My company recently started using HipChat and I really like it. I expected to prefer IRC because of the standard, open protocol and the choice of clients, but the HipChat application works much more smoothly on my Linux desktop than any IRC client I've tried, and it's been adopted more widely across my organization than IRC ever was - making it much more useful, even if that really just comes down to marketing it to appear more accessible. It's working really well.
I use bitlbee with hipchat so I can connect from Emacs. It's a bit awkward to set up, but it's a lot better than the official client since it works inside tmux+mosh.
XChat was previously my client of choice, although I don't have much of a need for IRC on a daily basis anymore. Specifically, HipChat's integration with KDE's system tray and general look and feel is much more polished, IMO.
Out of curiosity, what do you do with your IRC bots? I know HipChat can have bots, so I'd assume some similar functionality is possible. But Hipchat doesn't have decades of community developed bots, so IRC has a long head start.
I wrote a hosted bot service, to save you the hassle of maintaining one. Email me if you want to avoid the beta charge thing: https://www.getinstabot.com
That's HipChat 2.1.1013 running on x64 in Vmware 10.0.2 w/ 8gb of a total of 32gb allocated. Oh yea, I'm doing nothing in HipChat, just idling in a single channel, with two inactive conversations with AFK people open. The chat window contains no animated GIFs or Youtube vids or anything wild either.
I've been strongly considering switching to using a regular XMPP client especially since feature creep seems to be be bringing features I don't want (video chat etc)
Edit: I should add the view is filtered, the CPU load + memory usage in the top is from an encrypted filesystem backup currently running
HipChat is probably under fire from Slack. That's why I think they are making this change, because I just made the transition a few weeks ago and Slack has been amazing. Once you go Slack, you never go back.
We switched from HipChat recently, so far it's working fine. The only thing we miss are cross team notifications, but apparently they are working on it (can't find the link at the moment).
We were diehard HipChat users at my company, then one day I discovered Slack.com. Within a week it was our dominant messaging platform, not least because we could invite the entire company to use it for free (instead of just the development team).
From a product design standpoint, Slack is streets ahead of the conservative HipChat.
Similar for me and mine. We ran out of free users, hired a new guy and couldn't add him in. Someone else suggested Slack, and until this announcement, haven't looked back.
Any thoughts/justifications for pricing? The only thing holding us back is that Slack costs 4x as much ($8 instead of $2). While this isn't a big spend at the end of the day, we're sort of anchored at $2. There's nothing terribly wrong with hipchat, seems to address all our (simple) chat needs, and switching to slack doesn't seem to give us 4x as much value.
So far the best reasoning I have is that we're a mostly-dev team, and that there's something for non-devs that is appealing in Slack, but surely it's not a prettier interface? I'm genuinely curious, as I'd like to justify switching to the prettier product. :)
Slack has IRC gateway, so you can use irssi for company chat.
It might not be a big deal for you, but when we were briefly using Slack at previous company, I loved that I could just add it as another network to irssi.
Unfortunately, the IRC gateway causes a bad experience, not so much for the people using IRC, but for the people using the real Slack client. Slack apparently doesn't recognize username mentions ("@joe123") coming from IRC, so everyone needs to add their username to their list of highlight words so that the team members using IRC can mention them.
This isn't the usual "host your own server" integration. All Slack asks for are credentials for services you use and it seamlessly integrates into an assigned chat room (channel). My CEO did it for the startup I work at and in ten minutes from signup we had: Github, Trello, New Relic, Twitter, and Stripe all integrated.
This is a horrible way to think about it, slack doesn't need to deliver 4x the value, it just needs to deliver $6 worth of extra value per month.
Even at the very cheapest end of the spectrum, a developer is going to cost at least $60 an hour, fully loaded. If slack can make them 6 minutes more productive a month (ie: 12 seconds a day), then slack is worth it. These are productivity differences that aren't even measurable in practice which means the rational thing to do is to just be price insensitive and adopt the tool that works best, regardless of cost.
It really depends on what you want to get out of chat
$2 is a good price to pay if your team chatting needs are minimal. But as your organization grows, especially if it starts to involve a larger team and projects with larger scope and interdependent pieces, your chat needs evolve into more of a communications need. In such cases it may be worth it to look into a more comprehensive chat tool since it gives you a much more powerful communications platform than your AIM or even email.
