Pidgin
No written verdict yet. Here is what commenters said.
Why people recommend it
“Pidgin is still here although I'm behind on the monthly updates”
“Pidgin had it so good.”
Show 3 more
“Adding to this there is pidgin-otr”
“you can still use Pidgin and libpurple plugins to connect to a huge array of protocols”
“apps like Pidgin that would bring multiple chat clients together under one interface”
Caveats and dissent
“We had a bit of that with pidgin 8-or-so years ago.”
Often compared with
From the makers not counted in the ranking
“We never went anywhere and have support for modern protocols”
“we (Pidgin) just decided that Zulip was going to be the next protocol we were going to add support for”
“We (Pidgin) are still around”
“Pidgin is still here and does work (to some level) with all of those protocols”
“We (Pidgin) probably could have kept that code working if we had access to a server.”
Threads where it came up
- Meta to retire messenger desktop app and messenger.com in April 2026 3 mentions
- The No Kings Takedown Is Why You Shouldn't Rent Your Megaphone from Zuck 2 mentions
- Jabber/XMPP: 25 Years of Digital Independence 2 mentions
- Death of the Status Update: Why 55% of Americans Stopped Posting on Social Media 2 mentions
- Running My Own XMPP Server 2 mentions
- I replaced Windows with Linux and everything's going great 2 mentions
Data: pidgin.json. Quotes are verbatim; the verdict and theme labels are written by a model from these comments, and every clause links to its sources.
All comments 22
Jabber would like a word: https://jabber.org/ But seriously, there's zero incentive for the folks building these clients to make them interoperable. In fact there may even be disincentive, since the more folks they have on their platform, the more valuable the platform is.
“I used to use a multiprotocol client, Pidgin, to chat with people on a couple of different platforms.”
“If you want to use Pidgin with it”
Yes, but i haven't met someone who uses Pidgin in more than 5 years. Still, the pidgin team appears to be alive and their blog is always a good read! https://pidgin.im/post/
“We had a bit of that with pidgin 8-or-so years ago.”
“Pidgin is still here although I'm behind on the monthly updates”
“Pidgin had it so good.”
“Adding to this there is pidgin-otr”
“you can still use Pidgin and libpurple plugins to connect to a huge array of protocols”
“apps like Pidgin that would bring multiple chat clients together under one interface”
“purple3/pidgin3 (still in development) only supports for keyrings”
“well now you know ;) https://pidgin.im/plugins/”
“Pidgin was really top tier software. It was my favourite piece of software for a long time.”
We're still here... https://discourse.imfreedom.org/tag/news
“I used Pidgin for both, wonderful times”
“I want something like Pidgin.”
“We've never left. https://pidgin.im/”
“they allowed you to use open-source Pidgin to connect to the Domino servers”
“I miss the days when I could start Pidgin and it'd automatically log into every single service I use”
“Pidgin still has lots of plugins for many different chat protocols”
“I use one for Pidgin”
“you could use 3rd party apps like Trillian and Pidgin instead of the official clients”