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Six Multi-Service IM Clients Reviewed
mikemuch writes "It's been a while since AOL stopped trying to jam third-party IM clients, and their use is now a fairly common desktop experience. ExtremeTech has posted a roundup of free alternatives to the standard IM software from the big boys — AIM, Yahoo Messenger, and MSN (now Windows Live) Messenger. The products are a mixed bag, some of them Web 2.0-based, like the excellent meebo and the ad-heavy eBuddy. Most give you combined message windows with tabs. GAIM is now Pidgin, Meetro tries to get you chatting with locals, and Trillian, now at version 3.1, remains the client to beat."
...as noted in the article but not in the summary, the "client to beat" is the excellent free, open source, GPL-licensed, and highly customizable Adium (more info).
(The summary does mention the other five of the six clients reviewed in the article.)
Kopete?
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If you want a very lightweight text-based IM client for *nix, try bsflite. I've been very happy with it.
What about Miranda? It starts out minimal, supports all the regular IM service, and lets you extend it as far as you want with addons (there are many to choose from).
I've been using Trillian for years and still like it the best. Gaim is nice in it's simplicity and cross platform use however. I keep trying Kopete but never use it frequently enough to adjust to its little quirks.
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
I am quite disappointed by the choice of clients. MSN's client is bloated and I've asked them to add an option to STOP THOSE STUPID WINDOWS FROM BLINKING when you get a message when it was back in version 4. It's something like 11 now, and I have yet to see that little option.
Miranda IM is small and fast, but lacks in features and it has this annoying thing where the send control is disabled for a while after you send a message.
Trillian is the best of all but still has many bugs (slow, can't disable video/audio plugins which I never use, it doesn't update MSN names, it doesn't use upnp or let you forward ports yourself, etc etc).
Pidgin is rather nice but it lacks many features as well (ctrl+tabbing through windows never worked for me, pressing escape doesn't close the window, it constantly gets moved to the second screen, is rather slowish, etc).
It's too bad that with this many clients there isn't a great one. Trillian comes close, but it does need a bit of improvement still.
Send email from the afterlife! Write your e-will at Dead Man's Switch.
"and Trillian, now at version 3.1, remains the client to beat"
... ... ...
*pffffft* Oh, that's hillarious.
Wait, you were serious?
I've never liked Trillian, mostly because of it's ridiculous bloat, general non-conformance to any UI standard, costs more to be useful (Jabber), etc...
"I think an etch-a-sketch with an ethernet port would beat IE7 in web standards compliance."
ad free, single page version
~/.sig: No such file or directory
why would I use some adware instead of open source?
In this day an age where Linux on the desktop is more and more common, I don't consider an IM that only works on Windows a serious contender.
[alk]
Trillian is a hunk of crap, how is trillian the client to beat? It can't even come close to many other clients. Anyways, they didn't mention the best IM client on earth: bitlbee
Is this really a Unix nerds site, or just another Windows/Mac GUI hangout in disguise?
I personally enjoy bitlbee quite a bit more than any other IM client. Just connect with whatever IRC client you like and there you go! Perfect integration with emacs, no blinky lights, no nothing.
If man has no tea in him, he is incapable of understanding truth and beauty
I found Trillian to be a horribly bloated, very unstylish, and difficult to configure application.
It seems that the only pluses it has is that it does modern internet communications media (voice and video) on these networks. I'm hoping that they've fixed the configuration system too since I last tried it.
Adium on the Mac is pretty damn good, and deserves the 8/10. 9/10 and 10/10 would be Adium with voice and video support respectively. The interface styles are all very sophisticated and configurable, and it's simply very usable.
And that's what matters, usability. I'd far rather have fewer features that I can use simply, quickly, and easily rather than more features that are exposed poorly via the interface. Of course I'd rather have usability and all the features, but I think that Adium (and the libpurple it's based around) will get voice, video and other proprietary features support at some point.
