Comments on: Miranda vs Pidgin vs Trillian – Review of Multi-Messenger IM Clients

By: Alvin

Alvin — Mon, 23 May 2011 02:42:56 +0000

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.

By: me

me — Sun, 22 May 2011 19:06:37 +0000

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 To me it’s possible the plug in you have is outdated for MSN or there are other plugins causing stability problems as I used to use Trillian and have tried Pidgin and Miranda is the clear winner against both.

By: Wes

Wes — Tue, 12 Oct 2010 13:01:59 +0000

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.

By: John

John — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 14:10:11 +0000

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.

By: Alvin Poh

Alvin Poh — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 06:58:07 +0000

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

By: Justyna

Justyna — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 06:06:03 +0000

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

By: Alvin

Alvin — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 15:08:36 +0000

Not at all, hope the review’s helpful

By: TeeJay

TeeJay — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 08:15:20 +0000

Thank you very much, Alvin. I hope we weren’t too hard on you.

By: Alvin

Alvin — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 19:04:31 +0000

Sorry guys! The post has now been updated with the full review that includes the 3 clients

By: sreekumar

sreekumar — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 10:36:09 +0000

Replace “Miranda vs Pidgin vs Trillian” in the title with just “Miranda”.