Comments on: Three Free Multi-Protocol Instant Messengers You Should Know About

By: Arun

Arun — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 05:34:35 +0000

Trillian rules…..I have never used Miranda…..Pidgin does not work for me…It always crashes…….and is quite rusty….

By: sfmachine

sfmachine — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 23:29:05 +0000

Correcting my comment – Miranda msn can’t send custom emoticons quite yet

By: sfmachine

sfmachine — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 14:51:38 +0000

Miranda is pretty nice. So are Linux and Windows but this is subjective too
Finally can send custom MSN emoticons with a plugin. I see it runs on Linux (if winelib is used to make or of course using Wine). I don’t see any DB corruption or crashing these days (ran the fixer a few years ago). Might want to grab a plugin or two to pretty it up or add smileys for example and spend some time in the options (more than a sane person should want!)

By: Random

Random — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 07:53:27 +0000

^^Poster forgot to add “And if you’d like to waste your time using a crappy unsupported OS, use linux . Dont forget the retarded amount of work to do a simple task ” Just stick with windows and trillian. By the way, dont know how old this is, but you might want to check out Trillian Astra. Its a beta, but its like taking the best of everything and slamming it together. Ive been running it for about 2 months now without any problems or crashes. It only goes down when it updates, and it looks awesome.

By: Rich N

Rich N — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 20:47:15 +0000

I’ve used Trillian Basic, Trillian Pro and Pidgin.

When I primarily used Windows, I was very excited about Triliian (Basic). It was free and allowed me to access more than 1 network at a time. I dropped all my single-IM clients for it. Then I was disappointed by fact that if you wanted to access more than the 5, you had to pay.

After a major system crash and/or virus took out windows, I (financially) decided to try Ubuntu Linux. I heard bad things about Pidgin but seeing Trillian for Linux was FAIL, I gave it a try.

WHOA! Why didn’t I try this before? All the IMs I would ever care to access? For FREE? The lesson I learned was this: If you want to use software that was made with the sole motive to make money, Buy Trillian (oh, buy your windows version first) or…if you want to use software made for the enjoyment of it’s user, Try Pidgin for free; Better yet, give Linux a try and save a buck..or a hundred of them.

By: John S

John S — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 03:42:50 +0000

I started getting IM spam (spim) via the Yahoo connection on Trillian. So far, none of that with Pidgin and the privacy setting that says “allow only the users on my buddy list.”

By: Anthony

Anthony — Sun, 18 May 2008 03:37:49 +0000

I have tried Pidgin and Trillion, and i loved pidgin the most, but it had one critical item missing: voice conversation. Since i am away from home for school, i like to keep in touch with them, and calling on a cell costs too much; and since i am in a boarding house this year, i don’t want to jack up their phone bill So the voice conversation was the critical choice between Trillion and Pidgin.

The second crucial factor was that Trillion uses less of the system resources (6mb compared to 20mb for pidgin).

Overall, once you get used to it, Trillion is a nice application it works the way i want it to and it works for what i want it for: IRC and MSN.

By: Eva

Eva — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 14:56:38 +0000

I tried all three of these and ended up with Pidgin because Miranda is just plain ugly and the free version of Trillian does not support Gmail chat/Google Talk, only in the paid Pro version. Pidgin was very easy to set up, receives formatting and custom animated smilies from Windows Live buddies, file transfer works like a charm. You can install custom smiley themes in Pidgin, but my buddies don’t seem to receive them, they only see the codes. That’s fine with me, I’m not a big fan of smilies, but some of my buddies use them so much that it’s hard to understand what they’re trying to say without them, so I’m glad their smilies show up correctly in Pidgin. I must say, I’ve had Pidgin crash twice so far, but no data was lost. As far as styling, I really like the clean and simple look of Pidgin.

By: Kevin

Kevin — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 05:08:02 +0000

I have only tried Pidgin and i love it, It has yet to crash on me and it supports more Protocols. It is quite fast for me and i suggest it to anyone looking for Multi-Protocol Instant Messenger. Adium is the best for MAC in my opinion, my friend has it and its great. Thanks for writing this Jon.

By: Trey

Trey — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 13:08:30 +0000

Nice article, I have been using Miranda(0.6.8) for over a month now with no crash. I had used Trillian in the past but slowly moved away from it. Never tried GAIM/Pidgin, although have several friends that swear by it.
Would be nice to see Miranda and Gaim team up to make the encryped chat compatible. Maybe they do, never checked.
Would be great if they work together and take the best of both worlds.

MiranGin? Pidanda?

By: Irian

Irian — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 18:55:30 +0000

While I love Miranda and its flexibility and speed, I’m not so excited about its stability (true, I’m running the latest bleeding edge version, hehe). It crashes on me at least once a day. I’ll have to check the latest Pidgin, I haven’t used it since it was Gaim.

By: Jon

Jon — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 18:31:22 +0000

Nÿco, thanks for the heads up on the Linux and OSX clients, but they were omitted because I was focusing on strictly Windows clients. If I ever get the patience for Linux or the money for Apple, I’ll check them out.

Dan, I use all three of these daily depending on which I’m in the mood for, and I’ve had Miranda crash more than Pidgin, which has never crashed on me. I’d actually say that Pidgin is probably my favorite out of the bunch. Trillian isn’t bad, either, but it has too many distractions built in for my taste.

By: Dan

Dan — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 16:12:09 +0000

The problem with Pidgin and Miranda is they are more prone to crashing than Trillian. Pidgin actually crashes a TON, they fix a bug every couple months, but it still can be very problematic. Miranda crashes less often, but it still crashes. On the other hand, Trillian has been up and stable for ages.

By: Nÿco

Nÿco — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 12:39:57 +0000

Oops, I also forgot to mention Adium, the free/opensource multiprotocol IM client for Mac OS X. It is very pretty, and technically based on libpurple (ex-libgaim), the library used in Pidgin (ex-Gaim).

By: Nÿco

Nÿco — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 12:24:03 +0000

You have forgot Kopete, which is a free/opensource multiprotocole client for KDE, the free/opensource desktop environment running under Linux, Unix and *BSD.

http://kopete.kde.org/

By: brian

brian — Fri, 13 Jul 2007 17:48:13 +0000

I use trillian at work, it's excellent. I think my favorite part is that it does NOT recognize all the silly MSN messenger icons and sounds my coworkers are always trying to send me. Too bad you're not opening your list to OSX clients... Adium is one of the 10 killer apps I advise every Mac user to try.

By: Jon

Jon — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 19:02:33 +0000

They’re all interchangeable, really. I think the choice is just a matter of personal preference.

As nerdy as I claim to be, I’ve never logged in to IRC, and almost eliminated it as a requirement for this roundup.

By: n0ia

n0ia — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 00:40:39 +0000

As often as I DON’T use any type of IM service – GAIM/Pidgin has been my favorite.

I tried Trillian for a while, but it was LONG time ago, and before I was introduced to GAIM.

Never used Miranda, but with a client like Pidgin, why would I want to?

The only thing I don’t like about Pidgin (and probably the others as well) is the IRC client portion of it. I’d rather have a standalone IRC client like BitchX or IRSSI than use the one integrated in with one of these. I’d probably even go as far to say that I’d use mIRC over these. Scary. Khaled Mardam-Bey has my soul.