25 ms·

Atlassian launches Stride, its Slack competitor

440 points by davidjgraph 9y ago

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
sjellis 9y ago
It's good to see thoughtful competition in this space - Slack is mostly a joy to use, but we really need healthy competition. In the absence of widely-used open standards, the consequences of putting ever-increasing our institutional memories into proprietary, centrally controlled systems may depend upon how much competitive pressure the providers feel.
- waisbrot 9y ago
  Chat applications for work are insanely sticky, though? You can offer 5 great new features and a $500/month lower price-tag and I'm probably not going to want to lose my searchable chat history and have everyone unable to communicate for a week while we switch.
  - sjellis 9y ago
    Yep. Since there are no interoperability standard, any new entrant into the market is now going to have to spend a lot of resources on developing a process to reliably migrate accounts and history out of Slack, Yammer etc.
lin_lin 9y ago
From the makers of Jira and Confluence... no thanks.
- amiga-workbench 9y ago
  While Jira isn't amazing, its been a useful addition where I work. I just wish it wasn't so slow, and it could integrate better with some kind of scheduling software to flag obvious shortfalls.
- breakingcups 9y ago
  Could you at least add what your criticism on those two products is? Jira and Confluence get a lot of hate, but I feel like that's mostly because of how it's set up by organizations. At my organization we've set up Jira (and later Confluence) in a very developer-centric way, by looking at the best way it could help the developer first, project manager second. This has led to universal adoption and no complaints or ill attitudes toward Atlassian products.
  - Karunamon 9y ago
    I can definitely echo this. Confluence is just a wiki, Jira is just an issue tracker - both of these kinds of tools are table stakes for any serious development group. Most of the hate comes from the crappy setups enforced by overbearing companies. I've got very few complaints with either of these tools when developers are included in the talks about how they're to be set up and used. Any tool can be made obnoxious if managed incorrectly.
  - CaptSpify 9y ago
    Not who you are replying to but... I feel like Jira is trying to be too many things, instead of focusing on one goal, which leads to the bad setups that you mentioned. Though I agree that at the end of the day, it seems more like the org's fault, rather than Atlassian's. Confluence feels amateurish: email notifications never work right, and the search is a joke. The buttons are unintuitive, and the overall organization of pages is a mess. Debugging either of them when they crash all the time is a pain. Upgrades never go smoothly, and Atlassian can't even read their own core-dumps.
tomschlick 9y ago
I'm curious as to what will happen to HipChat. Having 2 competing chat products under one roof isn't ideal, I'd assume one will get the axe at some point.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- marshallofsound 9y ago
  There is a direct migration path from HipChat Cloud to Stride: https://confluence.atlassian.com/stride-documentation/faq-stride-and-hipchat-cloud-937165565.html https://confluence.atlassian.com/stride-documentation/faq-st...
  - Karunamon 9y ago
    Yow, that was unexpected. Relevant words: Do you plan to sunset HipChat Cloud? For now, HipChat Cloud will continue to be supported, but eventually we will encourage all HipChat Cloud customers to upgrade to Stride.
- mmanfrin 9y ago
  It's the Google model.
pmulv 9y ago
> There also is emoji and Giphy support, of course. But why? It seems that Stride is trying to be the more productive version of Slack, and I think action items and decision notes have potential, but if I keep getting :partyparrot: instead of information related to my job, I'm going to keep basically ignoring my communications app.
- therealmarv 9y ago
  there are jobs out there where you can also have fun, also in chat. Just saying...
  - BartSaM 9y ago
    Afaik there are enough chats that cater for that. I understand emojis, but gif support is not necessary for a business chat app. At least not in all of them.
- croon 9y ago
  I'm unsure if that's a system problem or if [team member] can ruin any medium. I don't mind planning poker cards having the coffee mug, or the occasional friday afternoon song playing out the speakers, etc, as long as there is a social contract where everyone respects moderation.
  - rtpg 9y ago
    Definitely agree that people cause issues in communication. Tools can encourage good behaviour and discourage bad behavior though. I've found that GIFs end up being a bit too far down the "pop culture" spectrum to be worth having in Slack, for example. Net negative for comfortable communication when not everyone is on the same meme spectrum
- tootie 9y ago
  Gif integration is key to team productivity.
- pavel_lishin 9y ago
bovermyer 9y ago
I was ready to hate on this as just another Slack clone, but its unique features (actions and decisions) sound pretty great. Those combined with the Focus Mode sound like what Slack needs to have, to be honest.
- Moru 9y ago
  Slack is just another IRC clone anyway... :-)
  - pavel_lishin 9y ago
    And cellphones are just a clone of Marconi's radio.
- pavel_lishin 9y ago
  Actions appears to be the only new thing; Decisions looks just like pinning a specific message in Slack based on the screenshots.
- beberlei 9y ago
  I am putting my hope into Slack cloning this feature similar to how facebook cloned g+ circles or snapchat. Hopefully it will be usable and not like they added "Threads".
morinted 9y ago
Now we have Slack, Discord, Gitter, Microsoft Teams, and Atlassian Stride. I'm not sure when chat rooms became a business tool. Personally, I find myself distracted more than anything from all the notifications these apps cause, I get less done. I have to be sure to quit every chat app and put my phone in "do not disturb" to disconnect and focus, and then I get coworkers mad that I'm not online. At least with email I could take a while to reply without anyone blinking an eye.
- chuckdries 9y ago
  Well stride kind of handles that with focus mode. I think most people are aware that sometimes you need to disconnect to focus.
- ewams 9y ago
  I mute every channel I am in except for the private channel of my team.
  - shangxiao 9y ago
    I mute everything except for direct notifications in Slack. I advise team members this and if they want my immediate attention that have to tag me.
- lin_lin 9y ago
  Cisco Spark too. Yes, I echo your concerns about having some "reply" time. Particularly since so many of my co-workers are all too eager to install these on their phones and use them outside of the work-place (i.e. always available to some degree). I absolutely refuse to install the apps, that's my line in the sand!
  - brightball 9y ago
    I'm on call a lot, otherwise I'd be right with you.
    - deleted 9y ago
codq 9y ago
Twist, by the makers of Todoist, is another take on work chat. https://twistapp.com/ https://twistapp.com/
- boundlessdreamz 9y ago
  I really like the idea of twist and it seems to work better in the trial we did. But it had some shortcomings 1. No linux client 2. UI/UX is not as polished as slack 3. Can't paste images from clipboard 4. Doesn't support webhooks which means that service integrations are almost nonexistent
  - ivm 9y ago
    On the other hand, their Mac client is native.
  - compuguy 9y ago
    No on-perm option either.
- bachmeier 9y ago
  I tested it out recently and it repeatedly said my messages couldn't be sent to the server. I'm not sure I'd trust it.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
eterm 9y ago
Isn't hipchat its slack competitor? Where does this leave that project? Hipchat is already suffering from poor support, its windows client is awful since it went to "version 2".
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- marshallofsound 9y ago
  Check out the Stride FAQ: https://confluence.atlassian.com/stride-documentation/faq-stride-and-hipchat-cloud-937165565.html https://confluence.atlassian.com/stride-documentation/faq-st... > Starting soon, we will begin to upgrade all HipChat Cloud teams to Stride. HipChat Cloud will continue to work as it does today until your team upgrades to Stride. After upgrading, HipChat Cloud will remain in 'read-only' mode so that you can reference your API configuration in HipChat Cloud and receive integration notifications for those apps that are not yet in Stride.
  - briffle 9y ago
    Can't find any info about a datacenter edition, only the cloud. But if hipchat is going away in cloud, then that is going to mean were not going to see any new features in hipchat datacenter...
    - bpicolo 9y ago
      > then that is going to mean were not going to see any new features in hipchat datacenter... That's been mostly true for a while anyway. You still can't delete or sanely edit a message in hipchat.
      - SomeHacker44 9y ago
        Oddly, this is the ONLY thing I think HipChat has ever done sanely. I've been using sed expressions for almost three decades to alert my fellow chatters of an error in my previous message. The first time I did that in HipChat... It edited my previous message. I nearly fell off my chair. It was and is probably my favorite HipChat feature. s/favorite/favourite/ for my English fellow humans. :)
brightball 9y ago
Looks really sharp to me. I like what I see from the workflow, especially when it comes to getting caught back up on things after being away for vacation or snooze. I'll be interested to see how the Remote Desktop Control premium feature works too. That seems geared towards collaboration/pairing. #1 question though...will they have a Linux client that they actually care about. The Hipchat linux client was largely an afterthought that hung regularly. It was better to just use Rambox and keep the web version open.
mmahemoff 9y ago
