Standard Atlassian MO for all of their products. They get you by having what would be a fairly small team in your company (usually 5 people) using their product and they are the trojan horse that then makes you end up purchasing a license.
That sounds like it's either an unclear arrangement ('trojan horse') or a bad thing ('makes you end up purchasing'). Atlassian makes great products and, if your team/company grows to the size where you need to pay, the cost is far less than the value of time saved. Sometimes, it's worth avoiding the hassle of free/open-source projects for critical tools.
I say this is a very happy paying Atlassian paying customer.
We pay for Atlassian products at my company as well. I just call their business model the "trojan horse". I personally don't prefer their products but that is not to say they are bad.
It's essentially pretty IRC. What makes it better than IRC is a better question. The answer is that you don't have to setup and maintain an IRC server, and have the power of bots through APIs.
HipChat's API's are severely lacking. There's no way to read messages from chat without using their halfway working XMPP implementation on a separate user account.
On the other hand, sending and receiving messages to IRC is pretty simple and straightforward. There are also tons of IRC libraries.
It's more like IRC, and the one thing that really makes it better is the chat history (which you could do with an IRC bot, but then you have to maintain that). The push notifications when someone messages you when you're offline are pretty nice too.
Does anyone have IRC as a service? I used to run an IRC server for my company, but as mentioned, there is the maintenance part. There is already more work that needs to be done than hours to do it.
I would like to see more start ups utilize existing protocols such as RSS and IRC.
Your are thinking of http://grove.io from Leah Culver of Pownce and Convor. Convor shut down and she started Grove, still there and running plus it has a sensible revenue model.
The biggest difference is that HipChat is primarily about "rooms" and less about messaging individual people (although you can do that too). It makes for much better team workflow, because it enables a lot more passive information sharing. Most people in a room don't want to be actively involved in everything, but they would like to passively just see what's going on.
Secondly, it's centralized around a company, so you know that everyone has everyone else on HipChat, unlike Skype, where everyone needs to manage their contact list separately.
Finally, the notification features are really nice. I can just @mention someone's name, and it's like summoning them into the room to answer a question for me. It's way smoother than adding someone to a Skype conversation, since they'll be able to trace back the history of the conversation.
Good summary. HipChat is simply very tuned to the needs of a workgroup, not just simple IMing. I especially found that it was good at notifying via email about a missed chat you likely want to have a look at.
Rooms can be created on Skype, that's the way we use skype in our business, we create a group chat between all the relevant people and then favorite it and it's the same as a room.
The contact list issue is good I think for larger companies especially in the beginning.
I'm wondering about how the integrations could be used in our business, and I'm also wondering if we can integrate our software with HipChat
I think the difference is that rooms are a focus of HipChat, and an afterthought / hack in Skype. Similar to how individual, "not in a room" conversation is an afterthought in HipChat.
In both cases you can technically do it, but the app doesn't go out of it's way to make it easy or well-supported. If you find you're using your favorited lists to chat more than one-on-one conversations, I'd really recommend trying out HipChat.
For what it's worth, we regularly use Skype at our office as well as HipChat. They both excel at what they were designed to do, and we don't necessarily see a problem with using two tools if it means you don't have to shove a round peg into a square hole.
The thing that is nice about Hipchat, it pains me to say, is that messages actually get delivered the moment you send them. Skype is completely unpredictable.
My company recently started using Skype as a free hipchat-like service. My complaints with it so far have been:
-you have to explicitly enable history to have people entering a conversation see it.
-When I send a message on my computer, I get a notification about my own message on my phone.
I trialled HipChat a little while ago, but there is no phone?
For me that was a deal breaker - if it had a skype-like talk option as well, it would serve the purpose. People like the all-in-one tool that Skype is, even if the chat side is weak.
Messages sent in a Skype chat room when you are offline are only sent to your client when other members of the room are online. So if you sign on before the rest of the participants in the morning, you don't see any messages sent overnight until someone else joins.
