HipChat is now free for unlimited users

https://blog.hipchat.com/2014/05/27/hipchat-is-now-free-for-unlimited-users/

by rbres • 12 years ago

333 203 12 years ago

blog.hipchat.com

My company recently started using HipChat and I really like it. I expected to prefer IRC because of the standard, open protocol and the choice of clients, but the HipChat application works much more smoothly on my Linux desktop than any IRC client I've tried, and it's been adopted more widely across my organization than IRC ever was - making it much more useful, even if that really just comes down to marketing it to appear more accessible. It's working really well.

ixmatus• 12 years ago

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.

technomancy• 12 years ago

I use bitlbee with hipchat so I can connect from Emacs. It's a bit awkward to set up, but it's a lot better than the official client since it works inside tmux+mosh.

TallGuyShort2• 12 years ago

XChat was previously my client of choice, although I don't have much of a need for IRC on a daily basis anymore. Specifically, HipChat's integration with KDE's system tray and general look and feel is much more polished, IMO.

wlesieutre• 12 years ago

Out of curiosity, what do you do with your IRC bots? I know HipChat can have bots, so I'd assume some similar functionality is possible. But Hipchat doesn't have decades of community developed bots, so IRC has a long head start.

wcummings• 12 years ago

IRCCloud is nice and sits somewhere in the middle

Nanzikambe• 12 years ago

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

joeblau2• 12 years ago

HipChat is probably under fire from Slack. That's why I think they are making this change, because I just made the transition a few weeks ago and Slack has been amazing. Once you go Slack, you never go back.

adricnet• 12 years ago

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.

saiko-chriskun• 12 years ago

www.google.com

davidkuridza2• 12 years ago

https://slack.com/

We switched from HipChat recently, so far it's working fine. The only thing we miss are cross team notifications, but apparently they are working on it (can't find the link at the moment).

bmelton• 12 years ago

Not the OP, but here's a link: https://slack.com/

I've used it, and it seems pretty good, but I don't have enough time behind the wheel to provide a review.

IbJacked• 12 years ago

Since I've only dabbled with it I can't provide a proper review, but the link is https://slack.com/

owenwil• 12 years ago

Here's a small review of how we use Slack at our company: http://hoistapps.com/blog/tools-we-love-slack/

tl;dr: it's awesome

jess10032• 12 years ago

If you communicate with more than one team (different emails), I'd look into Hall. It's chat, text, file-sharing on all your devices. Hall.com

izolate• 12 years ago

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.

eddieroger4• 12 years ago

Similar for me and mine. We ran out of free users, hired a new guy and couldn't add him in. Someone else suggested Slack, and until this announcement, haven't looked back.

joshma• 12 years ago

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. :)

klausa• 12 years ago

Slack has IRC gateway, so you can use irssi for company chat.

It might not be a big deal for you, but when we were briefly using Slack at previous company, I loved that I could just add it as another network to irssi.

avelis• 12 years ago

Yes. The integrations. https://slack.com/integrations

This isn't the usual "host your own server" integration. All Slack asks for are credentials for services you use and it seamlessly integrates into an assigned chat room (channel). My CEO did it for the startup I work at and in ten minutes from signup we had: Github, Trello, New Relic, Twitter, and Stripe all integrated.

shalmanese• 12 years ago

This is a horrible way to think about it, slack doesn't need to deliver 4x the value, it just needs to deliver $6 worth of extra value per month.

Even at the very cheapest end of the spectrum, a developer is going to cost at least $60 an hour, fully loaded. If slack can make them 6 minutes more productive a month (ie: 12 seconds a day), then slack is worth it. These are productivity differences that aren't even measurable in practice which means the rational thing to do is to just be price insensitive and adopt the tool that works best, regardless of cost.

liddybird• 12 years ago

It really depends on what you want to get out of chat $2 is a good price to pay if your team chatting needs are minimal. But as your organization grows, especially if it starts to involve a larger team and projects with larger scope and interdependent pieces, your chat needs evolve into more of a communications need. In such cases it may be worth it to look into a more comprehensive chat tool since it gives you a much more powerful communications platform than your AIM or even email.

If a significant chunk of your company's discussion is taking place in chat rooms, it may be time to look into an upgrade.

