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Add to SafariWhen comparing Smuxi 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 Smuxi is ranked 20th. 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 Twitter integration
It's possible to check and interact with Twitter's timeline, replies and direct messages from the Smuxi client.
Pro Distributed
Smuxi offers an option to keep idling in a channel even when all front-end clients are closed. It's possible for a front-end client or multiple front-end clients to connect to a single server. This allows setting up an always on-line server that can be accessed from anywhere.
Pro Plugins and scripts can be written in any language
Pro Highly customizable interface
Pro Facebook chat, gTalk and Jabber integration
Smuxi has XMPP protocol support that allows integrating with Facebook chat, gTalk and Jabber.
Pro Theming support
Pro Caret mode
Caret mode allows navigating through messages (the output buffer) via keyboard.
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 Poor script and plugin library
Smuxi's script and plugin library contains less than 10 entries.
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.
