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Add to SafariWhen comparing Pidgin vs Rocket.Chat, the Slant community recommends Pidgin for most people. In the question“What is the best chat software?” Pidgin is ranked 5th while Rocket.Chat is ranked 6th. 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 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.
Pro Free and open source
Rocket.Chat is available for free. It's licensed under the MIT license with source code available on GitHub.
Pro Native apps for all major desktop and mobile platforms
Rocket.Chat has native apps for macOS, Windows, Linux, iOS and Android.
Pro Supports a wide variety of authentication methods
In addition to the usual email / username + password combination, Rocket.Chat supports authenticating via Facebook, Github, Gitlab, Google, Linkedin, Meteor and Twitter accounts.
Pro Understands markdown better than Slack does.
Links work properly, for instance, with square brackets followed by parentheses.
Pro Very active and helpful community
Pro Video conferencing support
Rocket.Chat supports video calls.
Cons
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.
Con Developer support is non-existent
Can't even create a clean Ubuntu VM with a working developer install. Unresolved dependencies; fails to build. Docs are terrible; actual devs don't respond to questions; error messages are near-opaque. DO NOT RECOMMEND.
Con Web client loses images
In chat rooms with images, before very long, images start to become empty boxes. Useless to pass around visual information
Con No theme customization
Con No chat audit for enterprise
Con Poor security implementations / protocols
Con Centralized
Con iOS app is poorly made
The iOS application is not native, being just a browser container. This means that the UX is quite poor, slow, buttons unresponsive. At this moment they do not provide a decent experience.
Con Android app is poorly made
The Android application is just a badly wrapped web-view which does not perform well and has no form of offline caching whatsoever.
Con Privacy settings are absent
Privacy settings for the server are absent, for instance, you don't have the ability to disable registrations, there's no way to control access to the chat.
Con Features not available out of the box
Con No web browser support
Con Email required for registration
Con No way to block new registrations
Without the ability to disable registrations, there's no way to control access to the chat.
