When comparing Pidgin vs Brosix, the Slant community recommends Pidgin for most people. In the question“What are the best Skype alternatives?” Pidgin is ranked 12th while Brosix is ranked 26th. 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
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion 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 Excellent solution for companies who would like to encrypt their office communication
Brosix uses strong 256-bit encryption that secures ALL communication channels.
Pro Brosix is available on all platforms
This includes Android, iOS, Linux, Windows, Mac.
Pro Easy to use
Brosix IM facilitates the internal communication and increases office productivity.
Pro Affordable
For $1.70 per user per month voice & video chat, screen-sharing sessions, send unlimited files regardless of the size, etc.
Pro Great admin tools
The Enterprise version of Brosix allows the Administrator to manage their own and unique network. The Admin has also full-control over the archives of all chats within the network.
Pro Easy to use
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 Not enough Admin controls
Con Poor mobile version
The mobile version of the application contains only a few of the features that the Desktop client has.
