The following tables compare general and technical information for a number of notable LAN messengers.
Basic general information about the LAN messengers: creator/company, license/price, among others.
| Protocol | Author, creator | First public release date | Latest stable version | Cost (USD) | Software license | Programming language | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| BeeBEEP[1][2] | BeeBEEP Protocol | Marco Mastroddi | 2010 | 5.8.6 (February 13, 2023) | No cost | GPL-3.0-or-later | C++ and Qt |
| BORGChat | ? | Ionut Cioflan | 2002 | v1.0.0 b438 (March 31, 2007) [±] | No cost[3] | Proprietary | ? |
| Briar | Bramble Protocol | Briarproject.org | 2018 | 1.4.19 (January 4, 2023) | No cost | GPL-3.0-or-later | Java |
| iChat | Bonjour IM Protocol | Apple Inc. | 2002 | 6.0.1 (1002) (February 1, 2012) | bundled with OS | Proprietary | Likely Objective-C |
| iptux[4] | Windows Messenger service | Jally, ManPT, others | 2008 | 0.51 (November 20, 2009) | No cost[5] | GPL-2.0-or-later | ? |
| Miranda NG | Windows Messenger service | Roland Rabien | 2000 | 0.96.1 (June 2, 2022) | No cost | GPL-2.0-or-later | C/C++ |
| Pidgin[6] | Bonjour IM Protocol | Mark Spencer, others | 1998 | 2.14.12 (December 31, 2022) | No cost | GPL-2.0-or-later | C |
| qTox | Tox Protocol | Tux3 | ? | 1.17.6 (March 7, 2022) | No cost | GPL-3.0-or-later | C++ and Qt |
The operating systems the messengers can run on without emulators or compatibility layers.
| Client | Windows | Mac OS | Linux | Android | iOS | BSD | Other |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| BeeBEEP | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | No | Yes | Raspberry OS |
| BORGChat | Yes | No | No | No | No | No | |
| Briar | No | No | No | Yes | No | No | |
| iChat | No | Yes | No | No | No | No | |
| iptux | |||||||
| Miranda NG | Yes | No | No | No | No | No | |
| Pidgin | Yes | Yes | Yes | FreeBSD NetBSD OpenBSD |
Solaris Illumos | ||
| qTox | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | No | FreeBSD |
Information on what features each of the clients support.
| Toolkits or SDKs | Private messages | Private chat | Public chat | Message board | Encryption | File transfer | Unicode (UTF-8) | Message filtration | Graphical smileys | Message logging | Whiteboard | Terminal Service Compatibility | User base in Active Directory | Serverless (No server required) | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| BeeBEEP | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| BORGChat | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | No | No | Yes |
| Briar | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | No | No | No | Yes |
| iChat 1 | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | No | Yes | No | No | No | No | No | No | No | No |
| iptux | No | Yes | Yes | No | No | No | Yes | Yes | No | No | No | No | No | No | Yes |
| Miranda NG | ? | Yes | ? | ? | ? | ? | Yes | Yes | ? | Yes | Yes | ? | ? | ? | Yes |
| qTox | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | No | No | No | Yes |