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Six Multi-Service IM Clients Reviewed

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the trillian-for-the-win dept.

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."

7 of 258 comments (clear)

  1. And on Mac OS X... by daveschroeder · · Score: 5, Informative

    ...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.)

    1. Re:And on Mac OS X... by Kadin2048 · · Score: 3, Informative

      I don't think you should put it that negatively.

      Gaim/Pidgin is broken into two components. It has a library part and a UI part. Most Linux users think of these as one product, but Adium uses the gaimlib backend but then has a very polished Mac frontend that uses it.

      It also incorporates OTR messaging, pretty robust logging features, good account-management ... all in all, its frontend and UI are far better, IMO anyway, than Gaim's is on Linux or Windows. (And it's better than the vendor-supplied clients, obviously ... but sending scraps of your own flesh by carrier pigeon are also better than those bloated nightmares.)

      As far as a user is concerned, Adium is an entirely different product from Gaim/Pidgin, because even though it uses the same communication libraries, all the UI is different.

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  2. bsflite by John+Nowak · · Score: 4, Informative

    If you want a very lightweight text-based IM client for *nix, try bsflite. I've been very happy with it.

  3. Miranda? by PhrostyMcByte · · Score: 5, Informative

    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).

  4. Re:There's no great client. by Poromenos1 · · Score: 3, Informative

    I would like to retract some of what I said. I just downloaded the latest Miranda version to see how far it had gone and I must say that I am impressed. There are many plugins and it loads in under half a second on my 5 year old machine. I am confident that once I wade through the hundreds (literally) of options, I will have it working just the way I like it. I urge you all to try it. There is even a tabbed windows plugin, it looked good in the default install, I changed an option and now it looks like crap (literally, it's light brown).

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  5. Pigdin and the windows version by AntiTuX · · Score: 3, Informative

    Anyone else notice that they stated that there wasn't a windows version of Pidgin?

  6. Re:No plugins in Adium? by VGPowerlord · · Score: 4, Informative

    That's OK, according to the table at the end of the article, Pidgin can't be installed on Windows, even though they tested using the Windows version.

    Which I think tells a lot about this report's accuracy.

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