If a significant chunk of your company's discussion is taking place in chat rooms, it may be time to look into an upgrade.
You'd want something that gives you some standard next-gen functions: great global chat history search,video conferencing, screen sharing, markdown support, distributed team presence tracker, advanced noise management tools, dedicated integration efforts (integration to basic collaboration tools like asana, trello, etc should take minimal effort)
Keep in mind Slack is hardly the only other alternative in this game. Zapier gave a really good overview the other day, including Kato, who (full disclosure) I work for. https://zapier.com/blog/best-team-chat-app/
also @shalmanese makes a good point about justifying the cost.
I disagree. We tried Slack on our 26-person team and left it after a week. It had a few fans, but most people found the interface to be more complex and noisy than HipChat. Lots of red icons and blue banners that could not be disabled. No ability to see at a glance who is in a room without clicking the list and scrolling through it. The integrations were nice and the search was amazing, but those things were less important to us than the frictionless communication tools, which HipChat has nailed. Additionally, Slack lacks a distinction between @all and @here, which is frustrating when you want to announce something in a room without emailing everyone present.
In HipChat, you can be in a room but you won't get notifications if people mention "@here" while you're idle. With Slack, this isn't possible; you would get email notifications for all of the rooms you're in every time "@channel" is mentioned. Furthermore, "@everyone" can only be used in the primary chat room, not others.
Slack's blue "unread messages" banner should be a deal-breaker. I feel like I spend 10% of my day clicking around on Slack trying to get all the channels to realize I have read all their messages. It's such an insane usability nightmare that I can't believe any person or team seriously building a chat app would implement it.
Yeah, that was their response to my ticket as well. Shift-Escape saves some time, but it's still a useless feature that provides nothing but annoyance.
Similar story. I really liked Slack and the integrations are fantastic, but the UI has way too much going on and the lack of a native Windos client meant even just deploying the app is a hassle. The mobile client has menus that slide from left, right, and top last I checked. I told them they'd have had my business easily if they had a one click windows install and an optional Dummy Mode I could turn on for users by default that makes it work like a simple irc client.
I went to HipChat instead but it's got its own problems. Weirdly you can choose to get notifications for all rooms you're in or none of them, but nothing in between. Very frustrating.
My goal is to make make setup and support easy for my users, some of whom are remote and most of whom have never heard of IRC. I don't literally want to deploy a bunch of mIRC clients.
(That said, if I did it over again I might pick Slack over HipChat. The integrations with e.g. Github really are that much better.)
They are definitely feeling pressure as users are demanding and expecting more from their communication tools. Slack's done a good job at bringing more to the table, but we're really just at the start of a renaissance in business communication.
If you think about "chat" in generations, you started with IRC, AIM (which is still used in many companies) and then came HipChat. Not much development there for a couple years so Slack put some lipstick on the last generation of chat product. There's a whole new class of communication platforms being developed now that are taking things even further, by enabling true cross-company communication (meaning both internal & external), things like customer support integrated with internal team communication, etc.
We were looking for something better than campfire and tested slack and flowdock. Settled with flowdock, which in my opinion is much better, but is less hyped.
Why's that? I use Chrome Application Shortcuts for Slack and it essentially creates a task bar shortcut, and works with desktop notifications. It's currently missing background notifications, but aside from that, there's no appreciable differences between it and something truly "native client".
Chrome on Linux is barely usable most of the time. But having something that is native lets you do all the fun things you can do with native apps: auto-start at login, minimize to systray, alt-tab with nice icon, and so on.
Maybe Slack is different, but most rich web apps I've used ends up eating gobs of memory after prolonged usage.
True, but it has dock badges, native Notification Center notifications and keyboard shortcuts for navigating chat. That's close enough to native for me.
I wouldn't call Hipchat's OS X client native; it's Flash (Adobe Air). The Slack's desktop OS X and iOS apps, while they are html based, are an order of magnitude nicer to use.
Their new windows client (and therefore I imagine the others too) appears to be Qt and Webkit. Most of it still seems to be their web app wrapped in native...
The Android version has not been amazing for me. It crashes several times a day, switching rooms is clumsy and slow, and the push notifications arrive minutes after I've already replied to a message, so the phone is constantly buzzing for things I've already replied.
