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A multiprotocol instant messaging application is software that allows one instant messenger (IM) client to connect to multiple IM networks, particularly AOL Instant Messenger, MSN Messenger, ICQ and Yahoo! Messenger, along with some lesser known ones such as Novell GroupWise, Rendezvous, and Jabber networks. Some also support IRC, though this isn't really designed to be an instant messenger network (in particular, most IRC networks do not give a strong assurance that the person using a nick is always going to be the same person).

The major instant messaging networks have in the past been rather hostile towards multiprotocol clients, breaking them through small protocol changes. At one stage, the Trillian developers team was making a release every few days, since AOL changed its servers frequently to break Trillian. As of June 2006, however, there has been no such breakage for over 2 years.

Examples of multi-protocol IM clients include Gaim (multi-platform), Trillian (perhaps the most widely-used), Miranda IM and Instan-t (for Windows), Kopete (for Linux and other Unix-like operating systems running KDE), Simple Instant Messenger (multi-platform), PlanetaMessenger.org (for Java Platform) and Agile Messenger for mobile telephones and PDA's running Windows Mobile, BlackBerry or Symbian, and Adium and Proteus for the Apple Mac and the location-aware Meetro for Windows XP.

Jabber brought with it the idea of gateways (better known as transports). In this system, connections to the closed IM networks would be handled by a gateway on the users Jabber server, while Jabber users could talk to each other directly. This seems to function well for users running a private Jabber server, but large public Jabber servers sometimes become the subject of IP blocks from the large networks, or are not able to handle the high load. On the other hand, using a Jabber transport brings several advantages, both for the end user and the programmer of the client: less complexity on the client level, possibility to log in with multiple clients (e.g. mobile phone and computer) to the same account, lower chance for security and privacy risks for the end user thanks to the use of only one connection that can be secured to the Internet and thanks to the fact that people will not know your IP, possibility to archive messages on the Jabber server (as easy as normal Jabber messages) to comply with regulations such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, amongst others.

• Comparison of instant messaging clients