How about a port of Pidgin or some other open source (ad free) messenger for WinCE 5 (on an HTC Wizard)? The software that comes with the TMobile MDA blows (and uses SMS).
Invalid Checksum. Retrying.
The Yahoo client has some features all of
which aren't available on the other clients.
- At login time, itself you can invisible. In
some other clients, I have tried, you have first
login as visible & then change to invisiblw
- You can be invisible overall, but just visible
to one person or a group of people.
If I find a client in both of these features
are available, I'll switch.
Oddly missing were a host of good Linux offerings like Kopete (the built in kde client).
They should have called it PING: Pidgin Is Not Gaim.
Fuck Slashdot
u suxor nwbi adz r ez 2 dfeet
Seems like a biased review. Another missing good instant messenger is SIM
Sorry but I had to throw an exception on this one; all that trouble and it's not even a recursive acronym? Should try to go for triple recursion!
PING Is Not GAIM
GAIM Ain't Incorporating a MOP
Move On to PING
YMMV
How on earth can anyone sanction Trillian? Sure Windows UI is not the greatest thing in the world, but damn, it's as if the authors of Trillian tried their best to make it conform to no UI standard on the planet. The behavior of alt-tab with respect to chat windows and the buddy list is asinine, options are impossible to find, it's just.. downright TERRIBLE.
I use Adium on the Mac and really couldn't be happier. I wish there was something similar to use on my Windows laptop.
Message sends you!
You are reading a sig. Cancel or allow?
QQ and ICQ are very popular in China. I'm not sure why, but I thought I'd mention it.
Life is not for the lazy.
pig = pig IS gaim
now that would piss off some lawyers.
It's not just IM clients that suffer from this problem. Much of the software that tries to act as a general framework often is far inferior to targeted solutions.
Take NetBeans. Years ago, when it focused on only being a Java IDE, it was actually rather quick and efficient. Compared to JBuilder, it was extremely fast. But time has passed, and it has moved towards becoming a general-purpose application development framework. Yes, this does mean that it can now work with other languages and technologies. But the major downside of that has been significant performance loss.
On even a very fast, modern multi-core system with 2 GB of RAM, NetBeans can best be described as extremely slow. I suspect that part of this has to do with the use of Swing, which isn't exactly known as being the most resource-friendly GUI framework. Beyond that, the NetBeans architecture is very complex. This complexity may very well reduce the performance significantly.
Although it probably won't happen, I would like to see NetBeans return to its Java IDE roots. Say to hell with trying to be some ultimate framework. Instead, it could provide us with a sleek, effective Java development tool.
I agree completely. I use Trillian Pro and love it. I can chat with different users and do not need 73 different icons to do so. It comes with keyboard short cut, supports most features too.
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Any one else notice that the only product that got their little "ExtremeTech Approved" logo was Trillian Pro, which costs 25 dollars? An interesting choice for a list of Free clients.
There are no uninteresting things. There are only uninterested people.
I've been using trillian. Not for months, but YEARS! I've destroyed computers in shorter periods of time, and all I can say is Trillian is amazing. They don't ask for money, they don't try to cheat or guilt you, but their pro offerings are worth the cash if you need it. I've rarely had crashes (mostly when doing odd things) and in the last year their internet transfers are blazing fast (90K+ to AIM users).
Basically I want NOTHING more from trillian. It does everything it should in Basic and does it all well. It had tabs before the rest, it had logging before the rest. These are two of the most important niceties I've seen.
Trust me here, grab the basic, if you aren't happy think about the Pro but it's bar none the best out there, and I really have tried them all.
Adium - No
Oh right, they call them Xtras, so I guess they do not count...
Just 'cause no one else seems to have mentioned it:
Trillian Astra, a.k.a. Trillian 4.0, is in alpha-testing at the moment.
You can check out a feature preview here. The memory footprint and speed are two of the things they've really worked on with this version, and it's got some pretty funky Web 2.0 functionality happening, too. (q.v. Trillian Mini, this video, etc.)
