Revision as of 02:25, 5 August 2007

For your convience, here is a list of Instant Messaging (IM) clients that are known to support IRC.

NOTE: IM clients that offer that only partially support the IRC protocol have been omitted from this article.

Centericq =

Centericq is a text mode menu- and window-driven instant messaging interface that supports the ICQ, Yahoo!, AIM, MSN, IRC, Jabber, LiveJournal, and Gadu-Gadu protocols. It allows you to send, receive, and forward messages, URLs, SMSes (both through the ICQ server and email gateways supported by Mirabilis), contacts, and email express messages, and it has many other useful features. Known to work in Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris, Windows and Mac OS X/Darwin Operating Systems.

Fire

Fire is the first instant messaging client for Mac OS X (previously for OPENSTEP), that can access IRC, Jabber, AIM, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo! Messenger, and Bonjour. All services are built on GPL’d libraries, including firetalk, libfaim, libicq2000, libmsn, Jabber, and libyahoo2.

On 2007-02-23 it was announced that there would be no future versions of Fire released. The official Fire website stated there were several reasons, the biggest being the loss of developers, followed by the fact that most components libraries used by Fire are no longer in active development. Two of Fire's developers have joined the Adium team and have written a transition path for users to move from Fire to Adium. The announcement also says to look to Adium for future IM needs.

Kopete

Kopete is a multi-protocol, free software instant messaging client. Although it can run in numerous environments, it was designed for and integrates with the KDE desktop environment. According to the Kopete FAQ, the name Kopete comes from the Chilean word Copete, a word to refer to alcoholic drinks.

Miranda IM

Miranda Instant Messenger is a minimalist, open source multiprotocol instant messaging application, designed for Microsoft Windows.

Miranda is free software distributed under GNU General Public License.

naim

naim is a minimalist messaging and chat program written by Daniel Reed which supports the protocols AIM, ICQ, IRC, and lily (CMC). Unlike most messaging clients, it is not graphical; it runs from the console using the ncurses library. naim is free software, licensed under the GNU GPL.

naim is a multiplatform program. While it is primarily aimed at Unix-like systems (and is in fact distributed with several flavors of BSD and Linux), it can be made to work on a wide variety of systems including Microsoft Windows through the cygwin project.

Pidgin

Pidgin (formerly named Gaim) is a multi-platform instant messaging client that supports many commonly used instant messaging protocols. Pidgin is free software available under the GNU General Public License.

pork

pork is an ncurses-based instant messaging and IRC client for Unix-like operating systems. It closely resembles ircII, BitchX and other IRC clients.

psyced

psyced is a multi-protocol gateway and server application supporting the PSYC, Jabber, IRC, TELNET and more protocols such as HTTP. It performs as a node in distributed synchronous conferencing and instant messaging networks such as PSYC and Jabber. A special feature are its programmable chatrooms with the ability to multicast content to other PSYC servers and the users connected to it. PSYC uses its own multicast strategy on top of TCP and UDP to achieve that. psyced can be used as a replacement for a traditional IRC or Jabber server. It is available under the GPL free software license.

Qnext

Qnext is a free Peer-to-Web (P2Web) broadcasting software which allows users to share files and communicate with email and instant messenger contacts. It is cross-platform, compatible with Mac, Microsoft Windows, and Linux.

Trillian

Trillian is a proprietary multiprotocol instant messaging application for Windows created by Cerulean Studios that can connect to multiple IM services, such as AIM, ICQ, Windows Live Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, IRC, Novell GroupWise Messenger, Bonjour, Jabber, and Skype networks (the latter four with Trillian Pro which allows for additional plugins).