The difference is people like using it. UX counts for a lot.
The massive amount of integrations for it helps a lot too. Their goal, from what I've read, is to be a giant log for everything in your company, not just a chatroom service.
The massive amount of integrations for it helps a lot too. Their goal, from what I've read, is to be a giant log for everything in your company, not just a chatroom service.
Why would you ever want to entrust a log of everything in your company to a third party service? Honestly curious.
Sure, you wouldn't have wanted to host the Apollo Program's lab notes on Soviet servers, but your cat selfie startup isn't quite as high-stakes as that.
Unless your cats are taking selfies on Mars. In which case, yeah, maybe developing an in-house chat service is worth the investment.
I find this to be a pretty interesting comparison. To the best of my knowledge, the entire stakes of the space race were "we might lose face".
My perspective is framed by working with an EMS provider (PCB design & assembly) who does business in some highly regulated fields. We've started using Slack in the last couple months for some of our teams, and love it, but the idea of using it as a catch all strikes me as questionable.
If we used Slack for actually talking about the design/assembly portion of the business, and not just coordinating sales and marketing efforts, our customers would flip shit. And rightfully so.
At the end of the day, Slack is really useful, but I just don't see its use getting expanded much. At least for us. There's lots of stuff that just shouldn't get communicated across there. Coordination across the sides of the business that don't use Slack wasn't an issue in the first place, it was never really even considered afaik.
hn-username @zulip.org , or https://groups.google.com/group/zulip-devel
And then what if Slack gets hacked?
http://slackhq.com/post/114696167740/march-2015-security-inc...
Q: Were my messages taken/read/accessed?
If you have not been explicitly informed by us in a separate
communication that we detected suspicious activity involving
your Slack account, we are very confident that there was no
unauthorized access to any of your team data (such as messages
or files).
Yikes.
Second (this is the point I think hn-like forums grossly underestimate) is because the alternatives are not really alternatives. In practice the likelihood of using Irc or some open source chat within a company with the same wide buy in as slack (or Skype etc) is 0.
The way to judge this is adoption.
It may not be quite as "slick" looking, but it works very well.
Slack has said before that they're going to release a self hosted version at some point, so they have to know this is true. I think it makes sense for them to focus on the larger market (personal use and the SMB sector) for now though, even though the enterprise market will really make them money, because it's a much lower pressure space where they can afford to experiment.
There are parts we don’t like about Hipchat (the shortcuts for the emoticons are just weird), but we are using it company-wide where Slack was just used by developers (and Hangouts was used by everyone else).
This integration will allow you to receive updates in a Slack channel when an alert is triggered in New Relic. If you would like web, transaction, server, and mobile alerts to be posted in separate channels, you will need to set up separate integrations.
You can quickly hit the limit of ten integrations on the free service by having to set up a separate integration for each channel you want things to appear in. So…between GitHub, Bitbucket, Semaphore, a custom API integration, and a couple of others we ended up hitting the limit of 5 integrations (which is what the limit was as of May or June when we made the switch to HipChat; it’s double that now, but we’re starting to use even more tools, so it’s the same problem).
really? $7 per active user per month? How little do you pay your staff? At the median wage, save an average of 90 seconds a day per person through better communication and it pays for itself. And it's pretty likely any team members using slack are at a 2-10x salary multiplier on that, a $100K engineer only needs to save 24 seconds a day...
As a company we are not short of options: Slack (the dev team liked it, but no one else used it and even a large part of the dev team didn’t use it), Google Hangouts (what everyone else used), Skype (no one here uses it), and now HipChat—which everyone in the company uses. This means that we weren’t choosing between $0 and $7, but:
• $0 (Slack) which provided something most people in the company didn’t use, and whose limitations we in the dev team hit fairly quickly (both 10k message chat history and the limited number of integrations).
• $0 (HipChat) which provides something most people in the company do use, and whose limitations we have only recently hit (the last six weeks) and are not currently bothering us (the limitation is just the 25k message chat history).
• $0 (Google Hangouts). Not really $0, but we already pay for it as part of GApps so it’s an incremental $0. The group chat functions suck, and there’s no integrations to speak of, but it is available.
• $2/mau (HipChat). Adds video/voice calls and screen sharing and unlimited chat history. We only need the chat history, and that isn’t bothering us.
• $7/mau (Slack). Just removes the 10 service integration limitation (which IIRC was 5 a few months ago) and the chat history and a few other features we don’t really care about but nothing to write home about. There’s also the $12/mau level and they are working on an Enterprise level.
There is absolutely nothing that Slack provides—except a bigger bill—that HipChat doesn’t provide as well for less. (And, even if Slack were better than HipChat, it isn’t 3x better. Sorry.)
This isn’t to say that Slack is a bad thing, just that it’s stupidly expensive and/or limited compared to other hosted options.
The lawyers and Congressional subcommittees are going to love this.
there are many, many offerings, like Google Apps Vault, to facilitate this.