Hard to take it seriously when Hipchat came first and languished for so long. Even basic stuff like Emoji was a fail (their list included (arrington) and (derp)). Why launch a new Slack clone when you already have something so closely matching the architecture of Slack? I assume "technical debt" but that's rarely a good reason to start from scratch.
- hobofan 9y ago
  > Why launch a new Slack clone when you already have something so closely matching the architecture of Slack? A new possibility to build a brand and reputation? From what I can gather HipChat has a pretty "meh" reputation.
  - pavel_lishin 9y ago
    And a justified reputation at that, but between Hipchat, and Jira's frankly atrocious text formatting, I'm more afraid of Stride than looking forward to it. Hipchat may be crummy, but at least it's a familiar crummy that I've learned to work around.
  - dancryer 9y ago
    Couldn't that be an opportunity though? Are you more likely to notice 'the new thing' from Atlassian, or when someone says "Woah, have you seen how much they've improved HipChat?"
illamint 9y ago
Sad that this isn't available as an on-premises solution out of the gate. We're stuck using internally-hosted HipChat for compliance reasons and it is absolutely awful. The desktop and web clients have only gotten worse over time. This confirms my worst fears that HipChat is basically abandonware.
- AckSyn 9y ago
  Why not stick to irc or xmpp for your in-house needs?
- taternuts 9y ago
  It did get an update sometime last week!! Signed, Another sad on-premise user
- c0wb0yc0d3r 9y ago
  If it wasn't so new I would say look at matrix. You can host that yourself and chats are encrypted.
shangxiao 9y ago
> Atlassian, the company behind popular tools like … Trello sigh It's somewhat of a misleading statement that. My take on the "behind" is in the sense that they designed and created the product from its conception. I really love the Trello UX and believe that Atlassian products are the exact polar opposite. The only way an Atlassian product seems to gain love from a community is if they emulate something already in existence.
- saganus 9y ago
  I thought Trello was created by FogCreek, no?
  - krallja 9y ago
    Yes. Fog Creek spun Trello off as its own company (July 2014), which was acquired by Atlassian (January 2017).
    - saganus 9y ago
      Oh! I wasn't aware that Atlassian acquired it. My mistake.
  - Rbatista 9y ago
    https://techcrunch.com/2017/01/09/atlassian-acquires-trello/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/01/09/atlassian-acquires-trello/
- mhp 9y ago
  Hi! Co-founder Trello here. Agree that “behind” is maybe weird here and probably not intentional but then again the whole Trello team is now part of Atlassian. Every day we are part of the group of people that are building the future products and features. Even without us, I think today’s launch shows Atlassian is heavily invested in “unleashing the potential of EVERY team” (emphasis mine) and their design and understanding of how to do that is evolving. If you love the Trello UX then my guess is you are going to be pleasantly surprised about where we go in the future.
aargh_aargh 9y ago
So... is this a website, an Electron app or a native app?
_JamesA_ 9y ago
Slack, HipChat, Mattermost, Skype, IRC, iMessage, WhatsApp, Signal, Wire, etc, etc. Am I the only one that can't keep track of what service (or app) I need to use to communicate with which person, team or organization? I'll stick with e-mail until these services finally agree to federate.
- sdiepend 9y ago
  https://xkcd.com/1810/ https://xkcd.com/1810/
lukepothier 9y ago
Fingers crossed it has desktop clients that aren't written in Electron...
- neilsimp1 9y ago
  Have you noticed Slack slow down/use too many resources as a result of being an Electron app? Honest question, I've never used Slack, but have used other Electron apps and never really have any issues.
  - jasonthevillain 9y ago
    Yes (crazy CPU/memory/battery usage). I switched to using it in a browser tab and it's been much better.
  - montyf 9y ago
    I'm on a new computer and Slack takes at least a second to react to mouseclicks. It's completely ridiculous since, let's be honest here, Slack is a pretty basic chat app.
  - tushar-r 9y ago
    The Slack app on my mac kept using up a lot of RAM frequently. I'd have it running for a few days and suddenly the laptop would be unusable, with only ~200MB of RAM free. Slack would suddenly be using 2-3GB of memory. Kill slack and everything works fine. I've restored to using slack on Safari now. This problem still occurs, but reloading the slack tab is easier then finding and killing the slack process.
  - scaryclam 9y ago
    We moved away from slack due to it crashing peoples desktops (Mac, Windows and Linux all have had this problem). I've not used other electron apps though, so maybe I'll stop blaming the underlying tech :)
- Trufa 9y ago
  Why is that? I have had a great experience with slack on desktop, I was skeptical but it turned out great.
akilism 9y ago
no end to end encryption?
- bogle 9y ago
  This is seriously one of the killer features. How can a company use this if everything is in the clear? How can you even have a conversation if at any time it can all be dragged up and pored over? The double ratchet of Signal, for instance, is open source so just implement it already.
  - rtpg 9y ago
    But companies want records of communication! They want/need auditable records. If two employees want to chat in secret, companies sure don't want that happening
raaaaraaaa1 9y ago
let's hope that Stride will have minimalistic memory footprint ...fingers crossed. It's not nice to have 400mb taken from 5 Slack IM's.
- markdog12 9y ago
  I'd be very surprised if it wasn't an Electron app, which comes with all the baggage you describe.
cpursley 9y ago
My only question is, which Slack alternative does not use half my CPUs and suck down my battery just to run ideally in the background?
- MaxLeiter 9y ago
  Most IRC clients
  - cpursley 9y ago
    Can you recommend an IRC client that works for non-technical folks that also works with api and webhooks capabilities?
    - AckSyn 9y ago
      I would recommend this. https://github.com/ircanywhere/ircanywhere https://github.com/ircanywhere/ircanywhere
    - luckydude 9y ago
      That seems to be a project waiting to be written. It's clear that IRC can be good enough but slack wins because of the smooth on-boarding for non-technical people. I guess noone has built it because for techies, IRC is good enough, and there isn't a clear path to monetizing it?
      - xPaw 9y ago
        The Lounge works rather nicely for non technical people, https://github.com/thelounge/lounge https://github.com/thelounge/lounge ScoutLink uses it for kids with great success.
      - zanny 9y ago
        If you are going to write a new client for a chat protocol, why use IRC over Matrix, especially since Matrix bridges to IRC?
    - 9y ago
vssr 9y ago
Working for a company that uses Bitbucket, Jira and Slack, I'm carefully optimistic. It would be great to have reliable, well maintained integration between chat and the Atlassian tools.
abiox 9y ago
now we just need a chat app that bridges all the chat apps. (again)
- sturmeh 9y ago
  Why would a business use multiple solutions?
  - wila 9y ago
    As a contractor with multiple customers and each their own chat solution it is kind of handy to have it all in one area.
  - Jeremy1026 9y ago
    Businesses might not, but users do. I use Ryver for work, Slack for friends, and have a Discord for a group in a game.
- glenneroo 9y ago
  I just checked if Trillian was working on something like this, similar to their IM/IRC/Email/FB/etc. bridging tool. Instead, they are offering more competition in this space, Trillian for Business: www.trillian.im Guess we will have to wait for someone else to fill this niche.
- sschueller 9y ago
  http://rambox.pro/ http://rambox.pro/ Free, Open Source and Cross Platform
  - saagarjha 9y ago
    Yes, but it’s essentially loading a bunch of webviews in tabs.
- CaptSpify 9y ago
  I really like finch (pidgin terminal version). It's small, lightweight, and doesn't annoy me with notifications/emojis/gifs.
program_whiz 9y ago
More examples of needless tool cloning. Rather than reinvent IRC of the 90s/00s, where is the real innovation from Silicon Valley and the tech world?
- noxToken 9y ago
  Sometimes tech isn't about innovation, discovery and breakthrough. Sometimes it's about integrating existing technology into the workflow of your customer base. Plenty of businesses big and small use the Atlassian product suite. This is a way for those businesses to have a chat client that is native to their suite. Tech isn't always sexy. Sometimes tech is just good business sense.
  - program_whiz 9y ago
    Don't agree. I will accept the term "business technology" insofar as Atlassian is rewriting existing concepts for business. But that's like saying buying a house and renting it for profit is "good business technology" -- its just an existing method being used for something else, I guess a house is a type of technology. In my mind, when someone says they are a "technology company", what that means is that they want to sell technology (new approaches to solving problems). Making the same thing over and over with minor variations and calling it "tech" just because it runs on computers (30 year old tech) is just excusing it. The truth is, Atlassian saw the $$ that slack is making and wanted to get a piece of the pie, I highly doubt they thought: "Eureka! I've come up with a new technology to improve communication of a team. Its like email but in real time!"
    - noxToken 9y ago