Is there an inherent reason to dislike a thin wrapper around a web app? The Slack OS X app is that, but it doesn't have any problems that are caused by being a wrapped web app.
Can we run multiple organizations from the same client of Slack? That and an ability to refer to a specific comment/message (like Flowdock's threaded messages) are two things that can make me switch from Hipchat.
I really liked slack but in the end we went for hipchat for a two main reasons.
1. It's 25% of the cost (although that has now shifted). This may not be a big deal for small teams but if you want to have 100 users on either service, the difference is between $2,400 a year or $9,600 a year. That's a big difference.
2. Hipchat has a self hosted option in the works which should be available within a month or two (per them). This is essential for any company that deals with potential PHI on their IM systems. Slack says they plan to offer a self hosted option but it's a long way out.
Those are two things slack just couldn't overcome, beyond the fact that I generally liked slack better (it's prettier, much better message searching, better integrations, etc). The fact that hipchat also has voice chat is a big plus too though we've not found it reliable. Presumably at some point it will get better though and make it a more valuable feature.
Is HipChat really a good thing? Constant distractions all day means I get nothing done, so I'm pretty much against any kind of constant stream of communication when you're trying to think. Call me crazy.
On to the service itself:
I can't join in on my client's conversation without creating a whole new account with a different email address. Annoying and incredibly short-sighted. I know that the people over at HipChat never work with anyone outside of their office, but unfortunately this is not the case for most people.
Honestly, I can get an IRC server up and running in the time it takes to get a HipChat account activated. It's annoying that so many people are hyping HipChat, as if it were some groundbreaking thing.
The way we used it. There was a dev+qa channel and a dev+support channel with no one above tech leads in either group and it replaced Skype for a lot of work the devs did with support. Though we ultimately didn't use it beyond the trial period the key value driver for us was that a dev could step into an ongoing issue and get a of context very quickly even if they didn't have HipChat running. This means that as an IC you don't need to have the client running when you are "trying to think". That, along with the lack of management types in the communication flow meant that it was minimally distracting and mostly used as intended.
You can do pretty much the same thing with IRC, but getting HipChat set up on peoples PCs and phones is dead simple which is nice when you are dealing with remote QA and support teams.
With IRC, you need a bouncer (e.g. znc) to get the functionality of seeing history without having the client open (and technically the bouncer is just the open client).
We use hipchat because previously the constant distraction was somebody walking up to your desk to ask a question. I can disable notifications and somebody can wait for me to respond via hipchat.
There are still desk-walking drive-byers, though far fewer.
I totally agree with new account with new account with a different email address problem. Apart from that one big issue I've is privacy. As such admins can't see private messages, however since you will be registered to HipChat with your organizational email the admins can just reset your email password followed by Hipchat and eventually see all your private messages. I've seen this happen.
Slack surely is putting HipChat on its toes. Competition is really good.
I use and enjoy HipChat. The feature I love about it is the ability to temporarily invite someone (edit: a non organization person) to a room.
It would be nice if it was possible to have it open all day and have it like an IRC. It would be perfect for having support rooms for an app.
One thing i'd like HipChat to improve on is the timeout that happens to their desktop app. As long as it is open, I do not want to have to "reconnect".
Nice one guys. And Nice one Slack. Surely, no slackers.
This is awesome, we've been paying $100+/month for our company but never use video chat or screen share (nor did we want them) and have turned off history retention since day 1. Sounds like we can downgrade and pay nothing now.
We use HipChat at work, and I use Slack for some other projects; both pale in comparison to the simplicity, flexibility and client-options of IRC. But for those less technical it's a fantastic and easy to setup alternative. Pointless in an all-dev company, but anywhere else, priceless.
> both pale in comparison to the simplicity, flexibility and client-options of IRC
I can definitely agree on the flexibility part, but simplicity? No way. HipChat is easy enough for our completely non-technical users to be quite comfortable with immediately. The setup process is entering a username and a password. Ditto for the mobile apps.
I've set up an IRC server before and tried convincing a moderately technical team to install Colloquy and jump on. I will happily trade the features of Slack or HipChat for the simplicity of IRC. Persistent rooms alone (with zero config, no bouncers, etc) is worthwhile over vanilla IRC.
