The following tables compare general and technical information including the differences in feature sets between popular IRC daemons. Grey entries in the list represent supposedly unmaintained daemons.
This article is neither all-inclusive nor necessarily up-to-date, be warned.
The operating systems the daemons can run on without emulation; also supported I/O facilities for network sockets (see IRCd for further information).
Various networking and IRC technology implemented to date.
IRC server features, mostly extensions to RFC 1459. Probably also implementations of RFC 2810, RFC 2811, RFC 2812, RFC 2813, and possibly IRCX.
+channels (In early IRCds, these were simply named channels. At least one modern IRCd (IRCD) uses the + prefix for modeless channels, i.e. no modes are supported other than +t, which is forced. Since no user can become a chanop, no topic can be set. This is described in RFC 2811.)
#channels ("+channels" were later replaced with "#channels" in version 2.7, numeric channels were removed entirely and channel bans (mode +b) were implemented.)
&channels (irc2.8, those that exist only on the current server, rather than the entire network)
!channels (irc2.10, those that are theoretically safe from suffering from the many ways that a user could exploit a channel by "riding a netsplit"; IRCds using timestamping provide (most of) this functionality on #channels)
%#channels (#channels whose name are in UTF-8 for IRCX)
%&channels (&channels whose name are in UTF-8 for IRCX)
%!channels (!channels whose name are in UTF-8 for IRCX)