      That's literally what I said: >> Sometimes tech isn't about innovation, discovery and breakthrough. Sometimes it's about integrating existing technology into the workflow of your customer base. Technology companies don't just create new things. Business is not 100% innovation. Not even the giants like MSFT, Google, FB, Amazon, and Apple spend all of their employee power on creating something new. Sometimes it's giving your customer base what they want. I don't think anyone is billing Slide as the next frontier in chat software. Atlassian is porting over existing functionality to work natively with their other products. With the wide adoption of Slack, it's obvious that chat software is something Atlassian's customers are probably using, so why not make that hooks into the other products? It doesn't matter if you're a tech company, a real estate company, a law firm, or a medical practice - if your customers want something that integrates well with what you're offering, it makes good business sense to see if it can work.
LeicaLatte 9y ago
I find Slack to be less useful when it is used by more than a single person. I use it as a notification log/sink and it works great. Definitely trying out atlassian stride.
bitwize 9y ago
I thought HipChat was their Slack competitor? Jesus christ make up your minds people
- mihaela 9y ago
  HipChat was them buying time to compete with Slack.
  - knotty66 9y ago
    HipChat was around way before Slack.
bassman9000 9y ago
As long as we can get rid of Skype and Webex with a single tool, I'd be more than happy
cyphar 9y ago
Wait, what happened to HipChat? I get that it's not as sexy as Slack, but honestly they're all basically just IRC with images and some other integrations. Why start a whole new project (which presumably isn't XMPP under the hood). From memory, Slack started out as a HipChat competitor. Not to mention, what is the on-premises story going to be (which was a major selling point of HipChat).
- compuguy 9y ago
  They are continuing to support HipChat Datacenter edition...for what it's worth.
solatic 9y ago
Not being available on-prem continues to show how poorly Atlassian treats its enterprise customers. * No feature parity * No pre-built packages or support for configuration / infrastructure management - everything must be packaged completely from scratch, without recommended package specifications or Dockerfiles etc. to build off of. Nope - "here's a tar.gz. Have fun!" * No proper enterprise support and no access to source code. We have a couple feature requests which are deep, burning desires which we'd love to either throw money or developers at but we can't because we have no relationship with Atlassian and we have no idea if Atlassian will ever address them because they don't publish product roadmaps. * Essential enterprise products like Crowd and Bamboo get short shrift and make it clear that communication inside Atlassian is lacking. Example: Bitbucket Data Center shipped with support to enforce GPG-signed commits. But because Crowd won't manage user GPG public keys, administrators can't revoke user keys without disabling access to Bitbucket entirely (so, GPG keys never get revoked), and Bamboo administrators can't enforce that project builds only use Bitbucket repositories with GPG-enforcement enabled, so for enterprises which actually need to enforce audit trails (for compliance, for building trust with deeply conservative customers...), the feature is worthless. Another example: Bamboo supports elastic build agents... but only on AWS. No support for vSphere, OpenStack, or heck any other public clouds like GCE or Azure. No Dockerized build agents for build jobs which don't themselves need Docker. Another example: Crowd is utterly lacking of any kind of investment. Sun Directory Server Enterprise Edition? Supported. OpenID Connect? 2FA? RSA SecurID? Yubikeys? lolnope. It finally got active-active clustering this year, though, so maybe that's a good sign? It's too bad their suite is in a class of its own because for all its faults, it's in a class of its own. Everything else sucks, one way or another.
- jamiesonbecker 9y ago
  Agreed - we offer on-premise (and drive significant revenue from it) at Userify for people who prefer their SSH key management in-house. To be fair to Atlassian, they basically invented on-prem with SaaS-style pricing (and did us all a great service), and their biggest competitor here (Slack) isn't available on-prem either. Some of these features that you list in Crowd are ironically very similar to missing features in our products, but we're actively working on them -- while not losing focus on being the fastest and easiest key manager to stand up. Running a software business can be challenging -- especially with a myriad of customer environments and feature requests. My feeling is that Atlassian got really big really fast and may have lost sight of their key differentiator -- which, to me, at the time, was pricing and simplicity. It looks like this new product might have brought back their flair on both counts.
dabernathy89 9y ago
Like Slack, it has per user pricing. This means it's difficult for large open source projects to use it if they have any interest in keeping a permanent log, or even keeping a message history that goes back more than a few days. Feature-wise, the "Actions and Decisions" tools sound pretty interesting. Definitely a pain point with Slack. We've been using Slack for a lot of our planning for the Longhorn PHP conference (https://www.longhornphp.com https://www.longhornphp.com), and it's honestly not been great. Conversations & decisions about particular topics get buried; if someone wasn't present for a conversation, it's likely they'll never see it. I know Slack isn't a project management tool - we've been using a mix of Google Docs and Trello for that. But even as a communications tool it feels fragile and incomplete.
- cialowicz 9y ago
  Open source projects can request free licenses from Atlassian. Here's the form: https://www.atlassian.com/software/views/open-source-license-request https://www.atlassian.com/software/views/open-source-license... Presumably, they'll add Stride to that form eventually.
  - bananateam 9y ago
    yes, we will eventually.
    - dabernathy89 9y ago
      that's really good news!
  - onedr0p 9y ago
    In regards to OSS, with Discord adding screen sharing and video chat this month, I don't see why anyone would try their product.
rglover 9y ago
If this has an API, I'm fully onboard. The remote desktop control is something I've been patiently awaiting in Slack since they scooped up ScreenHero but they've done nothing with it.
- marshallofsound 9y ago
  It has an API --> https://developer.atlassian.com/cloud/stride/ https://developer.atlassian.com/cloud/stride/ :)
1_2__4 9y ago
How the hell did we go from realizing massive enterprise software was a bad deal to suddenly embracing it all over again? Not that stuff like Oracle and Salesforce ever went away, but I seriously don't understand why small companies buy into the Faustian bargain of "yes please vendor, I'd love to be in a position where I'm tied to your company forever, that sounds great".
- aembleton 9y ago
  Because it's easy to get going with it, and the pricing scales per user.
- Karunamon 9y ago
  For something as ephemeral as instant message, there's no real lock-in to speak of. The migration path is: 1) Grant your users access to the new tool 2) There is no 2. Pain only comes when you're storing organizational knowledge in an instant message tool.
- CaptSpify 9y ago
  The older I get, the more I realize that things don't ever really change. We keep making the same mistakes over and over and over. You think that we, as a science and engineering focused field would be less prone to this but no, we're still short-sighted meat-bags like everyone else.
- madeofpalk 9y ago
  I mean, what's the alternative? Roll your own software?
johansch 9y ago
Does each chat line submission take at least one second to process? If so I will feel right at home, knowing it's Atlassian-made!
gtirloni 9y ago
I can't find any information about accessibility features. Getting zero results in their docs.
eggs_and_avo 9y ago
We need a study measuring how much business chat tools are used for non-work communication. I keep hearing from managers that these tools aren't massive distractions, so let's look at the data!
altotrees 9y ago
So we have all of these chat apps. Choice is never a bad thing, but this has to be somewhat beyond saturation point, no? I don't know about anyone else, but I would rather have my work chat apps resemble social media chat apps less rather than more. Fewer Gif's, fewer emojis — they can be funny and endearing in the right context, but just feel forced and obtuse in a work setting. Also, this is coming from the makers of Confluence and Jira...I'll have to try it and see it in person before forming a true opinion, but not holding out too much hope.
- humanrebar 9y ago
  > Fewer Gif's My team often uses gifs to document and demonstrate workflows in UIs. It's easier to consume than a series of screenshots, albeit harder to maintain.
  - emddudley 9y ago
    The comment is referring to meme gifs. Your use case obviously makes a lot of sense.
- kody 9y ago
  I don't use any Atlassian products, but I see the appeal of a Slack-like chat app that natively integrates with other Atlassian products - particularly for knowledge management purposes. Businesses can configure/customize Slack to do this, but it's not really intuitive.
  - mdekkers 9y ago
    I see the appeal of a Slack-like chat app that natively integrates with other Atlassian products In which way? I often see this touted as a benefit, and rarely see it work effectively, or productively.
  - notatoad 9y ago
    In my experience atlassian products dont really integrate with each other any better than they do with third party products. I wouldn't expect a jira/stride workflow to be any better than a jira/slack workflow.
btbuildem 9y ago
Is it going to be as bad as JIRA?
- Sujan 9y ago
  How bad is JIRA?
  - TheCoelacanth 9y ago
    That depends heavily on how bad the person controlling your Jira configuration is. If they are bad it is pure torture. If they are good it is tolerable.
SomeHacker44 9y ago
