 64 connections	— (32 is the ceiling)	36 MB/s
Premium price	¥30/month	¥25/month (¥5.8 first month on promo)
Registration from abroad	+86 number needed	+86 number needed; Taobao login is a workaround
Can you read a share without an account?	No — needs a logged-in cookie	Yes — file names and sizes are public

Both free tiers are useless. Both premium tiers are fast once you open enough parallel connections. Quark's ceiling was higher in our test.

How we measured

• Server: the same Hetzner box in Finland that runs our fetch service.
• Files: a 1.98 GB ZIP on Quark, a comparable ~2 GB file on Baidu (measured in August).
• Method: the file is split into N byte ranges and fetched with N parallel HTTPS connections, which is exactly how download clients like aria2 or BaiduPCS-Go work. Throughput is total bytes over wall-clock time, including stalls.
• Runs: 1, 12, 32, 48 and 64 connections on Quark; 1, 8, 16 and 32 on Baidu.

Quark Pan, in detail

Connections	Throughput	Notes
Free account, 1	0.06 MB/s	measured over 120 s
SVIP, 1	0.64–0.69 MB/s	two runs
SVIP, 12	4.9 MB/s	some connection timeouts
SVIP, 32	13.6 and 18.0 MB/s	two runs, both with a few timeouts
SVIP, 48	14.4 MB/s	timeouts dragged it down
SVIP, 64	36.4 MB/s	clean run, no errors

Two things stand out.

The throttle is per account tier, not per connection. Free was 0.06 MB/s regardless of anything. SVIP scaled almost linearly with connections — about 0.4–0.5 MB/s per connection — until the clean 64-connection run hit 36 MB/s. Quark's download tokens carry a 51200 KB/s field (50 MB/s), so 36 MB/s from Finland is close to the ceiling.

Connection drops matter more than thread count. The 48-connection run was slower than the 32-connection run purely because a few connections timed out and stalled. Any client that fetches Quark from outside China needs per-range retries; without them, throughput is a coin flip.

Baidu Pan, for comparison

Numbers from our Baidu speed guide, same server, August 2026:

Connections	Free	SVIP
1	0.05 MB/s	—
8	—	8.7 MB/s
16	0.07 MB/s	15.8 MB/s
32	—	19.0 MB/s

Baidu flattens out around 19 MB/s at 32 connections; going to 64 does not help. Quark kept climbing.

What this means if you just have a link

• A 2 GB file takes about 1 minute on Quark SVIP (64 connections) and about 2 minutes on Baidu SVIP (32 connections). On either free tier: 9+ hours.
• A 20 GB folder: roughly 10 minutes on Quark, 18 on Baidu — but folders with hundreds of small files behave differently (below).
• Neither is worth registering for to fetch one file. The account, the phone number and the premium payment (Alipay, which needs a passport to verify) cost more time than the download saves.

Small files: the opposite rule

We also tested a folder of 80 files averaging 28 MB on Quark SVIP, with the same 32 connections split three ways:

Layout	Throughput
32 files at once, 1 connection each	10.5 MB/s
8 files at once, 4 ranges each	3.6 MB/s
4 files at once, 8 ranges each	4.1 MB/s

Splitting small files into ranges is slower — the connection handshakes cost more than the bytes. Baidu behaves the same way (we learned that the hard way on a 13,230-file folder). Many files → many parallel files, one connection each. One big file → one file, many ranges.

Reading a Quark share without an account

One genuine difference: Quark share pages are readable without logging in. The share token endpoint returns file names and sizes for anyone, password-protected shares included once you supply the code. Baidu's share/verify requires a logged-in session even to see what is inside.

For a fetch service that means Quark links can be priced before any account is involved — and if the account ever breaks, quoting still works. For you it means a Quark link that "won't open" is almost always a dead link, not a login wall.

Where BaiduFast is on Quark

Quark support is live since 23 September 2026 on the same setup that serves Baidu links — fully automatic. Paste a pan.quark.cn link on the home page: you see the real size and price first, files under 150 MB are free, and the rest costs the same as a Baidu link. The Quark Pan guide has the step-by-step.

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Measured 22 September 2026 on a Quark SVIP account and 24 August 2026 on a Baidu SVIP account, both from Hetzner Finland. If your numbers differ — especially from another region — tell us on Telegram and we will add them.