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Comment by javery | Hacker News Reader

The most interesting things to me is that Campfire was around before this and Hipchat before that. It goes to show that execution is everything, Slack has completely crushed it from a feature and integration standpoint and the polish is amazing. We switched from Hipchat and we didn't really have a good reason - it just felt better.

If Campfire was growing $1MM a month I am pretty sure 37signals would now be called Campfire and not Basecamp.

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> We switched from Hipchat and we didn't really have a good reason - it just felt better.

This is interesting. How many employees are using it? Slack costs 4 times as much as HipChat ($8/user/month vs. $2/user/month) so it seems silly to jump to a much more expensive product for no reason.

I made the same jump. Can't understate the value of "it just felt better" -- everybody who uses Slack in our organization has the same reaction, and it's dramatically increased desire to use the application. And, of course, buy-in is half the battle with getting these products to achieve their goal.

In my experience, if a tool provides any business value at all, worrying about $6/employee is a complete waste of time. If Slack saves each employee 6 minutes per month then it has paid for itself.

Developer tools generally charge far too little for their offerings - price point is probably not even a consideration for most companies, as long as its within an acceptable band.

> If Slack saves each employee 6 minutes per month then it has paid for itself.

But does it [compared to HipChat]? (asking as someone who has used HipChat but never Slack)

I use both on a regular basis, because our company has split personalities about which chat client is best.

I don't think it's meaningfully different or better than HipChat. The most obvious differences are that it automatically retries sending messages if your network glitches, and that it's proponents are more irrationally positive than HipChat's.

They're interchangeable. People who argue otherwise don't have enough actual work to do.

But my point is that doing that analysis is pointless, because the dollar amount is so low. The difference in price will never be more than a rounding error in a company's expenses, so it's not worth worrying about.

If someone at the company wants it, price point shouldn't be what's keeping the company from using it.

I think the biggest difference is that 37signals wasn't willing to offer an indefinite free version as a hook. Chat seems to be something that needs more room than a free trial and a low feature ceiling to catch on. Even a long free trial doesn't have the same effect as indefinite because it creates fear of wasting or misusing the trial. Humans are funny that way.

Interestingly, I use Hipchat with one team I work with and Slack with another, and far and away prefer Hipchat. The Mac Slack app feels like a web page inside a chromeless browser window. The Hipchat Mac app feels like a real app (albeit one that doesn't really comply with all of the Mac UI conventions).

>Mac Slack app feels like a web page inside a chromeless browser window

That's because it actually is just a web page inside a chromeless browser window. Right click and you can inspect and edit the markup.

We switched from Hipchat to Slack for reasons that seemed to amount to little more than hype about it in the tech world. It's fine. I don't think it has had any real effect on productivity or collaboration, and I really don't see the 'amazing' benefits that Slack fans tout.

In my opinion all of the various integrations that people get so excited about in Slack basically amount to constant noise that I can't filter out or defer the way I can with email notifications.

Its shows that timing is everything.

You get many benefits depending on when you start. Faulting Campfire or Hipchat for not executing properly is missing what execution is all about IMHO.

> We switched from Hipchat and we didn't really have a good reason - it just felt better.

Exactly the same here. The whole experience (especially the first run flow) was delightful and we immediately felt great about the decision.

I think one of the things that got slack going is that they have an actual free tier. I've wanted to use something like campfire or hipchat among dev teams before but I wasn't able to get someone to sponsor the lowest tier so we could just try it out. Also the devs were reluctant because everyone was in the same office.

>and the polish is amazing

Polish? It looks and feels like a ho-hum single page app (which it is).

Oh please. Ho-hum? Name 5 web apps that with more impressive UX.

Google Inbox, for one :)

Provided you're using Chrome, the only browser it supports.

As an active Slack user who started testing out Inbox--there is zero comparison. Inbox has some slick items for sure, but is nowhere near as intuitive as Slack.

And yet, Google led the round.

You consider this "impressive?"

What's impressive about it? Simple lists, a chat view, some text filter. Are you kidding me? Plus, just try "command-+" 2-3 times to enlarge the text, and see everything break down terribly.

But if you insist on web apps with more impressive UX work, anything in the list is better done: Twitter, Basecamp, Wunderlist, ..., hack even Gmail.

Sorry, but looking at it really doesn't do it justice. There are a lot of integration features that only appear when you need them. The UX is great because it's uncluttered and still powerful.

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