Comparison of IRC clients
Wikimedia list article

The following tables compare general and technical information between a number of notable IRC client programs which have been discussed in independent, reliable prior published sources.
General
Basic general information about the notableclients: creator/company, license, etc. Clients listed on a light purple background are no longer in active development.
Release
A brief overview of the release history.
Operating system support
The operating systems on which the clients can run natively (without emulation).
Unix and Unix-like operating systems:
Unix (BSD): 386BSD, BSD/OS, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, SunOS, ULTRIX
Unix (System V): AIX, A/UX, HP-UX, IRIX, SCO OpenServer, Solaris, UnixWare
Unix-like: Linux, NeXTSTEP, OpenVMS, OSF/1, QNX, Tru64 UNIX
Protocol support
What IRC related protocols and standards are supported by each client.
Direct Client-to-Client (DCC) support
The Direct Client-to-Client Protocol (DCC) has been the primary method of establishing connections directly between IRC clients for a long time now. Once established, DCC connections bypass the IRC network and servers, allowing for all sorts of data to be transferred between clients including files and direct chat sessions.
IRCv3 support
This software is compliant natively; other software may be compliant with extensions.
IRCv3 SASL mechanisms
IRC SASL authentication primarily uses the same mechanisms as SASL in other protocols.
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This entry incorporates text from “Comparison of IRC clients” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.