When comparing Trillian vs Pidgin, the Slant community recommends Pidgin for most people. In the question“What are the best IRC clients for Windows?” Pidgin is ranked 4th while Trillian is ranked 22nd. The most important reason people chose Pidgin is:
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.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro In-house server support
You can set up a dedicated server to hold your communications. Great for businesses that want to build their own infrastructure.
Pro Multiple networks in one place
Among them Yahoo!, Facebook, Skype, Google, AIM, ICQ, XMPP, MSN. You can have multiple accounts associated with each service.
Pro Group chat
Trillian to Trillian group chat is available.
Pro Support for a wide range of additional chat services
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.
Pro Free and open source
Pidgin and its code is completely free and open source. Pidgin has no ads and no features behind a paywall.
Pro Cross platform
The Pidgin instant messaging client is cross platform, working on Linux, Windows and OSX.
Pro Convenient notification features
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.
Pro Highly customisable with plugins
Pidgin not only has a large plugin library built-in, but also an array of third party plugins for a variety of functions.
Cons
Con Supports all dead services.
Con Miserable IRC font controls (as of 2.13.0.17)
Does its best to avoid putting sensible default font controls in any place where you can get to it. And when it does grudgingly change it, based on system preferences (not local preferences), it does so in an inconsistent and unpredictable fashion.
Con No native VoIP support
While there are plugins there is no built in support for VoIP in Pidgin which is time consuming to implement instead of being baked in from the jump.