I've found Video Chat to be pretty terrible. I find it weird to market that as the upsell. Most of the time, we give up with Hipchat Video and switch to a Google Hangout.
I think their video chat is or was recently in beta. I imagine their biggest upsell in their 'HipChat Plus' package is searchable history which is a pretty important feature.
So what? If your company ever used Openfire/Spark or any sorts of private IM services they're able to view private messages. Some of you act like this is some mind blowing travesty. You should expect the possibility of your company monitoring their services and communications.
Garret from HipChat here. The previous discussion on this topic made a lot of assumptions about this change, so I'd like to quote some additional detail from our help doc (http://help.hipchat.com/knowledgebase/articles/358098) before the same happens here;
In order for an organization to access 1-1 chats occurring
after May 27, 2014 or later, the organization will need to
make a request by emailing support@hipchat.com. As stated
in the HipChat-specific terms, the requesting entity must
have consent from their affected users in order to obtain
access to those users' 1-1 chat history. The typical way
that an entity would have the right to access employee
communications is through the entity's employee policy.
It is standard practice among businesses to state in their
policies that the employer has the right to access
communications occurring on workplace systems. You should
speak with your employer if you have questions about their
specific data access policies.
>The typical way that an entity would have the right to access employee communications is through the entity's employee policy.
It's nice of you to drop into this thread, but it's exactly as bad people assumed.
If I was an employer and I didn't cover this sort of breach of privacy in my employee policy, and someone at Atlassian bothered to ask (I'm sure that Atlassian invests in lawyers to vet each submitted request), I'd just add the language to the policy document and fire it off.
This was the reason my company moved to Slack. There's no way for our boss to turn off the ability to read our PMs, so there's no way for us to know he's not.
No one in the company wants this—we expect PMs to be private.
I was concerned too and sent an email to the HipChat team. They responded nearly immediately and updated the original HN post.
To be able to see "private" communications, the manager would have to send an email to hipchat to request certain access. See above for the exact terms.
I just recently compared Slack and Hipchat and Slack seems to be the more advanced of the two at this point.
The magic bullet in collaborative chat like this seems to be presence awareness. We used to use GTalk for this but since moving to hangouts we can't ever tell who is at there desk when we need them.
Here's to hoping one of them gets it right; especially when you install on your desktop and your mobile device.
My biggest issue with HipChat is the inability to run multiple organizations on the same client. The video and audio "premium" features are really a terrible idea as there's Skype, Google Hangouts, UberConference, and similar for that and they are free and core businesses and Atlassian cannot and should not attempt to compete with those!
Have you tried http://Kato.im ? They're the only product which supports multiple organizations in the same client -- and it's done in a really powerful way that doesn't force you to switch between orgs. You could have one or four open and still communicate effectively.
My company uses HipChat, and my group has been liking the video & audio features. My company also uses gmail & the google suite and traditionally it's always been a pain when trying to do a hangout chat w/ someone who hasn't done it before. Need to download some plugin, install something, blah blah. Not to mention that there are about 58.3 different ways of initiating a video chat w/ someone via google.
Since they've added the video chatting, we've been loving it. There's a single button to click, it Just Works, etc.
I'd love to see multiple organisations also. I think the problem's only going to get worse now that HipChat is free- why wouldn't different work teams etc. adopt it?
"multiple organizations on the same client" - that would be a super addition. HipChat ultimately could be used both as a business tool (esp. for contractors) and also a personal closed environment network communication tool.
Yup! This would even put Skype to shame as you can separate personal from business. It also works for people who work on different projects part time, so, you don't have to remember to log out to log in. :)
We moved from HipChat to Slack. HipChat desktop clients on OSX were crashing all the time. Most notably after waking up from a suspend. Slack is much more stable. The transition was pretty smooth.
I don't get the point of HipChat. It's a closed, proprietary Jabber server, with closed-source clients, intentionally no OTR support but the explicit ability to spy one-on-one conversations instead.
I haven't used Slack, but I've used all sorts of xmpp/jabber servers such as Openfire, generic jabberd, etc. Hipchat blows those away. I can quickly see what links and files I've posted or have been posted to me. I can open unlimited rooms, invite members to them and if I have a new employee start all I need to do is make them an account and they have everyones contact information. We previously used g-chat which was an absolute pain. Half of the employees I have on gchat I have their personal emails.