Genius move. Unless their infrastructure is really tuned for it, there is a cost of doing business under, say $10/mo (not to say that there aren't companies successfully doing micro payments and such). Premium support, CC processing, etc add up. However, using this lower rung as a hook to get people in the door is great, and it feels more honest than a trial window (although I'm certainly not hating on trials)
I think this is strategically a good move, as free and Open source alternatives like Kandan would be more attractive to teams of under 5 users than a paid (even though very affordable) solution like Hipchat.
One critical thing I recently learned -- Hipchat is run exclusively out of Amazon's US-East region. If you're using Hipchat for anything operational, make sure you aren't also exclusively in US-East. Otherwise, if there is a region-wide issue in Us-East, you're gonna have a bad time.
Hey there. Didn't intend to call you out, just wanted to make sure other's didn't get bit. :) You don't have an email in your profile, but shoot me one and maybe we can chat a bit more.
But what if I'm an old customer with 6 people on the team? Now I see that they are giving away what I have been paying for. Not a very strategically sound decision.
Nothing wrong against it since it is mosting a marketing comparison chart. IRC is fairly hard to use if you aren't familiar with it already so I get it.
We decided to try out an IRC channel because it was easy to get started, no cost really, and knowing how to connect to IRC is important if you ever want to get support inside #python or #django. Plus lots of other open source projects have IRC so it is good to know.
Shameless plug here, re: "IRC is fairly hard to use if you aren't familiar with it already"
I'm currently working on a web based IRC client called Relay.js (https://github.com/Fauntleroy/relay.js), which is my attempt at making IRC a little more approachable. It's pretty basic at the moment, but I hope to make it something really special in the coming months.
Ooh, if you're open to suggestions, my number one frustration with IRC goes like this: I'm connected and happily chatting, but then my Wifi blips and I'm disconnected. There's no chat log, so I don't know what I missed. And on crappy connections, this can happen pretty frequently.
I know there are programs that'll keep you online and collect chat logs even if you disconnect, but it seems ridiculous to have to set up a server just so I can chat.
If you fix this problem, I'd happily fork over at least $10/month, maybe more.
> I'm connected and happily chatting, but then my Wifi blips and I'm disconnected. There's no chat log, so I don't know what I missed. And on crappy connections, this can happen pretty frequently.
So a bouncer + web interface, huh? I'd better get to work..
During my time inside Trolltech/Nokia, everyone was on Freenode and our internal IRC server. A lot of people were connected through a client called Quassel [0] which is basically a distributed IRC client you can access from multiple machines (-> you'd host it on a server, it stores the backlog and everything else for you).
In my current startup we have the same (internal IRC server) and we also thought offering Quassel hosting [1] is a good idea.
FWIW, I set up a tutorial for my friends for IRC. If you explain it simply enough, it will work. I have 25+ of my friends on it now, most of whom not knowing what IRC was.
My friend was working on a web client for IRC [1] that provides a persistent connection (and hence chat history). I'm not sure if he's gonna finish it though.
We use http://partychapp.appspot.com (it was recommended on a previous HN posting). We already used Google Talk for one on one chats so this just adds a group chat into that, and works really well. It also doesn't require additional clients, doing group chats differently than one on one, yet more usernames and passwords etc.
Used to use this, then it was always down. Now use http://Jaconda.im. Always just works, has a convenient web interface as well for great room history.
We switched last night to Jaconda - thanks for the recommendation. While partychat never failed for us, it did prove limiting (eg no search) and seemed increasingly unmaintained (/commands not working). Jaconda also has Github integration which was nice.
Does (m)IRC have the ability to log everything? It's been a decade since I've used mIRC but I could have sworn I was able to save everything even back then.
