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What advantage does Matrix offer over IRC?

Server-side history storage, optional end to end encryption, mobile clients with push notifications (the client doesn't have to maintain a persistent connection), voice/video chat, file uploads (and embeds for certain filetypes)... among other things.

Also it cleanly bridges to IRC so it's not a one-or-the-other situation. Was really impressed when I looked at it a while back.

I personally use IRC for text chat, and other tools for, say video chat (Skype), file uploads (a wiki, website, ftp, S3, etc), and so on.

You can also use OTR on IRC for end-to-end encryption, you can use IRC bouncers for persistent connections, bots to record history, etc.

I could see how someone might want all that integrated in one software package or service, though.

well, end to end crypto for one

You can use OTR to provide end-to-end encryption on IRC.

Aside from requiring everyone to install a plugin to do OTR, the crypto behind Matrix's Olm (based on Signal's Axolotl) is much better suited to asynchronus communication than OTR (and MegaOlm actually supports group chats).

There are many more benefits to Matrix, but just making clear that Matrix's end-to-end crypto is better than just plain OTR.

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