Which words are you having trouble with? That's pretty straight forward, but I'm assuming you're wanting to know more about the across devices thing... This is actually one of my favorite features. Their system keeps track of where you're logged in from and whether you're active or idle on that platform, then if you are sent 1-1 messages or mentioned in a room it will find you, delivering to a computer client first, then push notifications, then email--which is really valuable for us.
Team communication: Teams need to interact in a variety of different ways: public groups/private groups, fixed groups/ad-hoc groups, groups/1-2-1. HipChat supports a variety of different ways of interacting, and does so in a way that's easy to use.
People nowadays use a variety of different devices (and classes of device). HipChat has a range of native clients, plus a web based one, and so can be used on most of the devices that people want to use it on.
(We use Slack, but I've tried and liked HipChat too)
Not everyone needs open-source tweakable tools, and siloing private conversations into an OTR capable client isn't that weird. Hipchat worked great when I convinced TC to switch to it back in the day - I've had less luck with NBC, which still uses Campfire. Not everything needs to cross every t and dot every i — if it works for the people who use it and people are comfortable with it, what's the problem?
A functioning business doesn't want to arse around setting up a Jabber server, building integration with Jira, creating clients optimised for group IM, or that sort of thing. It's not impossible to do, but it takes time and other resources.
On the other hand, we can use Hipchat - it works pretty well, integrates with anything we want, and somebody else is doing the development work. It's an obvious win.
Probably because it integrates with Jira/Confluence/Bitbucket and because it "Just Works". Sure we could do all that stuff with irc or whatever open source tools but that costs development hours which costs money, or we could just use something that it extremely cheap(or free if you don't want video chat) and works great with no effort on our part.
Still do. Point me at the Jabber server that gives us cross platform/device group and individual IM, easy integration, it's hosted elsewhere so if our work network is ever hosed we can still communicate and doesn't require any mucking around to set up. No?
I agree with you, but current open source alternatives (XMPP and it's clients) are lacking really good clients for the osx/ios/android/linux/windows/web which share some common functionality (embedding images, videos, keeping a tab of sent files, search, ...).
I would give money for somebody to work on this problem and open source it.
I know it sounds ridiculous but for me the one thing HipChat's got over Slack is the ability to have custom emoticons https://blog.hipchat.com/2012/05/21/custom-emoticons-everywh.... Admittedly we use it mainly for banter and fun but its a sticky feature currently keeping me migrating over to Slack...
I wonder if this has at least a little bit to do with the recent post about HackerChat [1], since even though it wasn't by the people at Slack themselves, but by someone else (Gianluca and Steven), it's pretty much a very good way to get the word out about Slack. I actually couldn't think of a better way than what HackerChat did to show to developers, entrepreneurs and people that would need such tool "Here's how it works!". I don't think any landing page can do that.
I think it's what some smaller businesses might do, or some people applying for a job: look what the startup/client does or needs, make something that's relevant to demo your skills/features and show it to them.
People are making the valid comparison of Hipchat and Slack, which is to be expected. But, this is a deeper move by Atlassian.
Atlassian's business model is still "All roads lead to JIRA/Confluence." It's why so many of their products are free. This isn't as much a Hipchat v. Slack/IRC/Google/Campfire move, as adding another road to JIRA.
The integrations that Atlassian tools provide are optimized for large businesses. One bill, SSO, bulk administration of users, etc. From a usability perspective, I'm not a fan of the Atlassian platform over other stacks, but they cater to the people who tend to call the shots.
HipChat has a nice API that allows us to shoot notifications from TribeHR, our Linux production boxes, code commits, Salesforce, etc. to our company-wide channels. It's a nice communication tool to use to keep the whole team on the same page.
HipChat integrates with Jira/Confluence/BitBucket/Bamboo et al. It is the only reason we are using it vs a host of tools sticky taped together with different interfaces.
As your team growths you will see the value in having a single unified set of tools that cover a majority of your needs vs a host of different tools chained together each providing a different experience, education and logins.
I just switched our team to JIRA for this exact reason. We were already on Bitbucket for repos and using Sourcetree for git access, so might as well get issue tracking from the same place.
Honestly my feelings on it are mixed so far. Doing a "good" job of administering projects and issues seems to have a pretty steep learning curve if you want to use more than about 10% of JIRA's functionality.