You'd want something that gives you some standard next-gen functions: great global chat history search,video conferencing, screen sharing, markdown support, distributed team presence tracker, advanced noise management tools, dedicated integration efforts (integration to basic collaboration tools like asana, trello, etc should take minimal effort)

Keep in mind Slack is hardly the only other alternative in this game. Zapier gave a really good overview the other day, including Kato, who (full disclosure) I work for. https://zapier.com/blog/best-team-chat-app/

also @shalmanese makes a good point about justifying the cost.

freerobby4• 12 years ago

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.

silvertonia• 12 years ago

We just made the switch and I'm in agreement-- too noisy to be a serious tool.

But there is an all/here distinction-- just named everyone/channel.

cjbarber• 12 years ago

I wrote this:

https://github.com/cjbarber/hipchat-alternatives/

I while back.

This move by HipChat makes me happy.

I've attempted to move over, but HipChat is far superior for my needs.

baddox6• 12 years ago

Slack's blue "unread messages" banner should be a deal-breaker. I feel like I spend 10% of my day clicking around on Slack trying to get all the channels to realize I have read all their messages. It's such an insane usability nightmare that I can't believe any person or team seriously building a chat app would implement it.

eli4• 12 years ago

Similar story. I really liked Slack and the integrations are fantastic, but the UI has way too much going on and the lack of a native Windos client meant even just deploying the app is a hassle. The mobile client has menus that slide from left, right, and top last I checked. I told them they'd have had my business easily if they had a one click windows install and an optional Dummy Mode I could turn on for users by default that makes it work like a simple irc client.

I went to HipChat instead but it's got its own problems. Weirdly you can choose to get notifications for all rooms you're in or none of them, but nothing in between. Very frustrating.

joeblau2• 12 years ago

I think there is @everyone and @channel.

chermanowicz5• 12 years ago

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.

medwezys• 12 years ago

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.

astrodust• 12 years ago

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.

dserodio• 12 years ago

Slack has nice native clients for OS X, Android and iOS too.

sdm• 12 years ago

I wouldn't call Hipchat's OS X client native; it's Flash (Adobe Air). The Slack's desktop OS X and iOS apps, while they are html based, are an order of magnitude nicer to use.

subdane• 12 years ago

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

meritt• 12 years ago

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

d0m• 12 years ago

Yeah, the Android native version is amazing. I know there's an ios one too.

baddox6• 12 years ago

Is there an inherent reason to dislike a thin wrapper around a web app? The Slack OS X app is that, but it doesn't have any problems that are caused by being a wrapped web app.

namityadav• 12 years ago

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.

ab• 12 years ago

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.

chadcf• 12 years ago

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.

tomkin2• 12 years ago

Is HipChat really a good thing? Constant distractions all day means I get nothing done, so I'm pretty much against any kind of constant stream of communication when you're trying to think. Call me crazy.

On to the service itself:

I can't join in on my client's conversation without creating a whole new account with a different email address. Annoying and incredibly short-sighted. I know that the people over at HipChat never work with anyone outside of their office, but unfortunately this is not the case for most people.

Honestly, I can get an IRC server up and running in the time it takes to get a HipChat account activated. It's annoying that so many people are hyping HipChat, as if it were some groundbreaking thing.

mutru2• 12 years ago

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

yaur• 12 years ago

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.

pyre• 12 years ago

With IRC, you need a bouncer (e.g. znc) to get the functionality of seeing history without having the client open (and technically the bouncer is just the open client).

mrjatx3• 12 years ago

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.

truncate2• 12 years ago

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.

OoTheNigerian• 12 years ago

Slack surely is putting HipChat on its toes. Competition is really good.

I use and enjoy HipChat. The feature I love about it is the ability to temporarily invite someone (edit: a non organization person) to a room.

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.

One thing i'd like HipChat to improve on is the timeout that happens to their desktop app. As long as it is open, I do not want to have to "reconnect".

Nice one guys. And Nice one Slack. Surely, no slackers.

tomkin2• 12 years ago

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.

baddox6• 12 years ago

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."

ghiculescu• 12 years ago

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

dahdum• 12 years ago

This is awesome, we've been paying $100+/month for our company but never use video chat or screen share (nor did we want them) and have turned off history retention since day 1. Sounds like we can downgrade and pay nothing now.

