Comparison of LAN messengers
The following tables compare general and technical information for a number of notable LAN messengers.
General information
Basic general information about the LAN messengers: creator/company, license/price, among others.| Protocol | Author, creator | First public release date | Latest stable version | Cost | Software license | Programming language | |
| BeeBEEP | BeeBEEP Protocol | Marco Mastroddi | 2010 | 5.8.6 | C++ and Qt | ||
| BORGChat | Ionut Cioflan | 2002 | |||||
| Briar | Bramble Protocol | Briarproject.org | 2018 | 1.4.19 | Java | ||
| iChat | Bonjour IM Protocol | Apple Inc. | 2002 | 6.0.1 | Likely Objective-C | ||
| iptux | Windows Messenger service | Jally, ManPT, others | 2008 | 0.51 | |||
| Miranda NG | Windows Messenger service | Roland Rabien | 2000 | 0.96.1 | C/C++ | ||
| Pidgin | Bonjour IM Protocol | Mark Spencer, others | 1998 | 2.14.12 | C | ||
| qTox | Tox Protocol | Tux3 | ? | 1.17.6 | C++ and Qt |
Operating system support
The operating systems the messengers can run on without emulators or compatibility layers.| Client | Windows | Mac OS | Linux | Android | iOS | BSD | Other |
| BeeBEEP | Raspberry OS | ||||||
| BORGChat | |||||||
| Briar | |||||||
| iChat | |||||||
| iptux | |||||||
| Miranda NG | |||||||
| Pidgin | FreeBSD NetBSD OpenBSD | Solaris Illumos | |||||
| qTox | FreeBSD |
Features
| Toolkits or SDKs | Private messages | Private chat | Public chat | Message board | Encryption | File transfer | Unicode | Message filtration | Graphical smileys | Message logging | Whiteboard | Terminal Service Compatibility | User base in Active Directory | Serverless | |
| BeeBEEP | |||||||||||||||
| BORGChat | |||||||||||||||
| Briar | |||||||||||||||
| iChat 1 | |||||||||||||||
| iptux | |||||||||||||||
| Miranda NG | |||||||||||||||
| qTox |
Note 1: Using Apple's Bonjour protocol