Soylens viridis homines es
Anyone else notice that they stated that there wasn't a windows version of Pidgin?
Do any of these have email notification? My main reason for running Yahoo! messenger is for that. I have only one contact on it who I actually talk to.
i think i just like it cuz its simple, the ui hasnt changed much over time and tabbed chat window plus integration of multiple types of accounts works smoothly and seamlessly. Pigin now looks nicer i think. Plus finally for windows version you can minimize to sys tray, in linux that was ofcourse already happening but i use both OS's and i hate when going back into a windows environment and little things just bug me after being easy and not annoying in linux.
Balderdash!
From Debian's package: "A console client for AOL Instant Messenger and IRC. Naim is a console-based client for AOL Instant Messenger, IRC, and Lily. It supports the TOC protocol and can store its buddylist on AOL's servers."
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
What, did they release a Linux version? No? Then it's already been 'beaten', as far as I'm concerned...
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I'm a big fan of Psi ( http://psi-im.org/ ). It's not a multi-service client in the strict sense, but if you find yourself a good jabber server with the right transports installed, it's just as good, if not better, than a multi-service client.
Someone help me...I can't for the life of me figure out where this "enable/disable" thing came from. It's not intuitive, it's somewhat crude, and a pain in the rear. It's not that way on the Linux version, but someone who did the windows port thought it was a good idea. I strongly disagree. A simple "log in/log out" would be a welcome step forward.
we all know that true geeks use telnet for IM with other geeks
That was 2000 years ago! It's improved since then. Have him try it again.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
A free AIM client for Windows Mobile 6?
Agile messenger and their pay by the month crap has to go.
Apple is a company, not a product.
die444die
Trillian has been 3.1 for well over a year and hasn't changed unfortunately.
I still use it, but with trepidation after discovering the hack-job workaround it uses to process aim:// links that no one ever uses.
See I had this problem with my old computer that, something...some nefarious process was causing my RAID array to access once every second. And since it was four heads seeking every second it was pretty loud despite my efforts to build a quiet box. So I used Sysinternals freeware FileMonNT to find out WTF was accessing my HD and lo and behold it was fucking trillian. Trying to read some goddamn file that didn't exist every two seconds, followed by NTFS filesystem logging a second later. Hence disk access every second.
I actually contacted cerulean studios about it and asked if they had any plans to fix it. One of their developers responded: "No."
Thanks guys!
Glad I didn't buy the "Pro" version...
Question everything
I have been using meebo.com for months now. It is great to have my full IM chat logs available any where. At work, home, pizza hut (they have free wifi), my parents house, anywhere. It just works great.
Unstable Apps: Our Android Apps Don't Suck
Adium... "Group chat support Only join existing" I must be schizo then when I make those chat rooms....
Kopete, Miranda, Proteus, Fire.
Their list of 6 is pretty sparse..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
So is "IBM", but people knew what one was referring to back in da day...
A cheerful little bird is sitting here singing.
Try having 200+ or 400+ people on Trillian and its slow as hell to load. Pidgin, loads them all up within a few seconds. Trillian is awesome, but I got tired of it having to load.
Amsn is great if you need a .NET/MSN client. But someone should design some better skins for it in my opinion, still the default ones definitly aren't going to create problems with the memory.
They are really dedicated to what they are doing and are very good.
If you have to transfer someone who uses MSN to **ix or OSX this is what you should give them.
You can even get an Amsn Plus plugin for those who want it.....
www.tdobson.net #### Dare to Dream #### blog.tdobson.net
You realize that Adium is just a Mac-ified Gaim/Pidgin right?
well how great for you. Care to explain why? otherwise I think you should shut your mouth when the grownups speak
... Because that was such a grown-up thing to say. Save your hostility and condemnation for when people do something like... well, what you just did.
but have you tried pidgin/Gaim/miranda/ANY of the others?
www.tdobson.net #### Dare to Dream #### blog.tdobson.net
People gotta make money I guess... Just don't let the media tell you what client to use, decide for yourself.