Fizzadar• 12 years ago

We use HipChat at work, and I use Slack for some other projects; both pale in comparison to the simplicity, flexibility and client-options of IRC. But for those less technical it's a fantastic and easy to setup alternative. Pointless in an all-dev company, but anywhere else, priceless.

gtaylor• 12 years ago

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.

eddieroger4• 12 years ago

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.

phamilton• 12 years ago

I've found Video Chat to be pretty terrible. I find it weird to market that as the upsell. Most of the time, we give up with Hipchat Video and switch to a Google Hangout.

fixie• 12 years ago

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.

JGuo• 12 years ago

Just moved our team to slack as well. Has definitely been a better experience.

Dorian-Marie• 12 years ago

I think they should learn from Slack and make all the integrations at least as awesome as them, and also have some kind of more modern interface.

latchkey2• 12 years ago

Reminder: https://blog.hipchat.com/2014/04/25/hey-were-changing-our-te... and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7649524

mrjatx3• 12 years ago

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.

latchkey2• 12 years ago

Personally, I'm against their binding arbitration clause. This is a good reference. http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/arbitration-clauses-c...

powdahound• 12 years ago

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.

stox• 12 years ago

My commendations on how you guys handled this and how well you notified the user base of the change.

mjolk• 12 years ago

The typical way that an entity would have the right to access employee communications is through the entity's employee policy.

It's nice of you to drop into this thread, but it's exactly as bad people assumed.

If I was an employer and I didn't cover this sort of breach of privacy in my employee policy, and someone at Atlassian bothered to ask (I'm sure that Atlassian invests in lawyers to vet each submitted request), I'd just add the language to the policy document and fire it off.

mplewis• 12 years ago

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.

jsmeaton3• 12 years ago

I was concerned too and sent an email to the HipChat team. They responded nearly immediately and updated the original HN post.

To be able to see "private" communications, the manager would have to send an email to hipchat to request certain access. See above for the exact terms.

ChikkaChiChi• 12 years ago

I just recently compared Slack and Hipchat and Slack seems to be the more advanced of the two at this point.

The magic bullet in collaborative chat like this seems to be presence awareness. We used to use GTalk for this but since moving to hangouts we can't ever tell who is at there desk when we need them.

Here's to hoping one of them gets it right; especially when you install on your desktop and your mobile device.

kolev6• 12 years ago

My biggest issue with HipChat is the inability to run multiple organizations on the same client. The video and audio "premium" features are really a terrible idea as there's Skype, Google Hangouts, UberConference, and similar for that and they are free and core businesses and Atlassian cannot and should not attempt to compete with those!

chermanowicz5• 12 years ago

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.

mutru2• 12 years ago

Flowdock also supports multiple organizations in one client.

kolev6• 12 years ago

There's isn't much info about it - not even a single screenshot.

jghn• 12 years ago

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.

anthonys• 12 years ago

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?

chermanowicz5• 12 years ago

See comments above... there are apps that let you have multiple organizations

semerda2• 12 years ago

"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.

kolev6• 12 years ago

Yup! This would even put Skype to shame as you can separate personal from business. It also works for people who work on different projects part time, so, you don't have to remember to log out to log in. :)

rdschouw• 12 years ago

We moved from HipChat to Slack. HipChat desktop clients on OSX were crashing all the time. Most notably after waking up from a suspend. Slack is much more stable. The transition was pretty smooth.

jedisct1• 12 years ago

I don't get the point of HipChat. It's a closed, proprietary Jabber server, with closed-source clients, intentionally no OTR support but the explicit ability to spy one-on-one conversations instead.

And people used to pay for that?

ashayh• 12 years ago

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...

mrjatx3• 12 years ago

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.

freerobby4• 12 years ago

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

zo1• 12 years ago

I'm sorry, I don't speak marketing. Care to translate what you just said for us non-initiated?

devindotcom• 12 years ago

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?

syntheticlife• 12 years ago

Yeah bro, chill out. Not every product needs to 'work' or be 'good'.

matthewmacleod2• 12 years ago

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.

