Digsby and Pidgin
I have been using Digsby for my IM client for a few weeks now. This is after a long time using Pidgin (previously Gaim). I have switched back to Pidgin for a couple different reasons but I wanted to give a quick run down of what I thought of Digsby vs. Pidgin.
While Digsby is based on Pidgin (the back end at least) developed in house and pidgin is open source there are some additional things that stand out that really set it apart from what Pidgin can do. First of all is the fact that Digsby is a server based application. What does that mean? It means you have a single login for Digsby and that is all you ever need to remember (once you are set up at least). Digsby will keep tract of what accounts you have set up, what the settings for each account are, and even your chat history. If you lose your computer and need to install Digsby on a completely different machine, or even a different OS, it doesn’t matter. All of your settings, logs, and connections will carry with you to your next machine. This also means that if there is a update to the software, you don’t have to track it down to find out what the latest version is or remember to download and install it. All of the updates are server based so all you have to do is start the program to get all of the new features, and possibly the new bugs as well. The last big thing that Digsby incorporates that Pidgin does not have is social networking sites. While I don’t use any social networking sites I hear they are quite the place to be. 
On the negative side, Digsby was missing a few things that I really enjoy in Pidgin. Although they are all plugins and could easily be incorporated into Digsby they are missing in Digsby’s current beta form (2858 I think). The main plugins I miss are text replacement and psychic mode. If you don’t know what either of those are you should really check them out for Pigin. The killer that made me switch back to Pidgin was email checking in Digsby. Although the options you have with email are far superior to what Pidgin can do I had a problem with Digsby not checking my sub folders in Yahoo and using the non-beta version of Yahoo mail which is just plain ugly. While that may not seem to be a deal breaker for some, I realized a week late that I had some important ebay, amazon, and personal emails that I was relying on Digsby to alert me when they came. Because Digsby let me down for those things (and because there isn’t currently a Linux installer) I have switched back to Pidgin. As soon as Digsby is out of beta I will probably give it another try. But for now Pidgin allows me to chat and check my email to my hearts content. I must admit I will miss the “report spam”, archive, and chat popups of Digsby in the meantime.
I updated a few things thanks to the comments I was sent clarifying a few things that I was incorrect about in my original article.
Actually, Digsby isn’t based on Pidgin. Digsby is closed source and all of our protocol implementations have been developed in-house (with the exception of IMAP and POP for email, which are from open source, non-GPL libraries).
Very good comparison! Their were some incorrect facts that I would like to clarify. Digsby is actually not based on Pidgin at all, we do not use libpurple at all its all home grown. Another note is that although your accounts and preferences are synchronized to our servers your chat logs are not. As for Yahoo Mail, their will be an update very soon that fixes the Yahoo Classic problem if you use Yahoo Mail Beta it will take this into consideration.
We appreciate your feedback and will definitely take it into consideration in future builds.
Even though i already read the comments about it not being based on pidgin, i must admit the same idea set on my mind as soon as i saw the screenshots. Looks promising, looking forward to using it once it is out of beta.
Fair enough. I see one more downside in Pidgin, which I feel important plus in Pidgin and I personally find it very useful. That is this grouping the contacts based on accounts (right now it supports grouping them based on service only). If you have more than one account in any service, in the Main Window, you find it very difficult to manage them.
The important plus in Digsby that I found is that you can reply from any of your accounts in a chat conversation. That is, if you have 2 yahoo accounts, you can choose to answer from either account during a chat. Though, this feature is a bit annoying sometimes. We inadvertently select an account that we dont intend to. May be an on/off check (account/service wise) in the preferences would do.
Digsby should be open source, that’s the only reason I use pidgin over it.