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Comment by aspir | Hacker News Reader

People are making the valid comparison of Hipchat and Slack, which is to be expected. But, this is a deeper move by Atlassian.

Atlassian's business model is still "All roads lead to JIRA/Confluence." It's why so many of their products are free. This isn't as much a Hipchat v. Slack/IRC/Google/Campfire move, as adding another road to JIRA.

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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.

For anyone else running into the same problem, I just copied my HipChat.app in /Applications, and ran the second hipchat next to the first hipchat (you can also change the second hipchat's icon for easy distinguishment). It's not perfect (upon logout/restart it still remembers the preferences for the other instance), but it solved 90% of my hassle.

You can also do in the terminal:

  hipchat --detach &

Or for even any app:

    open -n /path/to/application.app

From the open man page:

    -n  Open a new instance of the application(s) even if one is already running.

This has been driving me crazy for months, I had one version of the old buggy Adobe Air app running and one of the new Native app. Somehow just creating a copy of the new native app just never occurred to me. You just made my day substantially better.

That's smart. But still, it's crazy that something like multiple organizations would require you to do this on your end. There are better options out there :)

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.

Basic ticket management is easy to get going. Users of the system can also mostly get away dragging tickets between status and logging some work as long as the Greenhopper plugin is turned on.

JIRAs biggest win is integration with so many other tools. Bitbucket is an obvious one, but then 3rd party tools like bugsnag will auto-create tickets for any snags your app issues.

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.

That's why I like Youtrack more. It's far less complex and driven by search plus keyboard shortcuts.

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.

The integrations that Atlassian tools provide are optimized for large businesses. One bill, SSO, bulk administration of users, etc. From a usability perspective, I'm not a fan of the Atlassian platform over other stacks, but they cater to the people who tend to call the shots.

HipChat has a nice API that allows us to shoot notifications from TribeHR, our Linux production boxes, code commits, Salesforce, etc. to our company-wide channels. It's a nice communication tool to use to keep the whole team on the same page.

HipChat integrates with Jira/Confluence/BitBucket/Bamboo et al. It is the only reason we are using it vs a host of tools sticky taped together with different interfaces.

As your team growths you will see the value in having a single unified set of tools that cover a majority of your needs vs a host of different tools chained together each providing a different experience, education and logins.

Yes, sorta. http://help.hipchat.com/knowledgebase/topics/10037-integrati...

It's a shorter list and the Slack ones might be just better.

Does Slack support local hosting?

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.

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