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.
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February 17th, 2009 at 9:20 pm
Thank you, Alvin, but is there more to this “review” somewhere? Some of us care more about how the clients work and less about the cool skins.
March 26th, 2009 at 2:07 am
Uh, Digsby is mad good, my favorite for sure. You should look into it.
November 12th, 2009 at 2:12 pm
WHERE IS REVIEW?? oh, im sorry to yell but it seems like someone needs to get upset at this article… you say its a review and i see nothing of the like….have you even tried the other two that you mentioned?? and furthermore PERSONALLY i think your review isn’t a review.
November 19th, 2009 at 6:36 am
Replace “Miranda vs Pidgin vs Trillian” in the title with just “Miranda”.
November 21st, 2009 at 3:04 pm
Sorry guys! The post has now been updated with the full review that includes the 3 clients
November 22nd, 2009 at 4:15 am
Thank you very much, Alvin. I hope we weren’t too hard on you.
November 22nd, 2009 at 11:08 am
Not at all, hope the review’s helpful
June 2nd, 2010 at 1:06 am
Thank you for your review! I'm not sure if it's still accurate because some time passed, but it helped me to reach the decision and choose Pidgin. Lost messages – it's not something I'd like to be bothered about.
Greetings from Poland
June 2nd, 2010 at 1:58 am
You're welcome
It *has* been a while…I've even moved away from Windows, so I don't know how those IM clients are like now too. Let me know how Pidgin goes for you
September 3rd, 2010 at 9:10 am
I use Miranda and I can say that MSN is totally stable. It gives you visual feedback about whether a message has been delivered, and if it hasn't, it gives you a simple retry button. That means you don't have to retype your text, just press retry. I hope that clears something up. Otherwise good review, I agree with it.
October 12th, 2010 at 8:01 am
Miranda is pretty ugly out of the box, but I took the time to read up on skinning it. And all was well. Then the latest auto-update broke my skin mods somehow, which annoyed me, so now I'm going back and forth between Pidgin and Trillian again. Digsby's history of malware is well known, so that's out.
imo, Trillian is very good out of the box, but, yeah, the default form, while looking nice, is a bit big and busy. There is a second included skin that can make it look simple like Pidgin. I don't know if they changed things for the free version or what, but I've had it installed for quite a while and now downloaded a bunch of skins from their forums and they work and it looks more streamlined. I also reskinned Pidgin easily enough, and that looks pretty decent now too.
Either could get the job done for me, but we'll see which wins out. Thumbs up for both. And for Miranda if you can handle the skinning. Its own forums were not helpful. I only got it reskinned thanks to a random blog giving a step-by-step process.
May 22nd, 2011 at 3:06 pm
I think your review of Miranda is slightly misleading. I’ve used it for over a year now with all protocols. If a MSN message doesn’t get delivered (rare for me) it asks you if you want to retry. To me it’s possible the plug in you have is outdated for MSN or there are other plugins causing stability problems as I used to use Trillian and have tried Pidgin and Miranda is the clear winner against both.
May 22nd, 2011 at 10:42 pm
I love miranda for it’s interface and lightweight architecture. I only use the basic plugins (and only chat plugs, so that’s functionality that you’d expect out of a chat client) and I’ve used the most up-to-date MSN plugin, but it still gives me problems. Google it and you’ll find that it’s not an isolated case. Then again, my experience with Miranda was during 2007 to 2009, so you may have had better experience with it more recently.