Comparison of IRC clients

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. Most commonly:
 * PLAIN as defined by RFC 4616
 * EXTERNAL as defined by RFC 4422
 * SCRAM-SHA-256 as defined by RFC 7677

Features
Information on what features each of the clients support.