As the head of a company that uses HipChat... Thank you Atlassian. We have intended to migrate to the (free and better) Mattermost for a long time and just have been waiting for it to hit the top of our priority list. Knowing you are abandoning the terrible HipChat for an entirely new product, with no migration path and 50% more cost, makes this an easier choice. You have been abandoning us on JIRA and Confluence as well. There are many features that are not available on our self-hosted versions even when fully upgraded. Your licensing and pricing terms get worse year after year even though essentially absolutely nothing useful (to us anyway) ever gets added. We even use Trello a little here and there... I expect that to go south too. Well, at least we have GitLab and soon Mattermost, both suitable for much of what we need, for free. Thank you for making our decisions easier.
- orand 9y ago
  Which Jira and Confluence features aren't available for fully upgraded self-hosted instances?
  - Karunamon 9y ago
    Seconding this. It always seemed to me that you lose features by going to the cloud hosted version.
  - SomeHacker44 9y ago
    Not to beat a dead horse about it, but Atlassian made improvements to the Kanban functionality, especially regarding the backlog (a backlog manager), and didn't make it available to our on-premise locally-installed stuff. Additionally, they jacked up the prices on the Service Desk software users and changed who can do what at what prices. All in all, I wouldn't choose Atlassian for any new installations/companies. I would definitely look elsewhere. And, I've been using their products since before FishEye was an Atlassian product (and they destroyed that product too).
    - compuguy 9y ago
      Ouch (and self-hosted atlassian products were pricy to begin with). Are there any good alternatives to Jira and Confluence out there (that are self-hosted/on-prem)?
mansilladev 9y ago
Info on the Stride API at https://developer.atlassian.com https://developer.atlassian.com
eloff 9y ago
For the privacy conscious, there's also https://www.secure.chat/ https://www.secure.chat/ if you want a slack alternative with end-to-end client-side encryption. You can choose which channels or even individual messages you want private and encrypted. Of course, the tradeoff with end-to-end encryption like that is the content is opaque to the server and can't be indexed or searchable, but you get to choose how you want to make that tradeoff when you send the message. Disclaimer: I worked on secure.chat in the past.
lightedman 9y ago
Camfrog still reigns supreme IMHO. Voice and video chat with thousands of people at once, notifications are easily disabled so you can just focus on the conversation while doing your work, and if someone wants to show you something, all you have to do is click on their name to open their video window. The chat rooms can be set up to allow a single person to speak at a time or multiple people to speak simultaneously. Even has a words filter so you can just filter out words you don't like from conversations, if you don't like vernacular. So good Paltalk bought Camfrog just for the video tech, then resold it back to Camfrog. The only real downside to Camfrog is a lack of chat history, excepting in your IMs. Rooms do not have a chat history (admins have log access, though.) When these other apps provide a real chat function instead of it being a bolted-on afterthought, I might be convinced to switch. Until then, Camfrog's been the only social/chat/networking program/app that I've paid money for.
tiffanyh 9y ago
I realize there is a lot of Hipchat hate but ... One of the things I really liked about Hipchat was the information density vs Slack. Stride seems to be very loose in how much information it shows. See screenshots as a comparison. [1] https://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2017/09/actions-and-decisions-with-highlights.png https://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2017/09/actions... [2] https://ga0.imgix.net/screenshot/o/10167-1442255801-0858462?ixlib=rb-1.0.0&ch=Width%2CDPR&auto=format https://ga0.imgix.net/screenshot/o/10167-1442255801-0858462?...
Karunamon 9y ago
And this after they just got done doing a massive rearchitect of the self-hosted HipChat. Now I wonder where they plan on going with that...
jpalomaki 9y ago
One thing Slack could improve is handling this when following multiple slacks. At least with the windows client it seems that I need to occasionally click through all of them to see if there are messages for me. Not sure if this is a bug or a feature (could be some attempt to minimise resource usage). For just keeping track of what's happening around, I would love a view showing all the messages across all (or selected) Slacks/channels.
rukenshia 9y ago
Is this thing a fork of Rocket.Chat? Looks a lot like it, I hope it won't be as bad as rocket chat.
- compuguy 9y ago
  What's wrong with Rocket.Chat? It looks like it takes some design choices from it.
thrillgore 9y ago
So...HipChat?
dolguldur 9y ago
No reaction emojis? That's such a useful feature to avoid :thumbup: / yes / no / me too / haha messages. In bigger groups it's also a really nice and lightweight way to do quick polls.
harisamin 9y ago
A bit off topic but I have been working on a native Mac slack app on and off for the past couple of years. Truly native, no web views except for the Slack oauth login. Would ppl be interested in beta-testing it? Would ppl here be interested in paying for something like that? Here are some links to screenshots so you know its not just vaporware :) https://twitter.com/harisamin/status/727634194814373889 https://twitter.com/harisamin/status/727634194814373889 https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ChkTccjVAAAZ0Kt.png https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ChkTccjVAAAZ0Kt.png https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ChkTcbMUkAIYolx.png https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ChkTcbMUkAIYolx.png
- cyberferret 9y ago
  Seems cool. If it can use 1/10th of the memory/CPU footprint of the current Slack Atom based client (as your screenshots seem to indicate), then all the better. Good luck with your project!
bachmeier 9y ago
I wish companies would stop doing big release announcements followed by a signup that puts me on the waitlist. Let me try it out right now if you want to tell me about it. I'll get an email nine months down the road and probably just delete it because I won't even have thought about it after the announcement.
n4s33r 9y ago
Is it Electron based ? :(
bandrami 9y ago
If Stride is its Slack competitor what the hell is Hipchat?
Rjevski 9y ago
Does this have native clients for desktop (instead of Slack's Electron garbage)? If so this might be one of its key selling points.
- madeofpalk 9y ago
  Seeing as Atlassian is a Web + Java shop, and reasonably invested in React, it's doubtful.
- charliefan1234 9y ago
  Electron :(
jgritty 9y ago
Atlassian should fix their other shitty tools.
jcg8802 9y ago
They named it after the worst gum on earth. C'mon at least call it 5 or trident. Bubbalicious for Business is even a better name. So is Wrigley's for Work.
ElijahLynn 9y ago
I really like the Actions/Decisions concept and also the Stride Focus Mode. Good UX improvements that seem likely other messaging applications will borrow from.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
bobsil1 9y ago
Another Slack clone that's not end-to-end encrypted. Why even bother?
capkutay 9y ago
At least this is a better attempt than RingCentral's chat app which was a shameless, cheesy knock off of Slack. https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1600/1*I50CoGFK328HeWSvuLdh4A.gif https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1600/1*I50CoGFK328HeWSvu...
joombaga 9y ago
I wonder if this has anything to do with the security incident earlier this year [1]. My company terminated all HipChat subscriptions after the incident. A rebranding (understood that this is more than that) may allow some companies to revisit the product. [1] Linking the cached version since the hipchat blog now points to Stride: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:c6dtRhySYi0J:https://blog.hipchat.com/2017/04/24/hipchat-security-notice/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:c6dtRh...
013a 9y ago
I have no faith in anything atlassian builds anymore. They've constantly burned enterprise customers. HipChat was a horrible product for its entire life. Jira is so slow I cannot fathom why anyone chooses it except that there are no competitors. The only advantage they have across their suite is that their products are pretty cheap.
AncoraImparo 9y ago
So... a reskinned version of HipChat, ok.
royge 9y ago
I hope the client is not resource hungry like slack.
zoom6628 9y ago
Now a new tool with which you can fill the remaining % of your day which isnt in some "social" sphere already. Im glad there is competition for Slack, just as glad that this is coming from a ISV of developer tools so maybe it will be something that is slanted in favor of things that developers, product managers(me) and delivery teams need such as answers get tagged and go to knowledge base, can send check in/out commands for bots to use, etc without having to make the bot ourselves. On the usage of chat Im lucky that 2500 of my colleagues are not in the same timezone, and the ones that are, are already too busy to spend time talking about it. So i dont have a constant torrent of activity to respond to. Internally we use Yammer, and like email, it allows me to attend to it and get involved at the time and duration of my choosing. Bottom line how such systems get used is a matter of your preferred work style, corporate culture, and market needs. And you have commend Atlassian for coming up with a name that is indicative (to me anyway) of impact the product should have. "Stride" suggest big steps, not baby steps. Its walking with purpose, cadence, and at speed. Their other product "hipster" suggests completely the obvious i.e. react viscerally ('quantitative gut feel'), follow trends ('follow the crowd not your own intelligence'), bleeding edge, oh....and you may need to grow a beard and use a satchel and rider a fixie in order to use it properly.

