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Add to SafariWhen comparing Bleep vs Pidgin, the Slant community recommends Pidgin for most people. In the question“What are the best Skype alternatives?” Pidgin is ranked 12th while Bleep is ranked 27th. 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
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Free and cross-platform
Bleep is available for free on Windows, OS X & Android.
Pro Privacy focused
Bleep uses end-to-end encryption to keep communications private and leaves no metadata on a central server so no-one even knows the communication took place.
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 Privacy claims can't be validated
Since Bleep is not open source, there is no way to validate product's privacy claims.
Con Alpha state
Bleep is in early stages of development meaning there can be issues and it may be unstable.
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.
