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

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.