When comparing AstraChat 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 AstraChat is ranked 4th.
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 Easy-to-use interface
Pro OTR encryption
Pro Open source
Pro Supports file transfers
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 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).