Grove.io launches out of beta and announces plans | Hacker News Reader

Grove.io launches out of beta and announces plans

grove.io

7 pointscwilson3 comments

Grove prices:

  5 users: $10/mo
  10 users: $25/mo
  20 users: $50/mo
  50 users: $125/mo

HipChat prices:

  12 users: $9/mo
  30 users: $24/mo
  60 users: $49/mo
  100 users: $99/mo

Note the the lowest HipChat plan has only a month worth of archives and no private rooms, whereas all Grove plans have unlimited archives.

Grove is basically twice as expensive ($2+/user compared to under $1/user). In addition to the normal chat experience, HipChat also does voice/video chat, has SMS support, and does file transfers.

I saw many people in previous threads say that Grove allowed you to use native IRC clients instead of their HTML client, but HipChat also allows you to use Adium or any other XMPP capable client.

(Disclosure: I work for a company that uses HipChat (happily), and has tried other chat services like Campfire. I have no affiliation with either company, but HipChat does use some open source code I wrote, and once sent me a nice t-shirt as a thank you. I also helped create speeqe.com which planned to compete in this space year ago.)

At the same time, the people using native clients are the same people who can run up a $5/m VPS and run ircd with unlimited clients.

To be fair, the history search is a big selling point, and is fairly difficult to set up. Or perhaps that is and out of the box feature of modern ircd implementations now? It's been a while since I've run an irc server myself.

It is certainly true that running your own XMPP server doesn't get you searchable history out of the box.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com