Igglyboo• 12 years ago

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.

julianz• 12 years ago

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?

gog• 12 years ago

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.

smethod2• 12 years ago

I know it sounds ridiculous but for me the one thing HipChat's got over Slack is the ability to have custom emoticons https://blog.hipchat.com/2012/05/21/custom-emoticons-everywh.... Admittedly we use it mainly for banter and fun but its a sticky feature currently keeping me migrating over to Slack...

kolev6• 12 years ago

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

nikhilpandit• 12 years ago

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

smethod2• 12 years ago

Oh cool, thanks I missed that update

smasuch• 12 years ago

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

mitchellhislop• 12 years ago

You can setup custom emojis in Slack!

larrybolt• 12 years ago

I wonder if this has at least a little bit to do with the recent post about HackerChat [1], since even though it wasn't by the people at Slack themselves, but by someone else (Gianluca and Steven), it's pretty much a very good way to get the word out about Slack. I actually couldn't think of a better way than what HackerChat did to show to developers, entrepreneurs and people that would need such tool "Here's how it works!". I don't think any landing page can do that.

I think it's what some smaller businesses might do, or some people applying for a job: look what the startup/client does or needs, make something that's relevant to demo your skills/features and show it to them.

[1] http://hackerchat.co/

aspir2• 12 years ago

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.

callmeed• 12 years ago

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.

aspir2• 12 years ago

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.

david_shaw• 12 years ago

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.

semerda2• 12 years ago

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.

eli4• 12 years ago

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

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

colordrops• 12 years ago

Does Slack support local hosting?

quasse• 12 years ago

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.

matwood• 12 years ago

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.

microtonal• 12 years ago

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.

matthewmacleod2• 12 years ago

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.

JonoBB2• 12 years ago

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.

jacktoole12• 12 years ago

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.

bokglobule• 12 years ago

Do you guys worry about confidentiality with these services?

hhaidar• 12 years ago

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.

flurdy• 12 years ago

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

njharman• 12 years ago

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".

tomschlick• 12 years ago

They have a behind the firewall version of hipchat for security concious corp customers.

notwhyships• 12 years ago

Hard to imagine that Google isn't going to weigh in soon with its own offering.

EGreg• 12 years ago

We just use Hangouts and everything integrated into Google Apps. What is the advantage here?

jsmeaton3• 12 years ago

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.

mavci• 12 years ago

I'm still with Slack. Can't make a webhook with HipChat, it shouldn't be hard this much.

DanBlake• 12 years ago

It feels like they are pulling a amazon, ala diapers.com fiasco. *

Only issue is, they are doing it to their core business vs amazon who was doing it with just one segment and could afford to cannibalize profits in that sector

http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/10/10/amazon_bo...

te_chris• 12 years ago

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

ak217• 12 years ago

We switched to Flowdock and never looked back. The SNR advantages of the integrated conversation threads and "email-like" inbox model are amazing. I never knew what I was missing with IRC/hipchat.

akoumjian• 12 years ago

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.

MartinCron• 12 years ago

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

JonoBB2• 12 years ago

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.

ansimionescu• 12 years ago

Two questions, if I may:

What are HipChat's advantages over other chat services?

What's a good, mainstream-ish, secure/encrypted chat service?

gorax• 12 years ago

I wonder what the hosted pricing will be when it comes out of beta. At my work we will not even entertain something that cannot be hosted by us. Hipchat has saved 3 members of our 15 man team countless hours by integrating it into our workflow.

I if slack could be self hosted I would consider it but Hipchat has our support.

jess10032• 12 years ago

Has anyone checked out Hall? It's chat, text, and file-sharing for teams. Free for teams for an unlimited time. But with the added bonus of being able to talk with ANYONE from ANY email address, instead of switching in and out of teams like on Slack. Try it out: hall.com

rahilsondhi• 12 years ago

That's great HipChat. Now can you do emoji autocomplete?

IgorPartola3• 12 years ago

Last I tried HipChat, it was a terrible experience simply because I wanted to not run yet another application and instead use Adium. They do support XMPP but to get it working you have to do magic. After I did the magic, I had chat up and running but lo and behold: file transfers did not work. Thankfully, this is when our team decided the experiment was over. We went back to using IRC. What fundamental problem do these new chat protocols solve that are not already addressed by IRC and XMPP?

EC1• 12 years ago

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.

Karunamon• 12 years ago

I never understood how IRC was somehow not accessible. Connect to a server, join a room, (usually from a helpfully provided list), enter text and other people see it. Those are the basics, and my gran could understand them.

It's no more difficult than browsing the web.

brown9-22• 12 years ago

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.

IgorPartola3• 12 years ago

So XMPP lets you do this too. Why invent a new protocol?

idle_processor• 12 years ago

Overnight is covered by leaving a client running, with logging. Offline is covered by using a BNC[0]. These solutions are years old, but perhaps less user-friendly than hipchat.