~= scwizard =~
In the spirit of the old irc channel... It's Gaim or gaim, NOT GAIM. :)
Fear the turtle farming ninja!
No advertising.
Support for ICQ, AIM, MSN, and YAHOO.
Support for encrypted messaging with others using the same client (this should work out of the box with automatic key generation).
Support for voice and video features of the above networks.
Support for voice conferences ala ventrillo.
The ability to backup and import settings directly from the menus.
The ability to categorize contacts but all contacts should be dropped into a single default list unless you move them manually.
Creating multiple accounts on each network.
The ability to configure status, default status changes after a period of time (including disabling), auto-reponses, etc.
On windows the program should minimize to the system tray rather than the task bar.
That's it, fancy text, avatars, graphical smilies, and all other make my text pretty features shouldn't be implemented until the actual functionality is already in place.
Trillian is great, and was so at the beginning, but I feel the company has grown too big and they cannot excell as much as they once did.
Of course the IM needs to be GPL'd, free as in beer, and available for windows and linux. (Sorry BSD guys, I think your project is a waste of resources UNTIL the day that the borg is toppled and real healthy competition can begin.)
I use a single copy of GAIM on all my computers. The actual program runs on an old PIII 900 I keep in the basement at home, and I use SSH on my Linux machines at home and at the office, and Cygwin SSH on my Windows machines, then I X-Forward GAIM to whatever computer I'm working on. This way I keep all of my chat logs in one place and I have a unified experience across all platforms. Works well, except on a slow Internet connection; but those are getting increasingly rare...
- Murphy's Corollary: - It is impossible to make things foolproof because fools are so ingenious.
telnet.... pffft... we use netcat -AC
Miranda is generally good, although I think it's fairly byzantine from a configurability point of view. You can do darn near anything with it, but finding the right place to change such-and-such a setting can be pretty difficult (and a lot of the defaults seem to suck). And unless you're willing to a decent amount of time in it and download and configure modules for it, you're probably better off with something like Pidgin.
Adium X has all the visual and functional appeal of miranda to me only with a lot less required effort. It actually makes being stuck on a slowboat G5 powermac at work bearable. Now I would just like to see a cross-platform version of it...please?
Having uninstalled Messenger I had to use the command-line utility FSUTIL USN to remove the USN journal in order to get efficient disk fragmentation back on my NTFS pre-formatted disk. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/311724 - use method 2.
Artificial intelligence is the study of how to make real computers act like the ones in the movies.
Enable/Disable is in the Linux client too, has been for a while now. But don't complain about the UI was more user friendly in the old versions or the developers will ask for a objective reason other than "it was more like other IM clients, or it made more sense, or it felt better" They seem to have a "what do the users know, besides we're open source developers and they aint paying us so we don't care anyway" sort of attitude One of the developers said to me that he really didn't care if anyone used it or not. My thoughts on that were that if he felt that way why release the thing in the wild.
They're among the most user-indifferent devs I've ever come across.
For Windows, Trillian is lacking in two key areas when compared to Pidgin:
First, the Jabber module is shit. I mean seriously, absolute and complete garbage. It crashes constantly, takes up huge amounts of CPU, and that's when it works at all. This makes Trillian a non-starter for my work, since Jabber is a required service. It also makes Trillian worthless for Google Chat or any other jabber-based service.
Second, Pidgin has OTR as a plugin. OTR messaging (http://www.cypherpunks.ca/otr/) works with any client if you run it as a proxy, but with Pidgin it's really transparent. OTR is chat's killer app, especially if you're using an employer-owned chat server that might happen to log all traffic.
I'll gladly sacrifice video chat and all the rest of that crap nobody ever asked for in exchange for a deniable, secure encrypted communications.
Even Jesus hates listening to Creed.