Basic ticket management is easy to get going. Users of the system can also mostly get away dragging tickets between status and logging some work as long as the Greenhopper plugin is turned on.
JIRAs biggest win is integration with so many other tools. Bitbucket is an obvious one, but then 3rd party tools like bugsnag will auto-create tickets for any snags your app issues.
Doing a "good" job of administering projects and issues seems to have a pretty steep learning curve if you want to use more than about 10% of JIRA's functionality.
That's why I like Youtrack more. It's far less complex and driven by search plus keyboard shortcuts.
Yep, and that's not a bad thing. I'm not convinced that there would be much of a profitable market for a group chat tool, but if it convinces a couple of organisations to look more closely a Jira, then it's worth it for them.
What absolutely killed HipChat for our team was the fact that its not possible to use HipChat for multiple teams. Need to be logged into multiple accounts at the same time (i.e your own team and your client's team)? Not possible.
Their suggested solution is to use multiple different clients (i.e. one native, one browser) at the same time, which is beyond ridiculous.
For anyone else running into the same problem, I just copied my HipChat.app in /Applications, and ran the second hipchat next to the first hipchat (you can also change the second hipchat's icon for easy distinguishment). It's not perfect (upon logout/restart it still remembers the preferences for the other instance), but it solved 90% of my hassle.
This has been driving me crazy for months, I had one version of the old buggy Adobe Air app running and one of the new Native app. Somehow just creating a copy of the new native app just never occurred to me. You just made my day substantially better.
That's smart. But still, it's crazy that something like multiple organizations would require you to do this on your end. There are better options out there :)
That's pretty much what happened with us. We ended up rolling our own thing and deploying it on our VPN with LDAP authentication: https://github.com/sdelements/lets-chat
Yes. Every company I've worked for that had established (read not startups/not tiny) companies as customers could never use any thing like this due to contracts saying we won't be storing/transmitting their "stuff" on servers we do not control. [everyone hand waves email delivery but we can't use something like gmail].
These are tools for small / startup companies were you need something to just work and don't have resources to spend on anything but getting "established".
Hangouts are really annoying for persistent rooms that others can join and leave at will. We found we had lots of different combinations of people in different hangouts, and the conversations were really fragmented.
We use hangouts for group video, and hipchat for everything else.
It feels like they are pulling a amazon, ala diapers.com fiasco. *
Only issue is, they are doing it to their core business vs amazon who was doing it with just one segment and could afford to cannibalize profits in that sector
We switched to Flowdock and never looked back. The SNR advantages of the integrated conversation threads and "email-like" inbox model are amazing. I never knew what I was missing with IRC/hipchat.
Same here. We "inbox" everything from support, to social media shares, some analytics, as well as code pushes. Love the way Flowdock handles those items and lets you make reference to them while talking in the main thread.
Yep - the way that flowdock handles multiple "flows" and the nice simple interface was the selling point for us. Slack has a bit of a nasty interface that is just not "clean" enough.
206 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 173 ms ] threadHipchat isn't bad but I vastly prefer IRC, particularly with a good IRC bot.
It's actually pretty neat, you can try it out on : https://jabbr.net (+ it's opensource if you want to implement your own team chat )
That's HipChat 2.1.1013 running on x64 in Vmware 10.0.2 w/ 8gb of a total of 32gb allocated. Oh yea, I'm doing nothing in HipChat, just idling in a single channel, with two inactive conversations with AFK people open. The chat window contains no animated GIFs or Youtube vids or anything wild either.
I've been strongly considering switching to using a regular XMPP client especially since feature creep seems to be be bringing features I don't want (video chat etc)
Edit: I should add the view is filtered, the CPU load + memory usage in the top is from an encrypted filesystem backup currently running
We switched from HipChat recently, so far it's working fine. The only thing we miss are cross team notifications, but apparently they are working on it (can't find the link at the moment).
It's possible, see https://slack.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/201727913-Connec... for more details. You'll lose the history though. We've been using native clients more or less, all are working fine.
I've used it, and it seems pretty good, but I don't have enough time behind the wheel to provide a review.
tl;dr: it's awesome
From a product design standpoint, Slack is streets ahead of the conservative HipChat.