It certainly does. I'm pretty sure that almost every IRC client can do this, as can IM clients like Pidgin. (That reminds me: does Hipchat work well with Pidgin?)
edit: I think the difference on that chart, though, is that mIRC is a __client__, whereas I suspect that Hipchat's server also does logging -- so that you can see the chat log even if you were previously not connected. That's not something that is normally suported with IRC. You could roll your own with a custom client and server, I expect, but at that point you'd be investing probably more effort than it's worth.
We tried using Skype with our remote team. Of the top of my head, the following problems made us switch:
(a) Reliability (We were losing a lot of messages between people. Especially offline messages)
(b) Duplicate messages (As all of us have multiple machines, we were getting a lot of duplicate messages, depending on which machines were on and logged-in, and when)
(c) Poor search (Searching months old messages is a major hassle in Skype)
When my team and I started using HipChat, I wasn't really sure what to expect (since every chat application prior to it seemed pretty much the same).
I've found these benefits:
- Works on all of my devices. If someone @mentions me, it'll notify my phone just like a text message and/or email me (unless I disable that). And I can reply from my phone's hipchat client.
- Chat rooms and 1-on-1 work seemlessly. Chat rooms can also be public or private.
- History is persistent and searchable.
- Sharing files is as easy as a click. Sharing screenshots/mockups/images is as easy as copy/paste (we use this a lot)
- On the right-hand side of the chat room there is a list of all links & files shared in the room that you can easily search through.
- You can have guest access in chat rooms.
-It integrates with github and other services so that when we do certain things with our repository, it will notify one of our chat rooms.
And a million other little things. There is no single feature that made me think "I must use HipChat, this is awesome.", but rather a bunch of minor things that "just worked" and fit nicely together into a great experience.
Google+ hangouts rock for development teams. The multiple screenshares is great for looking over someone's shoulder and getting feedback from your peers. It's the first thing I turn on in the morning.
BTW, you don't have to share your entire screen just the app you want them to see.
I like that the project you decided to use in your mockup on your homepage is "Duke Nukem Forever - release once it is perfect and not one second earlier".
We're working hard on it. If you'd like to get on the list early, and help us by providing some info, please check here: https://www.hipchat.com/firewall
For those asking "why is HipChat better than X", one of the big reasons lies with the number of integrations with other products.
Our product Bugsnag (https://bugsnag.com) has HipChat integration, so you can instantly see errors from your apps appear in your chat room. We've also set up curl scripts to post into chat whenever there is a deploy, or push to GitHub.
Does it work with multiple organizations? Can I have an account that is free for me and 4 friends, but also be part of an organization that someone else pays for?
Or as a contractor - could I be part of two different paying organizations?
One person creates the "organisation", and then creates users/accounts within that organisation (or invites people). The organisation pays the bills. I assume it's not "first 5 people free" if you have more but either "up to 5 people free' or $2/mo/user - so if you have 6 it's 6 x $2/mo. Similar to Atlassian's other products with their $10/10 user tier.
Looking at the Billing screen of our 45 user account it doesn't seem like anything has changed (will still be $90/mo)
Disappointing that this is still not supported. The need to be able to join multiple organizations is what prevented me from advocating for my company to switch to HipChat a year ago. Unfortunately it looks like http://help.hipchat.com/forums/138883-suggestions/suggestion... has not received much attention.
HipChat has surprisingly been the most effective productivity tool we've taken up in the past 5 years.
After only a month of use, virtually all communication and notification streams (GitHub, Jenkins, Zendesk, systems monitoring) in our company have converged in HipChat. It's hard to imagine we've ever done without.
We were surprised to see our account go from paid to free this morning. Hipchat has been a great tool for our startup. We had initial pushback that IRC implementations could cover us and be free and better.
Hipchat was extremely easy and multiplatform. It just worked. (except animated gifs sometimes) Even our strongest holdout for IRC has at least stopped talking about IRC.
The company has been iterating on their new mac os x client with releases every week or two since it launched. I'm still impressed with this company's quality and am psyched that we now have one less bill to pay.
