Here’s the Deal

Quassel vs irc.c

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When comparing Quassel vs irc.c, the Slant community recommends Quassel for most people. In the question“What are the best IRC clients for UNIX-like systems?” Quassel is ranked 4th while irc.c is ranked 16th. The most important reason people chose Quassel is:

Quassal is available for free with source code licensed under GPL and available [here](http://bugs.quassel-irc.org/projects/quassel-irc/repository).

Specs

Auto updateNo

CRLNo

CTCPYes

DANE?

DCCNo

IPv6Yes

InterfaceGUI, TUI

LicenseGPL

Multi-serverYes

OSCPNo

OTRNo

Proxy serverYes

SASLYes

SSLYes

Scripting languageNo

TLSYes

URI scheme?

UTF-8Yes

Video chatNo

No specs yet!

Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking

Common Questions

What are the best IRC clients for UNIX-like systems?

Pros

Pro
Free and open source

Quassal is available for free with source code licensed under GPL and available here.

Pro
Distributed

It's possible for a front-end client or multiple front-end clients to connect to a single core client. This allows setting up an always on-line core that can be accessed from anywhere.

Pro
Easy installation on Ubuntu due to the existence of PPA's

Right now Quassel has a PPA maintainer, which allows you to install the stable version or daily versions.
Support for PostgreSQL as database backend and easy to configure for people that know a bit about systems.

Pro
Single server

Each instance of the client can only connect to one server and then you can join multiple channels with the join command.

Example: "irc -s irc.freenode.net", then "j #lua" and "j #chicken"

Pro
Open-source

The source code (a single C file) is under public domain.

Pro
Infinite scrollback

You can move up and down the history with the "Page Up" and "Page Down" keys.

Pro
Automatic reconnection

It automatically connects you back if you happen to get disconnected.

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Cons

Con
Potential memory bloat in monolithic client if left running for a period of time

(I don't know if this problem has been fixed in recent years, but I have doubts)

Con
No DCC support

DCC or Direct Client-to-Client protocol allows for private communications between users (without the traffic being routed through servers). Neither chat nor file transfers are supported.