Although PIRCH offers a great selection of features and sports a design that will be especially appealing to novice IRC users, it does lack several features that will likely keep advanced users from picking it over competing clients. PIRCH is relatively slow in listing channels for servers and also lacks the capability to filter the number of channels based on the number of users or the ability to sort based on the name of a channel.
The integrated Web support in PIRCH could also be handled better by offering users direct double-click access to a Web, FTP, or related site. And while PIRCH is available in both 16-bit (Windows 3.x) and 32-bit (Windows 95/98/NT) versions, as we mentioned earlier the latest release is PIRCH98, which is now more than two years old. ViRC, PIRCH's closest competition, is already one step ahead of PIRCH with features like real-time audio chat capabilities, bot and grouplist support, and channel filtering abilities.