OTR is academically interesting, but it's hardly useful enough for most people to be a "killer app". Very, very few people need explicitly fakable logs: for most people who desire privacy, standard encryption techniques work fine.
With a Bitlbee gateway running on one of your own machines (or even a public gateway) you can use pretty much any IRC client you like!
Six IM clients, and none of them can do voice with yahoo or google. Too bad, looks like I still have to keep those running.
Good god - that has to be one of the most incredible steps BACKWARD I've ever seen. I used to love Gaim. Now I'll use something else, because I hate the enable/disable junk, and worse, I can't stand developers who don't have a clue (and refuse to get one) with respect to usability issues.
They all suck. Now, I'm a big Pidgin fan, but only because it stands an inch higher out of the sewage that currently is instant messaging:
Encryption? Good luck. Maybe with a bunch of hacking and fucked up text files.
File Transfer? Maybe! Pray? Forget anything over 20 kbps, no matter HOW fat your pipe is.
Voice chat? NO! The major ones offer it, MSN, Y!, AIM, but none use speex, and ALL suck.
Video chat? YEAH RIGHT! The grainiest, crappiest, darkest, glitchiest.... Plus crap Audio! Hurray!
Ctrl+Scroll wheel to enlarge fonts? NEGATIVE!
MySpace IM integration? Supposedly in the NEXT version of Trillian. Despite 1.8 BILLION users or whatever.
Interoperability? pffft. Don't get me started.
Play Video games with friends? Maybe you'll get checkers with the SHITTY rules on MSN.
No ZSNES, No Mupen, No Hearts, Spades, Cribbage, Chess, Checkers, Texas Hold'em....
Granted, on Pidgin I can talk to AIM, MSN, Y!, ICQ, Google Talk (not actual talk of course!), ICQ, and some others, but I still can't voice chat, video chat, play ZSNES, or Mupen with my online friends. It's sad when the best client still lacks 20 of the most obvious and fun options that should have been in ALL of them from the get go.
The state of IM right now is horse shit. Pure, unadulterated, CRAP. MAYBE the SOC MySpace plugin will help Pidgin even farther, but still no Zsnes, Speex, or x264, I'm sure.
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
I still prefer the official MSN client. I actually keep a Windows VM going just for that, and for opening office docs and DRM'ed/proprietary videos. The client has some features that Gaim (it's not called Pidgin on my Ubuntu system yet) lacks, like webcam, and it *doesn't pop up windows in the foreground when I'm doing something else*. I can't believe that people put up with that.
I like Pidgin because it's available on the platforms I use (these would be Linux and Windows), it has support for the protocols I use (and a shitload of other protocols which I don't use, but I could if I wanted to). Most people say that it lacks video/audio support and they're right, but I'm not really interested in these two features, so this doesn't make a difference.
The thing which I doesn't like about Pidgin is that it forces simplicity at a point where I almost could say that it's a proof of concept application. Everything is minimalist about Pidgin, the last thing that made it a little bit nicer was that the buddy images now have rounded corners and your image is shown up next to the status switcher dropdown.
Pidgin could've been so much more appealing if the developers wanted to, but no, there is almost no control about how the buddy-list looks-like, not even color themes or something.
It may seam that I'm bashing Pidgin, but take a look at Adium, for example. It has lots of ways to customize the interface and how it works AND it looks nice, it is visually appealing. I know that Pidgin can be themed using GTK themes, but you can't theme ONLY Pidgin to be different from the rest of your apps on the desktop.
So, I'm basically proposing for somebody who has the capability and time to think about, and come up with a new "front-end" for libpurple, like Adium did, and create a new IM client which IS NICE and CAN BE CUSTOMIZED. It would be a different team for the user interface (the front end) and the pidgin team for the back-end (libpurple) which could work in collaboration.
Maybe I am too utopist but now, when the desktop eye-candy is becoming more popular, we should have a nicer IM client too.
Please note that eye-candy does not need to be obtrusive, and CAN help usability too.