440 points by davidjgraph 9y ago

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

It's good to see thoughtful competition in this space - Slack is mostly a joy to use, but we really need healthy competition. In the absence of widely-used open standards, the consequences of putting ever-increasing our institutional memories into proprietary, centrally controlled systems may depend upon how much competitive pressure the providers feel.

waisbrot 9y ago
Chat applications for work are insanely sticky, though? You can offer 5 great new features and a $500/month lower price-tag and I'm probably not going to want to lose my searchable chat history and have everyone unable to communicate for a week while we switch.
- sjellis 9y ago
  Yep. Since there are no interoperability standard, any new entrant into the market is now going to have to spend a lot of resources on developing a process to reliably migrate accounts and history out of Slack, Yammer etc.

lin_lin 9y ago

From the makers of Jira and Confluence... no thanks.

amiga-workbench 9y ago
While Jira isn't amazing, its been a useful addition where I work. I just wish it wasn't so slow, and it could integrate better with some kind of scheduling software to flag obvious shortfalls.
breakingcups 9y ago
Could you at least add what your criticism on those two products is? Jira and Confluence get a lot of hate, but I feel like that's mostly because of how it's set up by organizations. At my organization we've set up Jira (and later Confluence) in a very developer-centric way, by looking at the best way it could help the developer first, project manager second. This has led to universal adoption and no complaints or ill attitudes toward Atlassian products.
- Karunamon 9y ago
  I can definitely echo this. Confluence is just a wiki, Jira is just an issue tracker - both of these kinds of tools are table stakes for any serious development group. Most of the hate comes from the crappy setups enforced by overbearing companies. I've got very few complaints with either of these tools when developers are included in the talks about how they're to be set up and used. Any tool can be made obnoxious if managed incorrectly.
- CaptSpify 9y ago
  Not who you are replying to but... I feel like Jira is trying to be too many things, instead of focusing on one goal, which leads to the bad setups that you mentioned. Though I agree that at the end of the day, it seems more like the org's fault, rather than Atlassian's. Confluence feels amateurish: email notifications never work right, and the search is a joke. The buttons are unintuitive, and the overall organization of pages is a mess. Debugging either of them when they crash all the time is a pain. Upgrades never go smoothly, and Atlassian can't even read their own core-dumps.

tomschlick 9y ago

I'm curious as to what will happen to HipChat. Having 2 competing chat products under one roof isn't ideal, I'd assume one will get the axe at some point.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
marshallofsound 9y ago
There is a direct migration path from HipChat Cloud to Stride: https://confluence.atlassian.com/stride-documentation/faq-stride-and-hipchat-cloud-937165565.html https://confluence.atlassian.com/stride-documentation/faq-st...
- Karunamon 9y ago
  Yow, that was unexpected. Relevant words: Do you plan to sunset HipChat Cloud? For now, HipChat Cloud will continue to be supported, but eventually we will encourage all HipChat Cloud customers to upgrade to Stride.
mmanfrin 9y ago
It's the Google model.

pmulv 9y ago

> There also is emoji and Giphy support, of course. But why? It seems that Stride is trying to be the more productive version of Slack, and I think action items and decision notes have potential, but if I keep getting :partyparrot: instead of information related to my job, I'm going to keep basically ignoring my communications app.

therealmarv 9y ago
there are jobs out there where you can also have fun, also in chat. Just saying...
- BartSaM 9y ago
  Afaik there are enough chats that cater for that. I understand emojis, but gif support is not necessary for a business chat app. At least not in all of them.
croon 9y ago
I'm unsure if that's a system problem or if [team member] can ruin any medium. I don't mind planning poker cards having the coffee mug, or the occasional friday afternoon song playing out the speakers, etc, as long as there is a social contract where everyone respects moderation.
- rtpg 9y ago
  Definitely agree that people cause issues in communication. Tools can encourage good behaviour and discourage bad behavior though. I've found that GIFs end up being a bit too far down the "pop culture" spectrum to be worth having in Slack, for example. Net negative for comfortable communication when not everyone is on the same meme spectrum
tootie 9y ago
Gif integration is key to team productivity.
pavel_lishin 9y ago

bovermyer 9y ago

I was ready to hate on this as just another Slack clone, but its unique features (actions and decisions) sound pretty great. Those combined with the Focus Mode sound like what Slack needs to have, to be honest.

Moru 9y ago
Slack is just another IRC clone anyway... :-)
- pavel_lishin 9y ago
  And cellphones are just a clone of Marconi's radio.
pavel_lishin 9y ago
Actions appears to be the only new thing; Decisions looks just like pinning a specific message in Slack based on the screenshots.
beberlei 9y ago
I am putting my hope into Slack cloning this feature similar to how facebook cloned g+ circles or snapchat. Hopefully it will be usable and not like they added "Threads".

morinted 9y ago

Now we have Slack, Discord, Gitter, Microsoft Teams, and Atlassian Stride. I'm not sure when chat rooms became a business tool. Personally, I find myself distracted more than anything from all the notifications these apps cause, I get less done. I have to be sure to quit every chat app and put my phone in "do not disturb" to disconnect and focus, and then I get coworkers mad that I'm not online. At least with email I could take a while to reply without anyone blinking an eye.

chuckdries 9y ago
Well stride kind of handles that with focus mode. I think most people are aware that sometimes you need to disconnect to focus.
ewams 9y ago
I mute every channel I am in except for the private channel of my team.
- shangxiao 9y ago
  I mute everything except for direct notifications in Slack. I advise team members this and if they want my immediate attention that have to tag me.
lin_lin 9y ago
Cisco Spark too. Yes, I echo your concerns about having some "reply" time. Particularly since so many of my co-workers are all too eager to install these on their phones and use them outside of the work-place (i.e. always available to some degree). I absolutely refuse to install the apps, that's my line in the sand!
- brightball 9y ago
  I'm on call a lot, otherwise I'd be right with you.
  - deleted 9y ago

codq 9y ago

Twist, by the makers of Todoist, is another take on work chat. https://twistapp.com/ https://twistapp.com/

boundlessdreamz 9y ago
I really like the idea of twist and it seems to work better in the trial we did. But it had some shortcomings 1. No linux client 2. UI/UX is not as polished as slack 3. Can't paste images from clipboard 4. Doesn't support webhooks which means that service integrations are almost nonexistent
- ivm 9y ago
  On the other hand, their Mac client is native.
- compuguy 9y ago
  No on-perm option either.
bachmeier 9y ago
I tested it out recently and it repeatedly said my messages couldn't be sent to the server. I'm not sure I'd trust it.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]

eterm 9y ago

Isn't hipchat its slack competitor? Where does this leave that project? Hipchat is already suffering from poor support, its windows client is awful since it went to "version 2".

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
marshallofsound 9y ago
Check out the Stride FAQ: https://confluence.atlassian.com/stride-documentation/faq-stride-and-hipchat-cloud-937165565.html https://confluence.atlassian.com/stride-documentation/faq-st... > Starting soon, we will begin to upgrade all HipChat Cloud teams to Stride. HipChat Cloud will continue to work as it does today until your team upgrades to Stride. After upgrading, HipChat Cloud will remain in 'read-only' mode so that you can reference your API configuration in HipChat Cloud and receive integration notifications for those apps that are not yet in Stride.
- briffle 9y ago
  Can't find any info about a datacenter edition, only the cloud. But if hipchat is going away in cloud, then that is going to mean were not going to see any new features in hipchat datacenter...
  - bpicolo 9y ago
    > then that is going to mean were not going to see any new features in hipchat datacenter... That's been mostly true for a while anyway. You still can't delete or sanely edit a message in hipchat.
    - SomeHacker44 9y ago
      Oddly, this is the ONLY thing I think HipChat has ever done sanely. I've been using sed expressions for almost three decades to alert my fellow chatters of an error in my previous message. The first time I did that in HipChat... It edited my previous message. I nearly fell off my chair. It was and is probably my favorite HipChat feature. s/favorite/favourite/ for my English fellow humans. :)

brightball 9y ago

Looks really sharp to me. I like what I see from the workflow, especially when it comes to getting caught back up on things after being away for vacation or snooze. I'll be interested to see how the Remote Desktop Control premium feature works too. That seems geared towards collaboration/pairing. #1 question though...will they have a Linux client that they actually care about. The Hipchat linux client was largely an afterthought that hung regularly. It was better to just use Rambox and keep the web version open.

mmahemoff 9y ago

Hard to take it seriously when Hipchat came first and languished for so long. Even basic stuff like Emoji was a fail (their list included (arrington) and (derp)). Why launch a new Slack clone when you already have something so closely matching the architecture of Slack? I assume "technical debt" but that's rarely a good reason to start from scratch.

hobofan 9y ago
> Why launch a new Slack clone when you already have something so closely matching the architecture of Slack? A new possibility to build a brand and reputation? From what I can gather HipChat has a pretty "meh" reputation.
- pavel_lishin 9y ago
  And a justified reputation at that, but between Hipchat, and Jira's frankly atrocious text formatting, I'm more afraid of Stride than looking forward to it. Hipchat may be crummy, but at least it's a familiar crummy that I've learned to work around.
- dancryer 9y ago
  Couldn't that be an opportunity though? Are you more likely to notice 'the new thing' from Atlassian, or when someone says "Woah, have you seen how much they've improved HipChat?"

illamint 9y ago

Sad that this isn't available as an on-premises solution out of the gate. We're stuck using internally-hosted HipChat for compliance reasons and it is absolutely awful. The desktop and web clients have only gotten worse over time. This confirms my worst fears that HipChat is basically abandonware.