We've been using HipChat at Blimp since the very first day, we've even integrated it as our Support Chat. We are only three at the moment but have paid for up to 4 users. One less thing we have to pay for, and still be able to use such a great product.
This is a perfect size team for using HipChat. We tried HipChat at Gilt with around 40 engineers and it was too cumbersome because of the number of groups.
I hope they finally allowed users to edit their comments. That was one notable issue I had. Also, there was no such thing as a "private" group because admins had access to all groups.
Anyone use HipChat and Olark? I'm worried that switching off our regular chat will make me sign on more and our users won't be able to contact us on Olark.
If you had 6 users, you were not converted to a free account (obviously).
I had an account that became unneeded today, so I removed it... and then I contacted support about getting the free plan.
Their message about contacting support to get switched over is basically a lie because they tell you to delete your account and sign up new.
Sure, I'm paying for it now and get value from it, but every dollar matters at this point and if they are gonna help me save $10/month then I'd be happy! But instead I feel jaded.
Hey - Garret from HipChat here. That support info is not correct, and I'll investigate. All you need to do is go to the billing admin area and select the option to cancel your paid subscription. The message there will tell you that you have 5 users and that it's OK to cancel.
I've paid for hipchat in the past for managing teams in multiple timezones across the globe. Flowdock's ability to set tags and easily search conversations is great when you need to find that one temporary server password mentioned by a previous ops shift makes it much more useful in this case. Flowdock take note re: pricing.
Glad I saw this. We've got a team of three at SearchTempest and have been communicating almost entirely by email and gchat thus far. Have been meaning to try something a bit more feature rich for a while. Was planning to check out Google Hangouts, but HipChat sounds ideal. Will give it a look.
122 comments
[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 167 ms ] threadI say this is a very happy paying Atlassian paying customer.
GitHub - mickey commented on issue 104 of xxx/fronted: +1
GitHub - yoktan pushed to branch master of xxx/frontend - Txt (c7bd9a3)
Jenkins - backend-master - #481 FAILURE after 3 min 18 sec (Open)
Bugsnag - Exception in production from frontend in votes#index (details) RuntimeError: # app/controllers/votes_controller.rb:6 - index
On the other hand, sending and receiving messages to IRC is pretty simple and straightforward. There are also tons of IRC libraries.
That's exactly the use case for which I started building http://www.getinstabot.com/, but I haven't seen much interest, sadly.
I would like to see more start ups utilize existing protocols such as RSS and IRC.
Secondly, it's centralized around a company, so you know that everyone has everyone else on HipChat, unlike Skype, where everyone needs to manage their contact list separately.
Finally, the notification features are really nice. I can just @mention someone's name, and it's like summoning them into the room to answer a question for me. It's way smoother than adding someone to a Skype conversation, since they'll be able to trace back the history of the conversation.
The contact list issue is good I think for larger companies especially in the beginning.
I'm wondering about how the integrations could be used in our business, and I'm also wondering if we can integrate our software with HipChat
In both cases you can technically do it, but the app doesn't go out of it's way to make it easy or well-supported. If you find you're using your favorited lists to chat more than one-on-one conversations, I'd really recommend trying out HipChat.
For what it's worth, we regularly use Skype at our office as well as HipChat. They both excel at what they were designed to do, and we don't necessarily see a problem with using two tools if it means you don't have to shove a round peg into a square hole.
For me that was a deal breaker - if it had a skype-like talk option as well, it would serve the purpose. People like the all-in-one tool that Skype is, even if the chat side is weak.
As an aside I think IRC is being sold short on this chart:
https://www.hipchat.com/compare
Nothing wrong against it since it is mosting a marketing comparison chart. IRC is fairly hard to use if you aren't familiar with it already so I get it.
We decided to try out an IRC channel because it was easy to get started, no cost really, and knowing how to connect to IRC is important if you ever want to get support inside #python or #django. Plus lots of other open source projects have IRC so it is good to know.