There are a plethora of IRC clients to choose from one various platforms, but there's only the one hipchat. IRC is also an open protocol.

So, hipchat's only real chance is trying to be the Apple of IRC--they must nail UX and marketing to the tech-hapless to have a real chance.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BNC_(software)

ams6110• 12 years ago

We've had chat + persistence for decades, and called it email (or perhaps usenet or listserv, for groups).

jacktoole12• 12 years ago

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.

sgk284• 12 years ago

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.

mikeash2• 12 years ago

Some of those are legitimate points, but quite a few apply equally to IRC. Namely, 1, 2, 3, and 9.

Thaxll• 12 years ago

Is Slack cloud based? If so it's a big problem for a lot of compagnies, most of them don't want to host their chat service to an external provider, that's where Hipchat is very useful. You can host your own server in-house.

CMCDragonkai• 12 years ago

We moved from Hipchat to Kato, mainly due to the bugs and frequent servers going offline.

bmurphy1976• 12 years ago

I like HipChat but I really really wish it integrated with an irc client. I've spent hours trying to get a good experience with BitlBee and, well, it's anything but smooth. The single biggest thing they could do to help me and my coworkers out would be to allow our IRC clients to connect to the service. Other than that I love it.

gaoshan• 12 years ago

We use a bunch of Atlassian products (Jira, Bitbucket, Tempo, Sourcetree, IDE Connector, Jira Agile, ) but while HipChat never caught on with us, Slack hit a home run.

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

munificent• 12 years ago

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

Hangouts in G+?

jsmeaton3• 12 years ago

We were using hangouts and google chat exclusively until we finally made the jump to HipChat. We still use hangouts for group video (morning scrum mostly), and hipchat for everything else.

Group video in hipchat would be a killer feature.

fekberg• 12 years ago

HipChat is great, but I've found myself much more often on JabbR (https://jabbr.net/) to be honest. Might be because I am a sucker for SignalR.

JabbR is also free to use, you can have private team rooms if you so like and it integrates with a bunch of auth services.

programminggeek• 12 years ago

The biggest feature HipChat lacks is chat room sounds. That was my favorite feature of Campfire. Otherwise, HipChat is pretty cool, I guess.

I really miss chat sounds.

/sadtrombone

mutant• 12 years ago

this still doesn't fix the fact that there is no longer private 1 on 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7649524

machbio• 12 years ago

Slack has a problem with retrieving deleted team URLs, seems like they have not covered all the test cases for the signup process..

torbica• 12 years ago

What would be best HipChat alternative for self-hosting? At my organization we are not allowed to use any external service.

veesahni• 12 years ago

HipChat Server

https://www.hipchat.com/server

Deestan• 12 years ago

Be aware that Hipchat are now rolling out a new "feature" in which the account admin can read all private 1-to-1 chat: http://help.hipchat.com/forums/138883-suggestions-ideas/sugg...

This could be a significant issue for some, both morally and legally.

If you are using / are going to use Hipchat with this enabled, at least make sure you are aware of any legalities you need to conform to because of this. E.g. gather consent from employees.

djim• 12 years ago

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.

mikeash2• 12 years ago

That depends heavily on local laws and you really can't make a blanket statement like that.

truncate2• 12 years ago

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.

ltorresv• 12 years ago

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.

hoopism• 12 years ago

I tried to sign up. I really did.

First I entered in my own details but neglected my lastname... didn't say I had to. It's a single name field. It rejected my submission and zero'd out the fields. Strike one.

Then it asked for my team members names and email addresses. It had a skip button, that was nice. I added their emails and used again their first names... let them add their last name or preferred name. Again it failed and removed all the data I entered. Strike two.

Then I attempted to download the client. It wouldn't let me till I verified my account. It will let me send solicitation emails to team members... but not download a client. Ok. Odd. I downloaded the client to my mac entered credentials and after about 4 minutes it failed to launch with a debug window displayed. Strike three.

I did try.

skizm• 12 years ago

Maybe I haven't read enough about HipChat, but what is the advantage over google's chat? That you don't need a google account?

EDIT: ah, integration with other Atlassian products. got it.

jitbit• 12 years ago

The only reason my team prefers HipChat over Slack is because Slack doesn't have a Windows-client

HipChat is now free for unlimited users

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