After two years on Twitter and about 8.000 submitted tweets I’ve tried pretty much every iPhone twitter-client there is. I’ve used every one of them for a while and switched many times until I finally settled for the one best suited for a heavy mobile user like me.

There are many iPhone Twitter clients on the market right now and every day new ones arrive. I’ve prepared a field-test of the clients I’ve used over the past two years, based on my experiences with them, compiled into reviews, comparison chart, findings and ratings. I did focus especially on performance, ease of use, good integration, reliability and at least somewhat intuitive, usable and appealing design.

On top of that, if you leave a comment on this article mentioning at least one of your preferred iPhone / iPod touch twitter-clients, you get one vote in my contest to win one of three 15$ iTunes Gift Cards. Read more at the end of this article.

Clients in comparison: Birdfeed, Echofon (aka Twitterfon), HootSuite, iTweets, SimplyTweet, TweetDeck, Tweetery, Tweeterena Pro, Tweetie, TweetPocket, TwitBird Pro, Twit Pro, Twittelator, Twitterrific, ZiiBii.

Key defining factors: Price, Design, Reliability, Performance, Usability, 3rd Party Service Integration, Multiple Accounts, Facebook Connect, Push Notifications, Video Support.

Just before we get started: this is a test done by myself based on my experiences with each one of these clients compiled into subjective findings and ratings. There may be some features I overlooked, didn’t mention, forgot or even plain misunderstood. And I do know I compare free and paid apps in one place, but these are the clients I’ve tried out over my two years on Twitter, so that’s it.

Ok, let’s start

1. with client reviews and screenshots,
2. followed by the comparison chart
3. and over all ratings
4. and finished by a contest for you to win three 15$ iTunes Gift Cards.

Enjoy.

Client Reviews & Screenshots

Tweetie is in my opinion the best and my very favorite iPhone twitter-client. It has everything you can ever imagine. It is very fast, reliable, clean, well-designed and easy to use. Features I love the most are Draft Manager, 3rd party services variety, great usability, customization options and the great intuitive and yet mighty interface design. If you are a heavy twitter user, just get Tweetie and you’ll be happy. In the near feature I hope for Push Notifications, Themes and Facebook Integration to make Tweetie even better.

TweetDeck would be my first choice, if there wasn’t Tweetie. It has a unique design with configurable columns and several themes, facebook integration and synchronisation with the TweetDeck desktop-client. The app is fast and reliable with intuitive interface. I love the informative popups and the tools in the tweet-interface. TweetDeck is the best choice for a free client without ads. I wished it had an URL-Shortener, Draft Manager and more 3rd party service options. Anyway, an amazing free iPhone Twitter Client.

TwitBird Pro is a fast, flexible and rich featured iPhone twitter-client. It offers everything you’d expect from a good twitter client. Especially the clean arranged dashboard, customizable themes, music- & voice-tweets make the difference. The Tweet-Tool-Popups and integrated Music-Tweets are outstanding. It has Push Notifications as well, but per default TwitBird Pro – User to User only. The global Push Notifications package cost as much as the app itself. Anyway, great iPhone Twitter client with lots of potential.

SimplyTweet is a very performant and reliable application with all necessary features such as URL-Shortener, Text-Shortener, conversation tree-view and rich 3rd party service integration and some specialties as Push-Notifications, Browser-Bookmarklet and Notes-Manager on top of that. I only wished for Facebook-Integration in the future. I don’t really like the design-style a lot, but the feature that really counts for me is the Push Notification. I love that. All in all a amazing iPhone twitter-client with bookmarklet, push-notifications, draft-manager & more.

HootSuite is a very special iPhone twitter-client, with Features like no other. There is no other client with integrated scheduled tweets, tweeted links-charts and multi-recipient tweet-delivery. Very well done is also the user-profile interface with the very nice tab-structure and all usually needed tools right at one’s hand there. Scheduled tweets, track-statistics and the team workflow are really outstanding and hard to replace by other twitter-clients. If you’re not missing any other 3rd party services than ow.ly and hootsuite, HootSuite is the right client for you.

Twittelator offers in the free version of the client all the necessary tools, and there are even more of them in the Pro-Version there. It’s one of the heavy rich-featured clients, just like Twitterrific, so one could get really confused. Very unique is the Tweet-Interface, with integrated services ready to use and some special features, such as integrated Special-Chars set for instance. I do like the extensive 3rd party service integration, the google-maps integration and the browser bookmarklet. Twittelator is one of the very best free iPhone twitter-clients with no ads.

Twitterrific in the free version is the most rich-featured iPhone twitter-client out there, even though there are not even all Twitterrific Premium features enabled. It’s so heavy featured, that it get’s confusing and takes a lot of time to get used to that. What I really love about Twitterrific is the use of colors in the design, especially the colored tabs in the tweet-interface are really outstanding and beautiful on top of that. It offers all usual features, plus a browser bookmarklet, themes, URL-Shortener, GEO and more. Very well done are the general bottom-toolbar and the tweet-tools architecture. It’s a great free client with ads and the Premium-Version must be powerful indeed.