What I'm looking for is a decent messaging client that runs on windows and provides video chat capability. Specifically I'd like something that uses Jabber/XMPP that will work with Google Talk. I know there's supposed to be a plugin (Festoon) for the Google Talk client but I think that's just too hard for my dad to figure out how to install.
...among IMs is the #1 reason most Windows-using folk I know won't touch Ubuntu - even though they really like what they see in Ubuntu and don't enjoy the idea of ever moving over to Vista. While they fully appreciate that there are a whole host of interoperable IM clients for GNU/Linux-based distributions, the interoperable features they most want are: voice and video conferencing, and Windows-alike Remote Assistance direct from the IM client. The #2 reason most Windows-using folk I know won't touch Ubuntu - even though they really like what they see in Ubuntu and don't enjoy the idea of ever moving over to Vista - are commercial computer games ports. There's just not enough of them for GNU/Linux. Suffice it to say, 99.99% of all computer owners I know and teach are not geeks - just cutting and pasting is an enlightening and enabling experience for these people - and if GNU/Linux is ever going to enter these peoples lives in the mainstream, it has to offer #1 and #2. But they will, generally, be satisfied with #1 in the short-term.
but what about (http://tmsnc.sourceforge.net/) and finch(http://pidgin.im/pidgin/home/) for those who despise the bloated whale that is the X windowing system.
I thought that adium was basically gaim restyle to match OSX, in which case it would sort of be cheating to list it separately from gaim/pidgin. I didn't realize there were any other differences..
Other than the common dependency on the same library, known as libpurple (as it is now known), they are very different. You should think of Adium as third-party IM that happens to use libpurple. Adium has already used other libraries for features that libpurple just didn't implement well or at all. The Adium developer work closely with the developers of the Pidgin/libpurple project, ensuring fixes, bug reporting et al.
It should be noted that the separation into Pidgin and libpurple is recent, but that an unofficial libgaim had existed before this separation, and this is what Adium used. The Pidgin team, at about the same time as Gaim got renamed, split the UI and the core logic into two units, in order to facilitate development. There are now three projects that officially used libpurple, these being Pidgin (UI for Linux, Windows and possibly others, where X11 is present), Finch (CLI UI) and Adium (MacOS specific).
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Hey I was drunk, which in my culture, is a valid excuse for almost anything ;).
Anyway you're right and my apologies to the GP, I just hate when people don't back/explain their claims (at least when I don't agree with them).
What about OneTeam ?
:)
The forum to comment is here: http://www.process-one.net/en/forum/viewforum/9/
OneTeam is working on all platforms with a Firefox 2 browser. It offers a native user friendly interface. Only our MSN gateways have been plugged for now, as it is in public beta and we will open gateways one at a time.
I am participating to OneTeam development but I am suggesting it here because it is still little know and we are working on improving it every day, so if you have feature requests, suggestions, criticism or praise, it is very welcome
OneTeam web client is in beta on http://oneteam.im/
Mickael Remond http://www.process-one.net/
This is not the signature you're looking for.
Not multiprotocol, but it definitely doesn't include everything that is wrong with the regular aim client. It also has xm radio, voice chat, and video chat built right in. Last time I checked pidgeon forgot to add video support. Plus no ads.
I like Adium a lot, but it seems it won't get any video support until gaim/pidgin 3.0 which I guess is a major drawback for some people.
Also, does anyone know if it's possible to get contacts from all supported networks in iChat in the same contact list? 2-3 contact lists suck.
Over here in Sweden most people use MSN but if iChat didn't looked like shit and used multiple contact lists I would use it anyway (it doesn't support MSN, only AIM/ICQ, Jabber and its own.)
A valid excuse indeed :) - it's all good.
By following the method described here and my own private Jabber server, I have all of my contacts (MSN, AIM, Yahoo, and GTalk) available in one place - GTalk. No matter what machine or OS I'm on, I always have my IM contacts available. It's not fancy, shiny stuff is minimal, but it works.