So far the best reasoning I have is that we're a mostly-dev team, and that there's something for non-devs that is appealing in Slack, but surely it's not a prettier interface? I'm genuinely curious, as I'd like to justify switching to the prettier product. :)
It might not be a big deal for you, but when we were briefly using Slack at previous company, I loved that I could just add it as another network to irssi.
http://www.bitlbee.org/main.php/news.r.html
This isn't the usual "host your own server" integration. All Slack asks for are credentials for services you use and it seamlessly integrates into an assigned chat room (channel). My CEO did it for the startup I work at and in ten minutes from signup we had: Github, Trello, New Relic, Twitter, and Stripe all integrated.
edit: To clarify, we run github freshdesk and jenkins integrations. I'm sure there's plenty more. From what I recall it works in a similar way too.
Even at the very cheapest end of the spectrum, a developer is going to cost at least $60 an hour, fully loaded. If slack can make them 6 minutes more productive a month (ie: 12 seconds a day), then slack is worth it. These are productivity differences that aren't even measurable in practice which means the rational thing to do is to just be price insensitive and adopt the tool that works best, regardless of cost.
If a significant chunk of your company's discussion is taking place in chat rooms, it may be time to look into an upgrade.
You'd want something that gives you some standard next-gen functions: great global chat history search,video conferencing, screen sharing, markdown support, distributed team presence tracker, advanced noise management tools, dedicated integration efforts (integration to basic collaboration tools like asana, trello, etc should take minimal effort)
Keep in mind Slack is hardly the only other alternative in this game. Zapier gave a really good overview the other day, including Kato, who (full disclosure) I work for. https://zapier.com/blog/best-team-chat-app/
also @shalmanese makes a good point about justifying the cost.
But there is an all/here distinction-- just named everyone/channel.
In HipChat, you can be in a room but you won't get notifications if people mention "@here" while you're idle. With Slack, this isn't possible; you would get email notifications for all of the rooms you're in every time "@channel" is mentioned. Furthermore, "@everyone" can only be used in the primary chat room, not others.
https://github.com/cjbarber/hipchat-alternatives/
I while back.
This move by HipChat makes me happy.
I've attempted to move over, but HipChat is far superior for my needs.
Escape closes the blue banner for the current channel.
Shift-Escape closes that blue banner for all channels.
I went to HipChat instead but it's got its own problems. Weirdly you can choose to get notifications for all rooms you're in or none of them, but nothing in between. Very frustrating.
(That said, if I did it over again I might pick Slack over HipChat. The integrations with e.g. Github really are that much better.)
If you think about "chat" in generations, you started with IRC, AIM (which is still used in many companies) and then came HipChat. Not much development there for a couple years so Slack put some lipstick on the last generation of chat product. There's a whole new class of communication platforms being developed now that are taking things even further, by enabling true cross-company communication (meaning both internal & external), things like customer support integrated with internal team communication, etc.
It's not clear if Slack has this too.
Maybe Slack is different, but most rich web apps I've used ends up eating gobs of memory after prolonged usage.
Additionally, there's no native Windows client.
Slack is really the best I've seen.
1. It's 25% of the cost (although that has now shifted). This may not be a big deal for small teams but if you want to have 100 users on either service, the difference is between $2,400 a year or $9,600 a year. That's a big difference. 2. Hipchat has a self hosted option in the works which should be available within a month or two (per them). This is essential for any company that deals with potential PHI on their IM systems. Slack says they plan to offer a self hosted option but it's a long way out.
Those are two things slack just couldn't overcome, beyond the fact that I generally liked slack better (it's prettier, much better message searching, better integrations, etc). The fact that hipchat also has voice chat is a big plus too though we've not found it reliable. Presumably at some point it will get better though and make it a more valuable feature.
On to the service itself:
I can't join in on my client's conversation without creating a whole new account with a different email address. Annoying and incredibly short-sighted. I know that the people over at HipChat never work with anyone outside of their office, but unfortunately this is not the case for most people.
Honestly, I can get an IRC server up and running in the time it takes to get a HipChat account activated. It's annoying that so many people are hyping HipChat, as if it were some groundbreaking thing.
You can do pretty much the same thing with IRC, but getting HipChat set up on peoples PCs and phones is dead simple which is nice when you are dealing with remote QA and support teams.
There are still desk-walking drive-byers, though far fewer.
