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."

Comments

And on Mac OS X...

[daveschroeder]

...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.)

Re:And on Mac OS X...

[Kadin2048]

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.

One word

[darkwhite]

Kopete?

bsflite

[John Nowak]

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

Miranda?

[PhrostyMcByte]

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).

Re:Miranda?

[flakier]

Beats the bloated trillian hands down. Not only that, source is free =) I can't believe it wasn't part of the article

Re:Miranda?

[arashi no garou]

Agreed. My favorite thing about Miranda is that it runs very well from a USB thumb drive. Put it with PortableFirefox, PortableThunderbird and a few other flash-friendly apps and you can take your entire internet desktop with you.

There's no great client.

[Poromenos1]

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.

Re:There's no great client.

[Poromenos1]

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).

pidgon/gaim is the only open source one, right?

[Anonymous Coward]

why would I use some adware instead of open source?

Trillian?

[loconet]

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.

Re:Trillian?

[Virgil Tibbs]

Adium only works on OS X.
Now THATS a niche market. ..but good on them for filling it...

Just as a middle finger to the lawyers

[Demona]

They should have called it PING: Pidgin Is Not Gaim.

Re:Just as a middle finger to the lawyers

[zalas]

How about: Pidgin Is Definitely Gaim In Nature
?

Interesting...

[helmutvs]

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.

Pigdin and the windows version

[AntiTuX]

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

Re:Pigdin and the windows version

[SeaFox]

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

I noticed it. But they did remember to mention that the Mac installation was "complicated".
I also saw them mention that the Yahoo mail checking didn't work. Hmmm, works fine for me.

Several More Words

[nurb432]

Kopete, Miranda, Proteus, Fire.

Their list of 6 is pretty sparse..

Re:No plugins in Adium?

[VGPowerlord]

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.