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Add to SafariWhen comparing Pidgin vs Wickr, the Slant community recommends Pidgin for most people. In the question“What are the best instant messaging clients for Linux?” Pidgin is ranked 1st while Wickr is ranked 12th. 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 Doesn't require a phone number
Unlike most, you can use your phone but you don't have to. You can register without giving anything and add contacts either via e-mail (only) or phone number.
Pro Content shredder
Wickr has a feature that not only erases all messages, but also overwrites them with junk data.
Pro Can find other users securely
Instead of using usernames, emails or phone numbers to find other users, Wickr uses hashes derived from phone numbers or email addresses (this applies to the find friends functionality only). Hashes are the result of a one-way cryptographic function, meaning it's purposefully difficult to reconstruct original data (phone numbers and email addresses in this case) from them. For Wickr, hashes are generated on the client's side so that no personal information is ever sent to the Wickr servers. The app finds people on your contact list that also use Wickr by comparing the hashes that get generated from contacts and comparing them to the hashes that are stored on Wickr servers.
Pro Group messaging
Pro Messages have user-defined lifespan
Messages can have a lifespan between 3 seconds and 6 days. Received messages arrive locked. Once they are opened by the recipient, a timer starts counting down until the message is deleted. Of course, the recipient can still copy them or take a screenshot.
Pro By default, doesn't allow taking screenshots
Wickr disables the screenshot functionality altogether when the app is open. However, there are ways to circumvent this, as if the user has a rooted phone and has installed apps to overide this block or if a screenshot is taken via some apps that project the screen to a PC.
Pro Includes a basic photo editor
The editor allows cropping images, drawing and writing text on them as well as add decorations.
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 Partially Open source
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Con Small user base
Wickr claims that one million users have downloaded the app with no information on how many active users they have. But even if every person that has downloaded the app is an active user, the userbase is really small compared to apps like WhatsApp that boast about hundreds of millions of active users.