I'm currently working on a web based IRC client called Relay.js (https://github.com/Fauntleroy/relay.js), which is my attempt at making IRC a little more approachable. It's pretty basic at the moment, but I hope to make it something really special in the coming months.
[1]: https://github.com/thedjpetersen/subway
[2]: https://github.com/prawnsalad/KiwiIRC
I know there are programs that'll keep you online and collect chat logs even if you disconnect, but it seems ridiculous to have to set up a server just so I can chat.
If you fix this problem, I'd happily fork over at least $10/month, maybe more.
For now you can always try out https://www.irccloud.com or https://github.com/thedjpetersen/subway
Eggdrop bot is a common one, open source, etc.
So a bouncer + web interface, huh? I'd better get to work..
In my current startup we have the same (internal IRC server) and we also thought offering Quassel hosting [1] is a good idea.
[0] http://www.quassel-irc.org/
[1] http://quassel.woboq.com/
[1] https://github.com/pavben/WebIRC
edit: I think the difference on that chart, though, is that mIRC is a __client__, whereas I suspect that Hipchat's server also does logging -- so that you can see the chat log even if you were previously not connected. That's not something that is normally suported with IRC. You could roll your own with a custom client and server, I expect, but at that point you'd be investing probably more effort than it's worth.
I've found these benefits:
- Works on all of my devices. If someone @mentions me, it'll notify my phone just like a text message and/or email me (unless I disable that). And I can reply from my phone's hipchat client.
- Chat rooms and 1-on-1 work seemlessly. Chat rooms can also be public or private.
- History is persistent and searchable.
- Sharing files is as easy as a click. Sharing screenshots/mockups/images is as easy as copy/paste (we use this a lot)
- On the right-hand side of the chat room there is a list of all links & files shared in the room that you can easily search through.
- You can have guest access in chat rooms.
-It integrates with github and other services so that when we do certain things with our repository, it will notify one of our chat rooms.
And a million other little things. There is no single feature that made me think "I must use HipChat, this is awesome.", but rather a bunch of minor things that "just worked" and fit nicely together into a great experience.
It's worth every penny.
This sounds like me being facetious, but it's a great morale booster for teams.
BTW, you don't have to share your entire screen just the app you want them to see.
https://www.blossom.io/blog/2013/03/12/take-a-look-at-our-ne...
If you have a product that creates more value for your customers if you integrate with HipChat this is now a no-brainer :)
Revenue wise integrating was definitely worth it for us.
Our product Bugsnag (https://bugsnag.com) has HipChat integration, so you can instantly see errors from your apps appear in your chat room. We've also set up curl scripts to post into chat whenever there is a deploy, or push to GitHub.
Or as a contractor - could I be part of two different paying organizations?
http://help.hipchat.com/knowledgebase/articles/64418-how-do-...
so I wonder how it works for billing - if my boss creates a room that has more than 5 people in it and I join too, is it who opens the room that pays?
Looking at the Billing screen of our 45 user account it doesn't seem like anything has changed (will still be $90/mo)
After only a month of use, virtually all communication and notification streams (GitHub, Jenkins, Zendesk, systems monitoring) in our company have converged in HipChat. It's hard to imagine we've ever done without.
Hipchat was extremely easy and multiplatform. It just worked. (except animated gifs sometimes) Even our strongest holdout for IRC has at least stopped talking about IRC.
The company has been iterating on their new mac os x client with releases every week or two since it launched. I'm still impressed with this company's quality and am psyched that we now have one less bill to pay.
I hope they finally allowed users to edit their comments. That was one notable issue I had. Also, there was no such thing as a "private" group because admins had access to all groups.
I had an account that became unneeded today, so I removed it... and then I contacted support about getting the free plan.
Their message about contacting support to get switched over is basically a lie because they tell you to delete your account and sign up new.
Sure, I'm paying for it now and get value from it, but every dollar matters at this point and if they are gonna help me save $10/month then I'd be happy! But instead I feel jaded.