When comparing Kiwi IRC vs The Lounge, the Slant community recommends Kiwi IRC for most people. In the question“What are the best IRC clients for Windows?” Kiwi IRC is ranked 17th while The Lounge is ranked 18th. The most important reason people chose Kiwi IRC is:
Kiwi's default interface is aesthetically modern, while keeping a classic two-column layout with chat window on the left and nicklist on the right. Unlike many other interfaces, a considerable amount of effort has been spent on making it easy on the eyes. The interface offers common customization options including time format changes, choice of system messages and choice of laying out channels in a tabbed or list manner.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Beautiful interface
Kiwi's default interface is aesthetically modern, while keeping a classic two-column layout with chat window on the left and nicklist on the right. Unlike many other interfaces, a considerable amount of effort has been spent on making it easy on the eyes.
The interface offers common customization options including time format changes, choice of system messages and choice of laying out channels in a tabbed or list manner.
Pro Free and open source
Kiwi IRC web client is available for free licensed under GPL with source available on GitHub.
Pro Embeddable
Code can be generated that allows embedding the IRC client within a website.
Pro Available in multiple languages
Kiwi's front-end is available in more than 20 languages including Polish, Romanian and Russian.
Pro Free
Pro Highly maintained
You can see the activity here. For example 62 pull requests were merged from 2018-02-17 to 2018-02-24.
Pro Hosted on the web
Always up.
Cons
Con Notifications don't time out
Notifications pop-ups have to be closed manually each time, they don't disappear on their own after a set amount of time.
Con Requires additional install, i.e. 'must have this' to run
Con Server, not an application
This is a server, not an application, so there's that extra bit of overhead.
Con Uses NodeJS
Javascript...