Alternatives to HipChat

8 points·casebash··7 comments

Are there any alternatives to HipChat? In particular, I'm looking for lightweight chat clients that support both individual and group chats, and that have a simple user interface. It'd also be nice to have a native client for Mac

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I use https://github.com/kandanapp/kandan at the office with my team. Easy to roll on a free Heroku instance and the pricetag is hard to beat.

We just started using Slack, which I've been enjoying quite a bit: https://slack.com/

We've been experimenting with unison.com. - easy sign-up. - no charge for outside vendors/clients/contractors brought into chats. - multi-threaded rooms (vs. one long chat).

Web-based with native iPhone and Android clients (no native iPad client, which would be nice). Fairly simple web interface. Good feedback and integration into notifications.

Check out http://hackerchat.im

It offers anonymous chat, a console in the chat box, the option to use wget to pull up websites within the chat, pull up xkcd's by simply typing xkcd {xkcdNumber}, and other cool stuff like that.

I wish the Stack Exchange folks would open source their chat app and/or provide as a service alongside Trello (perhaps with the same payment model). We use HipChat here, it's ok, but SE chat is pretty awesome.

We've been using https://www.flowdock.com/ recommend it highly

Checkout https://hall.com/ its super slick

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