After having gone through the trouble of running both AIM and MSN at the same time, I decided to go give one of those multi-protocol IM chat clients a try again. There are 3 such popular IM clients: Pidgin, Trillian, and Miranda.

Miranda IM Chat Client

Personally I like Miranda because it’s so flexible. It’s pretty bare out of the box, but is fully extensible with many free plugins. You can change it from looking like this:

To looking like this:

That’s a screenshot of how the Miranda IM messenger looks after it’s skinned, and I really like how it looks! The only drawback I can tell is that it doesn’t support video-conferencing, so you can’t use your webcam, but other than that it’s great.

The only gripes that I have with Miranda is with it’s interface with MSN. I use MSN quite a bit, and sometimes messages just don’t get sent. Sometimes I won’t even know if the message has been sent or not – it would appear to be sent, but then I would find out from the recipient that the message wasn’t received at all.

That’s not all though – sometimes Miranda would crash in the middle of a chat, and I’d have to restart it. It’s not a terrible hassle, but I do expect that the applications that I use should be stable and not crash every few days.

Visit Miranda IM Homepage

Visit Cult Skin Pack Homepage

Pidgin IM Chat Client

Pidgin’s strength lies in its maturity, robustness, and cross-platform operability. If you care about having the same client for Windows, Mac and Linux, then Pidgin would be your best bet. Miranda and Trillian are Windows-only IM chat clients, so you’d have to use a different client if you have other computers.

In fact, I was using Miranda before I switched to Pidgin. Miranda looks way better than Pidgin – MUCH better. Just take a look at Pidgin’s screenshot here:

The only reason why I used Pidgin was the way it handled messages. For some reason, message deliverability was actually reliable in Pidgin. I couldn’t say the same for Miranda, and that was the primary reason why I switched away from Miranda.

Trillian IM Chat Client

Trillian is a great client, albeit commercial. They recently released Trillian Astra, which was hyped to be groundbreaking, but I’m not impressed. Trillian Astra comes in 2 versions: there’s a free version that’s slightly limited, and then there’s the Pro version. You basically get some more functionality and the ability to personalise your version of Trillian when you upgrade. Check out the comparison between Trillian Pro and Trillian Free here.

When I tried Trillian Astra, I wasn’t impressed by the way the interface looked, even though it was pretty apparent that they spent a lot of work developing Astra’s feature set. For me, a minimalistic client was better, but Trillian Astra just looked clunky. There were some pretty good looking Trillian Astra skins, but you had to upgrade to Trillian Astra Pro to get that, and I wasn’t going to do that just to get a better looking interface.

Verdict – Which IM Chat Client To Choose?

One of the main requirements that I have is a hassle-free chatting experience. If it requires me to troubleshoot and jump through hoops just to talk to my friends, then I’d just go somewhere else and choose another IM client. That was the case with Miranda. It was an awesome client that had all the requirements that I wanted on paper, but then daily usage was another matter. Chatting with my friends would be a frustrating experience because of problems with the MSN interface, and crashes that occur.

Trillian Astra wasn’t a good experience for me (at least the free version wasn’t). That made me switch to Pidgin, and while it wasn’t as visually appealing, at least it worked well, and I was happy.

Similar Posts:

• Tweeting with TweetDeck and HootSuite?
• Top Freeware Applications / Software (That’s Right — Entirely Free!)
• How To Fix The Problem of Suddenly Not Being Able To Send Messages With Your Sony Ericsson Phone
• Bloated SnagIt Screencapture Utility
• Samsung i780 versus Apple iPhone