When comparing Snowball vs Adium, the Slant community recommends Adium for most people. In the question“What are the best unified messenger apps?” Adium is ranked 3rd while Snowball is ranked 9th.
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Extensive client support
Snowball supports Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Snapchat, SMS, Hangouts, Twitter, Line, WeChat, Slack, Telegram, Viber, Hike, BBM, Kik, GroupMe, Kakao and Skype.
Pro Easy-to-use interface
Pro OTR encryption
Pro Open source
Pro Supports file transfers
Cons
Con Not standalone
Snowball requires (some of) the original apps to be installed. This also affects resource usage as the app uses ram for itself plus the ram used by the other apps.
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).