AckSyn 9y ago
Why not stick to irc or xmpp for your in-house needs?
taternuts 9y ago
It did get an update sometime last week!! Signed, Another sad on-premise user
c0wb0yc0d3r 9y ago
If it wasn't so new I would say look at matrix. You can host that yourself and chats are encrypted.

shangxiao 9y ago

> Atlassian, the company behind popular tools like … Trello sigh It's somewhat of a misleading statement that. My take on the "behind" is in the sense that they designed and created the product from its conception. I really love the Trello UX and believe that Atlassian products are the exact polar opposite. The only way an Atlassian product seems to gain love from a community is if they emulate something already in existence.

saganus 9y ago
I thought Trello was created by FogCreek, no?
- krallja 9y ago
  Yes. Fog Creek spun Trello off as its own company (July 2014), which was acquired by Atlassian (January 2017).
  - saganus 9y ago
    Oh! I wasn't aware that Atlassian acquired it. My mistake.
- Rbatista 9y ago
  https://techcrunch.com/2017/01/09/atlassian-acquires-trello/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/01/09/atlassian-acquires-trello/
mhp 9y ago
Hi! Co-founder Trello here. Agree that “behind” is maybe weird here and probably not intentional but then again the whole Trello team is now part of Atlassian. Every day we are part of the group of people that are building the future products and features. Even without us, I think today’s launch shows Atlassian is heavily invested in “unleashing the potential of EVERY team” (emphasis mine) and their design and understanding of how to do that is evolving. If you love the Trello UX then my guess is you are going to be pleasantly surprised about where we go in the future.

aargh_aargh 9y ago

So... is this a website, an Electron app or a native app?

_JamesA_ 9y ago

Slack, HipChat, Mattermost, Skype, IRC, iMessage, WhatsApp, Signal, Wire, etc, etc. Am I the only one that can't keep track of what service (or app) I need to use to communicate with which person, team or organization? I'll stick with e-mail until these services finally agree to federate.

sdiepend 9y ago
https://xkcd.com/1810/ https://xkcd.com/1810/

lukepothier 9y ago

Fingers crossed it has desktop clients that aren't written in Electron...

neilsimp1 9y ago
Have you noticed Slack slow down/use too many resources as a result of being an Electron app? Honest question, I've never used Slack, but have used other Electron apps and never really have any issues.
- jasonthevillain 9y ago
  Yes (crazy CPU/memory/battery usage). I switched to using it in a browser tab and it's been much better.
- montyf 9y ago
  I'm on a new computer and Slack takes at least a second to react to mouseclicks. It's completely ridiculous since, let's be honest here, Slack is a pretty basic chat app.
- tushar-r 9y ago
  The Slack app on my mac kept using up a lot of RAM frequently. I'd have it running for a few days and suddenly the laptop would be unusable, with only ~200MB of RAM free. Slack would suddenly be using 2-3GB of memory. Kill slack and everything works fine. I've restored to using slack on Safari now. This problem still occurs, but reloading the slack tab is easier then finding and killing the slack process.
- scaryclam 9y ago
  We moved away from slack due to it crashing peoples desktops (Mac, Windows and Linux all have had this problem). I've not used other electron apps though, so maybe I'll stop blaming the underlying tech :)
Trufa 9y ago
Why is that? I have had a great experience with slack on desktop, I was skeptical but it turned out great.

akilism 9y ago

no end to end encryption?

bogle 9y ago
This is seriously one of the killer features. How can a company use this if everything is in the clear? How can you even have a conversation if at any time it can all be dragged up and pored over? The double ratchet of Signal, for instance, is open source so just implement it already.
- rtpg 9y ago
  But companies want records of communication! They want/need auditable records. If two employees want to chat in secret, companies sure don't want that happening

raaaaraaaa1 9y ago

let's hope that Stride will have minimalistic memory footprint ...fingers crossed. It's not nice to have 400mb taken from 5 Slack IM's.

markdog12 9y ago
I'd be very surprised if it wasn't an Electron app, which comes with all the baggage you describe.

cpursley 9y ago

My only question is, which Slack alternative does not use half my CPUs and suck down my battery just to run ideally in the background?

MaxLeiter 9y ago
Most IRC clients
- cpursley 9y ago
  Can you recommend an IRC client that works for non-technical folks that also works with api and webhooks capabilities?
  - AckSyn 9y ago
    I would recommend this. https://github.com/ircanywhere/ircanywhere https://github.com/ircanywhere/ircanywhere
  - luckydude 9y ago
    That seems to be a project waiting to be written. It's clear that IRC can be good enough but slack wins because of the smooth on-boarding for non-technical people. I guess noone has built it because for techies, IRC is good enough, and there isn't a clear path to monetizing it?
    - xPaw 9y ago
      The Lounge works rather nicely for non technical people, https://github.com/thelounge/lounge https://github.com/thelounge/lounge ScoutLink uses it for kids with great success.
    - zanny 9y ago
      If you are going to write a new client for a chat protocol, why use IRC over Matrix, especially since Matrix bridges to IRC?
  - 9y ago

vssr 9y ago

Working for a company that uses Bitbucket, Jira and Slack, I'm carefully optimistic. It would be great to have reliable, well maintained integration between chat and the Atlassian tools.

abiox 9y ago

now we just need a chat app that bridges all the chat apps. (again)

sturmeh 9y ago
Why would a business use multiple solutions?
- wila 9y ago
  As a contractor with multiple customers and each their own chat solution it is kind of handy to have it all in one area.
- Jeremy1026 9y ago
  Businesses might not, but users do. I use Ryver for work, Slack for friends, and have a Discord for a group in a game.
glenneroo 9y ago
I just checked if Trillian was working on something like this, similar to their IM/IRC/Email/FB/etc. bridging tool. Instead, they are offering more competition in this space, Trillian for Business: www.trillian.im Guess we will have to wait for someone else to fill this niche.
sschueller 9y ago
http://rambox.pro/ http://rambox.pro/ Free, Open Source and Cross Platform
- saagarjha 9y ago
  Yes, but it’s essentially loading a bunch of webviews in tabs.
CaptSpify 9y ago
I really like finch (pidgin terminal version). It's small, lightweight, and doesn't annoy me with notifications/emojis/gifs.

program_whiz 9y ago

More examples of needless tool cloning. Rather than reinvent IRC of the 90s/00s, where is the real innovation from Silicon Valley and the tech world?

noxToken 9y ago
Sometimes tech isn't about innovation, discovery and breakthrough. Sometimes it's about integrating existing technology into the workflow of your customer base. Plenty of businesses big and small use the Atlassian product suite. This is a way for those businesses to have a chat client that is native to their suite. Tech isn't always sexy. Sometimes tech is just good business sense.
- program_whiz 9y ago
  Don't agree. I will accept the term "business technology" insofar as Atlassian is rewriting existing concepts for business. But that's like saying buying a house and renting it for profit is "good business technology" -- its just an existing method being used for something else, I guess a house is a type of technology. In my mind, when someone says they are a "technology company", what that means is that they want to sell technology (new approaches to solving problems). Making the same thing over and over with minor variations and calling it "tech" just because it runs on computers (30 year old tech) is just excusing it. The truth is, Atlassian saw the $$ that slack is making and wanted to get a piece of the pie, I highly doubt they thought: "Eureka! I've come up with a new technology to improve communication of a team. Its like email but in real time!"
  - noxToken 9y ago
    That's literally what I said: >> Sometimes tech isn't about innovation, discovery and breakthrough. Sometimes it's about integrating existing technology into the workflow of your customer base. Technology companies don't just create new things. Business is not 100% innovation. Not even the giants like MSFT, Google, FB, Amazon, and Apple spend all of their employee power on creating something new. Sometimes it's giving your customer base what they want. I don't think anyone is billing Slide as the next frontier in chat software. Atlassian is porting over existing functionality to work natively with their other products. With the wide adoption of Slack, it's obvious that chat software is something Atlassian's customers are probably using, so why not make that hooks into the other products? It doesn't matter if you're a tech company, a real estate company, a law firm, or a medical practice - if your customers want something that integrates well with what you're offering, it makes good business sense to see if it can work.