Tweeterena Pro is a perfomant and reliable client with good usability. On top of the usual features a good twitter-client should have, Tweeterena Pro offers posting to Facebook, browser-bookmarklet, URL-Shortener, full client caching, translator, themes and a draft-manager as well. I only wished for a better 3rd party integration and video support not just for 3GS. These days Tweeterena becomes 1 year old and there is already a new Project called ‘Eagle’ in development as a new client, just like Tweetie 2 did. I only hope they’re not going to cash one more time for the app. Anyway, happy birthday to you and good luck with the Eagle-Project!

Echofon, also known as Twitterfon is one of the very first rich-featured and usable iPhone twitter-clients there was, in the meantime available in two versions: free & pro. The free version offers basically all the necessary tools a twitterer needs, but there are some features it had before – as multi-accounts – disabled in the free version. There were no ads in the original Twitterfon-Version, but since the update to Echofon, only the Pro-Version is ad-free. All in all a great free iPhone Twitter Client with ads.

Tweetery is a simple twitter-client in a dark elegant design fashion with good usability, but with poor 3rd party integration and many missing necessary tools just as URL-Shortener, note- or draft-manager, video-support, GEO-Support or a bookmarklet. The only outstanding feature I can think of is the ‘Mute-User option’. The look & feel is good, but functionwise the client is not finished yet. Other than that is Tweetery a nice but basic iPhone Twitter Client with potential for the future.

Birdfeed is in my opinion the most well-designed, clean and elegant iPhone twitter-client ever, with all the usually needed tools and one neat dashboard, draft-manager, browser bookmarklet and infinite scrolling on top of that. The 3rd party service integration is good as well, but there is a serious problem with the performance there, what does the best design of the world count, if every screen takes minutes to load. I love the design and the features, but I really hate the waiting. I still hope for a fix, since I purchased the client back then for $4.99.

TweetPocket is yet another nice twitter client for just $0.99 with good usability and reliability but the performance is rather poor. It offers some 3rd party integration, some kind of a dashboard and music-tweets as well. Well done are the user-profile pages and the tweet-interface with URL-Shortener, photo-tweet, hashtag- & music-tweet-integration. I do miss more colors in this client and better performance. Way to go would be Facebook-Integration, videotweet-integration, a draft-manager and a browser bookmarklet.

ZiiBii is not just a twitter-client like all the others, it’s a river of configurable streams integrated with Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr and Yahoo and capable of fetching any other configured webfeeds. The combination of sources is unique and so is the interface, but I wasn’t able to get used to it and it felt confusing and somewhat strange to use. There is a potential to develop this client for better usability and bigger use-case variety. Interesting and unique approach with somewhat half-baked solution yet.

TwitPro is another basic low-budget iPhone Twitter Client solution with multiple accounts, facebook-upload and video-support, but poor performance and poor 3rd party integration. The focus on Trending Topics (Twitter in Real-Time in 9 predefined categories) is in my opinion really overstated and the configurable tab-interface didn’t work for me at all. Nice outstanding features are the offline-mode and battery-life optimization. Other than that it’s a simple straight-forward basic twitter-client for just $0.99.

iTweets offers one more unique approach to a twitter-client. There are no tabs, no columns and no pages. All Tweets are displayed in one stream with customizable colored diferentiation for mentions, DM’s or favorites. The most special features, like no other client has, are the “Tap Commands”.. Single tap for built-in web view, double tap for reply, tripple tap for favorit toggle. The client remembers the last viewed tweet too. Apart from these amazing features, the interface feels confusing and if you’re following more than 20 people you’ll be lost in your own timeline most of the time.

Top 15 iPhone twitter-clients for 2010. Comparison overview table.

My final results out of the iPhone twitter-clients I’ve used until now.

Best Paid iPhone Twitter Clients: Tweetie, SimplyTweet & TwitBird Pro.
Best Free iPhone Twitter Clients with no ads: TweetDeck & Twittelator.
Best Free iPhone Twitter Clients with ads: Twitterrific & Echofon.

CONTEST! Leave a comment to Win one of three 15$ iTunes Gift Cards

Write down at least 1 (up to 3) of your favorite iPhone twitter-client(s) in a comment on this article and get a vote in the draw for one of three 15$ iTunes Gift Cards. Feel free to present why the client of your choice is the best one for you.

If you write an article about this contest on your blog you get three votes in the contest, trackback counts.

All comments on this article before Friday, February 12th 2010 midnight (CET – Central European Time) get one vote in the contest. Every article about this contest before this date gets three votes in the contest. The draw itself will be done by my cats and monitored by my wife on February, 13th 2010, so you can get your iTunes Gift Card for Valentine

Contest-Rules (Terms & Conditions)

1. Please comment just once, every email gets one vote max.
2. If you write an article on this contest on your blog, you get three votes in the contest. Trackback counts.
3. The prize is one out of three 15$ iTunes Gift Cards. There will be three winners drawn and every one of them gets one 15$ iTunes Gift Card.
4. There is no refund of any other kind for your win, especially not in any monetary way.
5. I reserve myself the right to change the rules of this contest and to limit the duration of this contest. For more see the iTunes Store Gift Certificates and Allowances Terms.

So don’t hesitate and get your 15$ iTunes Gift Card for free here. Good luck & Spread the word please!