HipChat is now free for unlimited users

The beauty of Slack, IMO, is in the nice integrations with everything I already use. Does Hipchat/JIRA/Confluence do that? (I honestly don't know)

For a small team, there's no reason (for us at least) to move away from Trello, GitHub issues, etc.

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.

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.

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.

Would you mind linking to the competing service you mention, or perhaps a review of it? I've been advocating for Hipchat but haven't seen Slack yet.

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.

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. :)

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.

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.

The HipChat native client for OS X has been fantastic, plus there's an iOS client that pairs well with it, giving you push notifications for mentions.

It's not clear if Slack has this too.

Our 6 person team started using Slack a few weeks ago and we love it. Particularly great - awesome mobile integration.

Does slack have native clients yet? And by native I mean a native application not a thin wrapper for a browser.

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.

Honestly I can't imagine how we ever used HipChat. The Linux client is abysmal, and the IRC/Jabber integration is also terrible.

Slack is really the best I've seen.

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.

> The feature I love about it is the ability to invite someone to a room.

Wow. Groundbreaking stuff here. There were chatroom perl scripts in 1998 that did this.

> The feature I love about it is the ability to invite someone to a room.

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."

> 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.

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

if said service is provided by the employer, they own the data/communications and have every right to monitor the service. same goes for work email: employers have access to this. it isn't illegal for them to access these communications done on a work account.

I mentioned earlier in this thread, privacy was already kind of broken. Given your account was registered with organization email, admin could reset your password and look at your private chats (like when you leave a company). Doing that would perhaps be violation of terms, but I don't think many would care particularly in developing countries where legalities of such things are joke.

I don't see where it says it's already a feature. The note itself (not that post) says it might be available in the future but it's not there right now:

Messages and files shared in 1-1 chats are only browsable and searchable in HipChat by the two people involved.

"While admins do not have access to browse or search 1-1 chats through functionality within HipChat, this is an option we may provide in the future for organizations to opt-in to. If made available, it will not be retroactive, and we will be sure to address how affected users can be notified that their chats are subject to viewing by their admins" http://help.hipchat.com/knowledgebase/articles/358098

It does say the organization can email them and ask for that so while technically possible it's not so easy for the admin to snoop.

Hipchat runs smoother than XChat for you? That's a first.

Hipchat isn't bad but I vastly prefer IRC, particularly with a good IRC bot.

IRCCloud is nice and sits somewhere in the middle

I have the opposite experience, HipChat runs like a dog: http://shiva.pw/hipchat_is_this_normal.jpg

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

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.

I came here to say exactly this. Flowdock is my favorite groupware chat I have used so far.

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.

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.

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.

What exactly do you mean by 'spy'?

Edit: Looks like OP was referring to this: https://blog.hipchat.com/2014/04/25/hey-were-changing-our-te...

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.

And it was about $3/mo per user. Not bad at all.

We pay for HipChat because it makes team communication easy and painless on every device our employees own.

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?

Yes, you clearly don't get the point.

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.

The fundamental problem they "solve" is to be more hip and cool than the last, since no regular human being has heard of IRC, let alone many "hardcore programmers" that I know.

I wish IRC was overhauled SOMEHOW and made more accessible to the common person.

Persistence. It's nice to be able to see what conversations you missed while offline or overnight, especially if you have teammates distributed across the globe.

Persistence also allows you to search through or link people to old conversations.

I've found using hipchat with coworkers to be much nicer than using XMPP with coworkers mostly for it being closer to IRC: there are rooms where most discussion takes place, so you can get to know people by lurking there, and when you need to 1:1 message someone, you probably have some context about who they are, which makes a world of difference to an introverted new hire. The realtime team-wide chat just makes everything feel much more friendly, imho.

I'm sure it's possible to get that setup with XMPP, and it's definitely possible to get an equivalent setup with IRC (which I have an external server running ZNC for), but it's not out of the box, and there is something to be said for having a good configuration set up and working for everyone out of the box.

HipChat is incredible compared to IRC.

Out of the box you get:

  1. 1-on-1 messaging
  2. Private and public chat rooms
  3. A client that works on mobile, desktop, and web.
     No matter where I am, I'm connected to my team.
  4. Persistent and searchable history.
  5. Real-time notifications if someone mentions
     you while offline.
  6. You can copy and paste screenshots directly into
     the room. We use this all of the time for gui
     mockup discussions.
  7. Integration with most online services like
     GitHub, etc...
  8. Easy file transfers.
  9. No servers to manage.
  10. Easy user management.
  11. Video calls.
  12. Voice calls.
  13. Screen sharing.

Most importantly, it all just works. We could get IRC to do much of the above, but it'd be a hodgepodge of a solution and require someone to spend time setting it all up and maintaining it. At $2/user/month HipChat is a no-brainer. Why waste engineering resources trying to solve problems that someone else already solved for us?

Edit: And custom emoticons. Can't forget those. That's the best part of HipChat.

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.

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.

It's not ridiculous. People like eye candy! And even pay for it (stickers and other ridiculous things)!

Slack lets you add custom emoji too: https://twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/437028458627989504

This is possible in slack: https://twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/437028458627989504

You can setup custom emojis in Slack!

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

It's been working pretty nicely.

They do offer an internal hipchat server as a beta: https://www.hipchat.com/server Not total confidentiality but better.

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".

> 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 love IRC, but it's a very different thing.

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.

> That said, once someone includes video group chat (a la Skype) for free we will likely jump for whoever offers it.

Hangouts in G+?

HipChat Server

https://www.hipchat.com/server

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 would seem that you don't know much about Atlassian, JIRA and Confluence is their core business, not HipChat.

Flowdock has pretty much the same functionality, and supports multiple organizations with one login. https://www.flowdock.com/

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.

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.