LeicaLatte 9y ago

I find Slack to be less useful when it is used by more than a single person. I use it as a notification log/sink and it works great. Definitely trying out atlassian stride.

bitwize 9y ago

I thought HipChat was their Slack competitor? Jesus christ make up your minds people

mihaela 9y ago
HipChat was them buying time to compete with Slack.
- knotty66 9y ago
  HipChat was around way before Slack.

bassman9000 9y ago

As long as we can get rid of Skype and Webex with a single tool, I'd be more than happy

cyphar 9y ago

Wait, what happened to HipChat? I get that it's not as sexy as Slack, but honestly they're all basically just IRC with images and some other integrations. Why start a whole new project (which presumably isn't XMPP under the hood). From memory, Slack started out as a HipChat competitor. Not to mention, what is the on-premises story going to be (which was a major selling point of HipChat).

compuguy 9y ago
They are continuing to support HipChat Datacenter edition...for what it's worth.

solatic 9y ago

Not being available on-prem continues to show how poorly Atlassian treats its enterprise customers. * No feature parity * No pre-built packages or support for configuration / infrastructure management - everything must be packaged completely from scratch, without recommended package specifications or Dockerfiles etc. to build off of. Nope - "here's a tar.gz. Have fun!" * No proper enterprise support and no access to source code. We have a couple feature requests which are deep, burning desires which we'd love to either throw money or developers at but we can't because we have no relationship with Atlassian and we have no idea if Atlassian will ever address them because they don't publish product roadmaps. * Essential enterprise products like Crowd and Bamboo get short shrift and make it clear that communication inside Atlassian is lacking. Example: Bitbucket Data Center shipped with support to enforce GPG-signed commits. But because Crowd won't manage user GPG public keys, administrators can't revoke user keys without disabling access to Bitbucket entirely (so, GPG keys never get revoked), and Bamboo administrators can't enforce that project builds only use Bitbucket repositories with GPG-enforcement enabled, so for enterprises which actually need to enforce audit trails (for compliance, for building trust with deeply conservative customers...), the feature is worthless. Another example: Bamboo supports elastic build agents... but only on AWS. No support for vSphere, OpenStack, or heck any other public clouds like GCE or Azure. No Dockerized build agents for build jobs which don't themselves need Docker. Another example: Crowd is utterly lacking of any kind of investment. Sun Directory Server Enterprise Edition? Supported. OpenID Connect? 2FA? RSA SecurID? Yubikeys? lolnope. It finally got active-active clustering this year, though, so maybe that's a good sign? It's too bad their suite is in a class of its own because for all its faults, it's in a class of its own. Everything else sucks, one way or another.

jamiesonbecker 9y ago
Agreed - we offer on-premise (and drive significant revenue from it) at Userify for people who prefer their SSH key management in-house. To be fair to Atlassian, they basically invented on-prem with SaaS-style pricing (and did us all a great service), and their biggest competitor here (Slack) isn't available on-prem either. Some of these features that you list in Crowd are ironically very similar to missing features in our products, but we're actively working on them -- while not losing focus on being the fastest and easiest key manager to stand up. Running a software business can be challenging -- especially with a myriad of customer environments and feature requests. My feeling is that Atlassian got really big really fast and may have lost sight of their key differentiator -- which, to me, at the time, was pricing and simplicity. It looks like this new product might have brought back their flair on both counts.

dabernathy89 9y ago

Like Slack, it has per user pricing. This means it's difficult for large open source projects to use it if they have any interest in keeping a permanent log, or even keeping a message history that goes back more than a few days. Feature-wise, the "Actions and Decisions" tools sound pretty interesting. Definitely a pain point with Slack. We've been using Slack for a lot of our planning for the Longhorn PHP conference (https://www.longhornphp.com https://www.longhornphp.com), and it's honestly not been great. Conversations & decisions about particular topics get buried; if someone wasn't present for a conversation, it's likely they'll never see it. I know Slack isn't a project management tool - we've been using a mix of Google Docs and Trello for that. But even as a communications tool it feels fragile and incomplete.

cialowicz 9y ago
Open source projects can request free licenses from Atlassian. Here's the form: https://www.atlassian.com/software/views/open-source-license-request https://www.atlassian.com/software/views/open-source-license... Presumably, they'll add Stride to that form eventually.
- bananateam 9y ago
  yes, we will eventually.
  - dabernathy89 9y ago
    that's really good news!
- onedr0p 9y ago
  In regards to OSS, with Discord adding screen sharing and video chat this month, I don't see why anyone would try their product.

rglover 9y ago

If this has an API, I'm fully onboard. The remote desktop control is something I've been patiently awaiting in Slack since they scooped up ScreenHero but they've done nothing with it.

marshallofsound 9y ago
It has an API --> https://developer.atlassian.com/cloud/stride/ https://developer.atlassian.com/cloud/stride/ :)

1_2__4 9y ago

How the hell did we go from realizing massive enterprise software was a bad deal to suddenly embracing it all over again? Not that stuff like Oracle and Salesforce ever went away, but I seriously don't understand why small companies buy into the Faustian bargain of "yes please vendor, I'd love to be in a position where I'm tied to your company forever, that sounds great".

aembleton 9y ago
Because it's easy to get going with it, and the pricing scales per user.
Karunamon 9y ago
For something as ephemeral as instant message, there's no real lock-in to speak of. The migration path is: 1) Grant your users access to the new tool 2) There is no 2. Pain only comes when you're storing organizational knowledge in an instant message tool.
CaptSpify 9y ago
The older I get, the more I realize that things don't ever really change. We keep making the same mistakes over and over and over. You think that we, as a science and engineering focused field would be less prone to this but no, we're still short-sighted meat-bags like everyone else.
madeofpalk 9y ago
I mean, what's the alternative? Roll your own software?

johansch 9y ago

Does each chat line submission take at least one second to process? If so I will feel right at home, knowing it's Atlassian-made!

gtirloni 9y ago

I can't find any information about accessibility features. Getting zero results in their docs.

eggs_and_avo 9y ago

We need a study measuring how much business chat tools are used for non-work communication. I keep hearing from managers that these tools aren't massive distractions, so let's look at the data!

altotrees 9y ago

So we have all of these chat apps. Choice is never a bad thing, but this has to be somewhat beyond saturation point, no? I don't know about anyone else, but I would rather have my work chat apps resemble social media chat apps less rather than more. Fewer Gif's, fewer emojis — they can be funny and endearing in the right context, but just feel forced and obtuse in a work setting. Also, this is coming from the makers of Confluence and Jira...I'll have to try it and see it in person before forming a true opinion, but not holding out too much hope.

humanrebar 9y ago
> Fewer Gif's My team often uses gifs to document and demonstrate workflows in UIs. It's easier to consume than a series of screenshots, albeit harder to maintain.
- emddudley 9y ago
  The comment is referring to meme gifs. Your use case obviously makes a lot of sense.
kody 9y ago
I don't use any Atlassian products, but I see the appeal of a Slack-like chat app that natively integrates with other Atlassian products - particularly for knowledge management purposes. Businesses can configure/customize Slack to do this, but it's not really intuitive.
- mdekkers 9y ago
  I see the appeal of a Slack-like chat app that natively integrates with other Atlassian products In which way? I often see this touted as a benefit, and rarely see it work effectively, or productively.
- notatoad 9y ago
  In my experience atlassian products dont really integrate with each other any better than they do with third party products. I wouldn't expect a jira/stride workflow to be any better than a jira/slack workflow.

btbuildem 9y ago

Is it going to be as bad as JIRA?

Sujan 9y ago
How bad is JIRA?
- TheCoelacanth 9y ago
  That depends heavily on how bad the person controlling your Jira configuration is. If they are bad it is pure torture. If they are good it is tolerable.

