When comparing AstraChat vs Pidgin, the Slant community recommends Pidgin for most people. In the question“What are the best XMPP clients for Windows?” Pidgin is ranked 2nd while AstraChat is ranked 7th. 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 Direct connect
Pro Secure
Messages are received from clients using secured (TLS or SSL) XMPP (jabber) protocol.
Pro Network efficient
AstraChat is tuned to make very efficient use of the network connection and processor so you can be confident that it will use very little of your battery or data allowance.
Pro Supports a lot of protocol
- RFC-3920:Core
- RFC-3921:Instant Messaging and Presence
- XEP-0012 Last Activity
- XEP-0016 Privact lists
- XEP-0054 VCARD-temp
- XEP-0085 Chat State Notifications
- XEP-0153 vCard-Based Avatars
- XEP-0172 User Nickname
- XEP-0184 Message delivery receipts
- XEP-0191 Blocking commands
- XEP-0198 Stream Management
- XEP-0199 XMPP Ping
- XEP-0176: Jingle ICE-UDP
- XEP-0136: Message Archiving
- XEP-0045: Multi-User Chat
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.
Cons
Con No OTR service
Off-the-Record Messaging (OTR) is a cryptographic protocol that provides encryption for instant messaging conversations. Astrachat doesn't include this protocol, that it is often included in other XMPP services.
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.
