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Comment by pavlov | Hacker News Reader

How do people feel about Quip as a competitor to Slack?

I was sceptical, but Quip's combination of chat and group-editable documents feels actually much better for dev teams than Slack, which ends up very unstructured.

(I have no association with Quip at all, but recently had the chance to use it in a Slack-like context.)

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I've been using Quip for a few months now, it's awesome. Can't really describe it as a Slack competitor because it really has all the core features of Dropbox, Dropbox Paper, Google drive-like documents and slack combined. The text editor is extremately pleasant(even when sometimes gets a little crazy, hopefully they fix it soob) which is such a huge accomplishment since, at least on OSX, the app is super smooth, doesn't consume lots of resources and really feels OSX native.

I LOVE the text editor. My only gripe with quip is that the folder layout changes frequently, is unintuitive, and I can never find documents I wrote.

Agree, but it's still better than the old navigation.

Quip is the Evernote killer.

The only thing I liked about Quip was the conversation about the doc alongside the doc. Otherwise it was kind of a not-great Google docs, a not-great Dropbox and a not-great Slack wrapped into one.

That said, this was a year ago, maybe it's better now?

they're two different use cases (for us anyway). we use quip instead of google docs, slack for everything else.

I guess my question is, why use Slack at all when you have Quip?

Quip has chatrooms that work like Slack (or IRC, or any other group chat in the history of the Internet).

I guess because most conversations are not about documents?

But Quip's chat rooms are just that. They don't have any forced relation to the documents, and can be set up just like Slack (as far as I can see).

So what's the different use case?

Oh ok, I didn't know that. I tried Quip when it first came out. Anyway, even if functionally they are similar, the Slack ecosystem is too strong now.

Maybe... Sometimes the initially strong ecosystem doesn't end up being the winning one. Apple had a huge headstart in GUI desktops but Microsoft nearly trounced them.

(I don't see Quip having such an advantage -- although Quip seems like a perfect fit for Microsoft's product portfolio... Hmm...)

Oh ok, I didn't know that.

Positioning can definitely hurt a product.

I hadn't seen Quip before now, but from their marketing site, it looks almost exactly like Basecamp. The screenshots shown have been Basecamp's core feature set for 5+ years.

https://basecamp.com/

I'd assume dev teams are very kin on custom integration (/dothat).

Quip does slash commands, but I don't know if they support custom integrations. (Shows how little I know about the platform really... I just like the concept of structured docs + unstructured chat being hyperlinked together.)

We just switched to it today from slack.

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