Chat software comparison. Your opinion please.

[Lea Verou]

RealChat is very good out of the box and its the most good looking one (according to my taste) but I wouldn't recommend it to any developer out there or any demanding admin. You get stuck with the original features and look (you can only customize the colors and the graphics - but you have to keep the graphics the same size). Its closed source, even if you offer extra payment, so you can't make changes to the software by yourself and the developer refuses to do paid modifications. It also seems quite abandoned. You can't even change the smilie shortcuts or add/remove smilies (you can change the graphics though, as long as your new smilies are not animated and at the same size or smaller) and the predefined smilie shortcuts suck.

123flashchat has more features and even though its closed source (it wasn't in the past, but it is now, sadly), you can pay for modifications. However, its customer support is terrible and its interface looks amateurish and its quite buggy. Its development isn't dead though, so we can hope for the future.

Digichat looks very nice and I got to know it better thanks to this thread. I haven't bought it, as I've already spent ~$1000 in the above products, so I'm not sure we can afford to try a third one, and I feel very sorry I didn't notice it more when I was searching. I had stumbled across their site, but I didn't appreciate the looks of the chat, so I didn't check the features as carefully as I should have. If I had done this, I would have seen that it can be very customized. I feel so stupid.