Pidgin and its code is completely free and open source. Pidgin has no ads and no features behind a paywall.

Pidgin not only supports IRC, it also supports plenty of other services such as AIM, Google Talk, MSN, ICQ and plenty of others. This way, you can have all of your conversations in the same app and won't have to deal with multiple chat windows being open.

The Pidgin instant messaging client is cross platform, working on Linux, Windows and OSX.

Pidgin not only has a large plugin library built-in, but also an array of third party plugins for a variety of functions.

Like other quality IRC clients, Pidgin features notifications that the user can set in order to have a variety of things happen when the users is mentioned, such as an audio cue or changing the system tray icon.