I use and enjoy HipChat. The feature I love about it is the ability to temporarily invite someone (edit: a non organization person) to a room.
It would be nice if it was possible to have it open all day and have it like an IRC. It would be perfect for having support rooms for an app.
One thing i'd like HipChat to improve on is the timeout that happens to their desktop app. As long as it is open, I do not want to have to "reconnect".
Nice one guys. And Nice one Slack. Surely, no slackers.
Wow. Groundbreaking stuff here. There were chatroom perl scripts in 1998 that did this.
Which really means that you can force people into a room, and there's no way to say "leave this room and don't let anyone force me back into it."
You can do this. Intercom.io are an example of someone who does - this is their help desk for new customer setup https://www.hipchat.com/gAstw61gT
I can definitely agree on the flexibility part, but simplicity? No way. HipChat is easy enough for our completely non-technical users to be quite comfortable with immediately. The setup process is entering a username and a password. Ditto for the mobile apps.
I love IRC, but it's a very different thing.
It's nice of you to drop into this thread, but it's exactly as bad people assumed.
If I was an employer and I didn't cover this sort of breach of privacy in my employee policy, and someone at Atlassian bothered to ask (I'm sure that Atlassian invests in lawyers to vet each submitted request), I'd just add the language to the policy document and fire it off.
No one in the company wants this—we expect PMs to be private.
To be able to see "private" communications, the manager would have to send an email to hipchat to request certain access. See above for the exact terms.
The magic bullet in collaborative chat like this seems to be presence awareness. We used to use GTalk for this but since moving to hangouts we can't ever tell who is at there desk when we need them.
Here's to hoping one of them gets it right; especially when you install on your desktop and your mobile device.
http://blog.kato.im/
I guess the website is still getting redesigned ;)
Since they've added the video chatting, we've been loving it. There's a single button to click, it Just Works, etc.
And people used to pay for that?
Edit: Looks like OP was referring to this: https://blog.hipchat.com/2014/04/25/hey-were-changing-our-te...
And it was about $3/mo per user. Not bad at all.
Is this sentence really that hard to understand?
A functioning business doesn't want to arse around setting up a Jabber server, building integration with Jira, creating clients optimised for group IM, or that sort of thing. It's not impossible to do, but it takes time and other resources.
On the other hand, we can use Hipchat - it works pretty well, integrates with anything we want, and somebody else is doing the development work. It's an obvious win.
I would give money for somebody to work on this problem and open source it.
I think it's what some smaller businesses might do, or some people applying for a job: look what the startup/client does or needs, make something that's relevant to demo your skills/features and show it to them.
[1]: http://hackerchat.co/
Atlassian's business model is still "All roads lead to JIRA/Confluence." It's why so many of their products are free. This isn't as much a Hipchat v. Slack/IRC/Google/Campfire move, as adding another road to JIRA.
For a small team, there's no reason (for us at least) to move away from Trello, GitHub issues, etc.
As your team growths you will see the value in having a single unified set of tools that cover a majority of your needs vs a host of different tools chained together each providing a different experience, education and logins.
It's a shorter list and the Slack ones might be just better.
Honestly my feelings on it are mixed so far. Doing a "good" job of administering projects and issues seems to have a pretty steep learning curve if you want to use more than about 10% of JIRA's functionality.
JIRAs biggest win is integration with so many other tools. Bitbucket is an obvious one, but then 3rd party tools like bugsnag will auto-create tickets for any snags your app issues.
That's why I like Youtrack more. It's far less complex and driven by search plus keyboard shortcuts.
Their suggested solution is to use multiple different clients (i.e. one native, one browser) at the same time, which is beyond ridiculous.
I dont think that I have seen any uservoice votes above 6000 for any other product request before (see http://help.hipchat.com/forums/138883-suggestions-ideas/sugg...).
With no solution in sight, moving to slack or flowdock was a no brainer.
It's been working pretty nicely.
These are tools for small / startup companies were you need something to just work and don't have resources to spend on anything but getting "established".
We use hangouts for group video, and hipchat for everything else.
Only issue is, they are doing it to their core business vs amazon who was doing it with just one segment and could afford to cannibalize profits in that sector
http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/10/10/amazon_bo...
What are HipChat's advantages over other chat services?
What's a good, mainstream-ish, secure/encrypted chat service?