SomeHacker44 9y ago

As the head of a company that uses HipChat... Thank you Atlassian. We have intended to migrate to the (free and better) Mattermost for a long time and just have been waiting for it to hit the top of our priority list. Knowing you are abandoning the terrible HipChat for an entirely new product, with no migration path and 50% more cost, makes this an easier choice. You have been abandoning us on JIRA and Confluence as well. There are many features that are not available on our self-hosted versions even when fully upgraded. Your licensing and pricing terms get worse year after year even though essentially absolutely nothing useful (to us anyway) ever gets added. We even use Trello a little here and there... I expect that to go south too. Well, at least we have GitLab and soon Mattermost, both suitable for much of what we need, for free. Thank you for making our decisions easier.

orand 9y ago
Which Jira and Confluence features aren't available for fully upgraded self-hosted instances?
- Karunamon 9y ago
  Seconding this. It always seemed to me that you lose features by going to the cloud hosted version.
- SomeHacker44 9y ago
  Not to beat a dead horse about it, but Atlassian made improvements to the Kanban functionality, especially regarding the backlog (a backlog manager), and didn't make it available to our on-premise locally-installed stuff. Additionally, they jacked up the prices on the Service Desk software users and changed who can do what at what prices. All in all, I wouldn't choose Atlassian for any new installations/companies. I would definitely look elsewhere. And, I've been using their products since before FishEye was an Atlassian product (and they destroyed that product too).
  - compuguy 9y ago
    Ouch (and self-hosted atlassian products were pricy to begin with). Are there any good alternatives to Jira and Confluence out there (that are self-hosted/on-prem)?

mansilladev 9y ago

Info on the Stride API at https://developer.atlassian.com https://developer.atlassian.com

eloff 9y ago

For the privacy conscious, there's also https://www.secure.chat/ https://www.secure.chat/ if you want a slack alternative with end-to-end client-side encryption. You can choose which channels or even individual messages you want private and encrypted. Of course, the tradeoff with end-to-end encryption like that is the content is opaque to the server and can't be indexed or searchable, but you get to choose how you want to make that tradeoff when you send the message. Disclaimer: I worked on secure.chat in the past.

lightedman 9y ago

Camfrog still reigns supreme IMHO. Voice and video chat with thousands of people at once, notifications are easily disabled so you can just focus on the conversation while doing your work, and if someone wants to show you something, all you have to do is click on their name to open their video window. The chat rooms can be set up to allow a single person to speak at a time or multiple people to speak simultaneously. Even has a words filter so you can just filter out words you don't like from conversations, if you don't like vernacular. So good Paltalk bought Camfrog just for the video tech, then resold it back to Camfrog. The only real downside to Camfrog is a lack of chat history, excepting in your IMs. Rooms do not have a chat history (admins have log access, though.) When these other apps provide a real chat function instead of it being a bolted-on afterthought, I might be convinced to switch. Until then, Camfrog's been the only social/chat/networking program/app that I've paid money for.

tiffanyh 9y ago

I realize there is a lot of Hipchat hate but ... One of the things I really liked about Hipchat was the information density vs Slack. Stride seems to be very loose in how much information it shows. See screenshots as a comparison. [1] https://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2017/09/actions-and-decisions-with-highlights.png https://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2017/09/actions... [2] https://ga0.imgix.net/screenshot/o/10167-1442255801-0858462?ixlib=rb-1.0.0&ch=Width%2CDPR&auto=format https://ga0.imgix.net/screenshot/o/10167-1442255801-0858462?...

Karunamon 9y ago

And this after they just got done doing a massive rearchitect of the self-hosted HipChat. Now I wonder where they plan on going with that...

jpalomaki 9y ago

One thing Slack could improve is handling this when following multiple slacks. At least with the windows client it seems that I need to occasionally click through all of them to see if there are messages for me. Not sure if this is a bug or a feature (could be some attempt to minimise resource usage). For just keeping track of what's happening around, I would love a view showing all the messages across all (or selected) Slacks/channels.

rukenshia 9y ago

Is this thing a fork of Rocket.Chat? Looks a lot like it, I hope it won't be as bad as rocket chat.

compuguy 9y ago
What's wrong with Rocket.Chat? It looks like it takes some design choices from it.

thrillgore 9y ago

So...HipChat?

dolguldur 9y ago

No reaction emojis? That's such a useful feature to avoid :thumbup: / yes / no / me too / haha messages. In bigger groups it's also a really nice and lightweight way to do quick polls.

harisamin 9y ago

A bit off topic but I have been working on a native Mac slack app on and off for the past couple of years. Truly native, no web views except for the Slack oauth login. Would ppl be interested in beta-testing it? Would ppl here be interested in paying for something like that? Here are some links to screenshots so you know its not just vaporware :) https://twitter.com/harisamin/status/727634194814373889 https://twitter.com/harisamin/status/727634194814373889 https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ChkTccjVAAAZ0Kt.png https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ChkTccjVAAAZ0Kt.png https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ChkTcbMUkAIYolx.png https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ChkTcbMUkAIYolx.png

cyberferret 9y ago
Seems cool. If it can use 1/10th of the memory/CPU footprint of the current Slack Atom based client (as your screenshots seem to indicate), then all the better. Good luck with your project!

bachmeier 9y ago

I wish companies would stop doing big release announcements followed by a signup that puts me on the waitlist. Let me try it out right now if you want to tell me about it. I'll get an email nine months down the road and probably just delete it because I won't even have thought about it after the announcement.

n4s33r 9y ago

Is it Electron based ? :(

bandrami 9y ago

If Stride is its Slack competitor what the hell is Hipchat?

Rjevski 9y ago

Does this have native clients for desktop (instead of Slack's Electron garbage)? If so this might be one of its key selling points.

madeofpalk 9y ago
Seeing as Atlassian is a Web + Java shop, and reasonably invested in React, it's doubtful.
charliefan1234 9y ago
Electron :(

jgritty 9y ago

Atlassian should fix their other shitty tools.

jcg8802 9y ago

They named it after the worst gum on earth. C'mon at least call it 5 or trident. Bubbalicious for Business is even a better name. So is Wrigley's for Work.

ElijahLynn 9y ago

I really like the Actions/Decisions concept and also the Stride Focus Mode. Good UX improvements that seem likely other messaging applications will borrow from.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

bobsil1 9y ago

Another Slack clone that's not end-to-end encrypted. Why even bother?

capkutay 9y ago

At least this is a better attempt than RingCentral's chat app which was a shameless, cheesy knock off of Slack. https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1600/1*I50CoGFK328HeWSvuLdh4A.gif https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1600/1*I50CoGFK328HeWSvu...

joombaga 9y ago

I wonder if this has anything to do with the security incident earlier this year [1]. My company terminated all HipChat subscriptions after the incident. A rebranding (understood that this is more than that) may allow some companies to revisit the product. [1] Linking the cached version since the hipchat blog now points to Stride: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:c6dtRhySYi0J:https://blog.hipchat.com/2017/04/24/hipchat-security-notice/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:c6dtRh...

013a 9y ago

I have no faith in anything atlassian builds anymore. They've constantly burned enterprise customers. HipChat was a horrible product for its entire life. Jira is so slow I cannot fathom why anyone chooses it except that there are no competitors. The only advantage they have across their suite is that their products are pretty cheap.

AncoraImparo 9y ago

So... a reskinned version of HipChat, ok.

royge 9y ago

I hope the client is not resource hungry like slack.

zoom6628 9y ago

Now a new tool with which you can fill the remaining % of your day which isnt in some "social" sphere already. Im glad there is competition for Slack, just as glad that this is coming from a ISV of developer tools so maybe it will be something that is slanted in favor of things that developers, product managers(me) and delivery teams need such as answers get tagged and go to knowledge base, can send check in/out commands for bots to use, etc without having to make the bot ourselves. On the usage of chat Im lucky that 2500 of my colleagues are not in the same timezone, and the ones that are, are already too busy to spend time talking about it. So i dont have a constant torrent of activity to respond to. Internally we use Yammer, and like email, it allows me to attend to it and get involved at the time and duration of my choosing. Bottom line how such systems get used is a matter of your preferred work style, corporate culture, and market needs. And you have commend Atlassian for coming up with a name that is indicative (to me anyway) of impact the product should have. "Stride" suggest big steps, not baby steps. Its walking with purpose, cadence, and at speed. Their other product "hipster" suggests completely the obvious i.e. react viscerally ('quantitative gut feel'), follow trends ('follow the crowd not your own intelligence'), bleeding edge, oh....and you may need to grow a beard and use a satchel and rider a fixie in order to use it properly.