When comparing Pidgin vs Adium, the Slant community recommends Adium for most people. In the question“What are the best Jabber/XMPP clients for Mac OS X?” Adium is ranked 1st while Pidgin is ranked 2nd.
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 Easy-to-use interface
Pro OTR encryption
Pro Open source
Pro Supports file transfers
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 Appears to be abandoned
Not Gatekeeper-compatible, SSL cert expired, social media presence is ancient.
Con Lack of OMEMO encryption
the de facto standard for Jabber Texting [xmpp]
Con Release version has old OTR
The current release, version 1.5.10.4 only does OTR version 2, and version 3 has been out for a long time.
Con Lack of multi-resource message capability
No carbon copy, for example.
Con No antispam (built-in or by plugin)
It has no challenge-like antispam (such as seen on github.com/jesobreira/box-sentry plugin for pidgin).
