12 ms·

Stride, Atlassian’s Slack competitor, opens its API to all developers

116 points by mansilladev 9y ago

tootie 9y ago
What happened to HipChat? It was already the same thing as Slack for less money.
- salmonfamine 9y ago
  I believe they are in the process of sunsetting HipChat. It was not successful.
  - briffle 9y ago
    They say they are working to improve hipchat, but only for datacenter, no more hosted.
  - 7ewis 9y ago
    They gave us a deadline to move (~2000 users). So we're just getting the Slack business case ready. If we have to move AND pay more money anyway, then why not just go to Slack?
    - ckorhonen 9y ago
      I thought Stride was the same price as Hipchat?
    - cjalmeida 9y ago
      I believe it's cheaper, isn't it?
    - taoistextremist 9y ago
      A quick look at the prices, Stride is under half the price of Slack. No idea if quality correlates with price here since I've never touched Stride.
    - notwhereyouare 9y ago
      have you considered rocket chat? It's a slack you can either have hosted for you, or host in house.
    - zie 9y ago
      You might also look at mattermost, if you are OK with hosting yourself (it's not hard, and upgrades are easy).
    - eridius 9y ago
      I don't know about Stride, but the quality of Slack has really been declining lately. Especially the quality of the desktop client. If I was in charge of the decision for what communication tool to use at my company, I would take a long hard look at every single alternative to Slack.
- hartator 9y ago
  Stride is just re-branded HipChat.
  - patrickaljord 9y ago
    I know it sounds silly but I believe the main reason for HipChat failing is mostly because the name was so uncool.
    - xfour 9y ago
      Uptime wasn't the greatest at a critical moment when Slack was gaining market share as well.
      - el_duderino 9y ago
        Yeah. HipChat's stability was absolutely abysmal for quite some time. They seem to have finally gotten it under control. That or a majority of their user base went elsewhere.
    - bpicolo 9y ago
      More likely it's just that HipChat isn't a great product experience. As an example, the only way to edit a message is to use a sed-style "s/foo/bar", which is absurd. Because of this, you can't edit messages other than the most recent one, and if you want to edit one instance of "foo" but not another instance of "foo" you're out of luck. That's a terrible piece of UX even if you're in the only subset of users (software devs familiar with sed-style search and replace) where it makes any sense whatsoever
      - Fishkins 9y ago
        One time I was trying to correct and "its" that should've been an "it's", but I didn't realized there was a preceding, correct "its" in the post. I ended up changing that "its" to an incorrect "it's", while also leaving the following incorrect "its". It was inconsequential, but very frustrating. As a sibling comment said, the main reason my team abandoned Hipchat for Slack was Hipchat was hopelessly buggy and unreliable at the time we tried to use it.
- ljm 9y ago
  It seems it stagnated. There wasn’t a real competitor to it until Slack turned up and developed a fantastic integration ecosystem (I don’t think there would be such a focus on conversational UI were it not for Slack, whether or not they intended that). By that time it was already too late, HipChat is old school, Slack is the new hotness. Anecdotally, anyone working in a startup with an opinion on design will know how shallow a judgment has to be to switch to a competitor. App is functional but has 2008 design? The less functional equivalent with 2017 design is better because it looks up to date
  - pavel_lishin 9y ago
    To be fair, Hipchat is missing a lot of features that Slack has.
    - ljm 9y ago
      That’s exactly the point, right? Slack turned up and offered more and HipChat didn’t respond in a meaningful way except to rewrite all their clients in JS. At that point they had a buggy client and fewer features, while Slack had an inefficient client with lots of features.
      - pavel_lishin 9y ago
        I was referring to the (weirdly opposed) example they mentioned with the better-looking-fewer-features.
    - tootie 9y ago
      Like what? 99% of usage is just chat rooms. I could hook in build notifications and post gifs. HipChat had voice and video years before Slack.
      - hrktb 9y ago
        Hipchat is not very good at notifications and chat though. 3 years in, and still randomly missing messages for a while until it’s somewhat synched. Whole ongoing conversations don’t appear on other devices if I don’t manually open them. Getting notified on my phone while I’m on my laptop. Lack of integrations is the most sailant thing to point st, but I think at its core Hipchap is also a very meh service.
- encoderer 9y ago
  Anecdata: The SaaS service I run has integrations with both -- Slack has literally 10x the number of integrated channels.
  - asda22sdasd 9y ago
    You integrated slack 10x more in your SaaS?
    - lev99 9y ago
      My understanding was 10x more of his users integrate with slack than hipchat.
  - rekoros 9y ago
    https://sameroom.io/status https://sameroom.io/status
- rlopezcc 9y ago
  I was really disappointed when noticed they didn't have a way to report bugs. They had some kind of "Suggestions box", so I used that to report mine: Images wouldn't upload correctly when the chat room name started wih a slash (/dev/null in my case). They deleted the ticket and a few days later it was magically fixed. You will find pretty annoyed people if you search for "report hipchat bug".
  - wwalser 9y ago
    > "I'm annoyed they didn't use my wording. They did fix my bug but I'm still annoyed." In what world would one imagine that a suggestions box was in any way different from reporting a bug? "Suggestions box" is a bug report but renamed to be understood by Joan from accounting.
    - rspeer 9y ago
      The thing about the HipChat suggestions box is that you had to collect "votes" for your "suggestion" to be considered. So you could try to get their attention to the bug of "when you paste XML into a code block, it replaces it with subtly different, broken XML, my suggestion is to stop doing that", but it's going to be sitting several pages beyond "please add a left shark emoji!!!" You can try to get your whole office to stack the vote, but why? I only have to be one person to report a bug to Slack.
  - ec109685 9y ago
    Slack’s /feedback is stupendous. You get a human response in minutes. And they have live chat too. Google for example makes it 1000x harder to give feedback and report bugs, which greatly limits the amount of quality feedback they get. Anecdote: hangouts didn’t let us accept external users into a hangout today. Google will never know that because I have no easy way to tel them that.
bgibson 9y ago
Haven't used Stride yet but as someone who hates always-on chat I could see myself really appreciating its deep work oriented features: mute notifications, allow others in the channel to mark things as "task", "decision", "outcome" so you can go back and find important things you missed while deep working. https://www.stride.com https://www.stride.com
- pavel_lishin 9y ago
  Something about this comment feels very much like an ad.
  - sotojuan 9y ago
    Especially because you can always mute Slack or use do not disturb as well.
    - bonesss 9y ago
      But can Slack help you rethink team communication, or redefine the way teams move work forward, together? I know I want a messaging tool that delivers results. https://www.stride.com/ https://www.stride.com/
  - cortesoft 9y ago
    Probably the strange link at the bottom of the comment, linking to the site we are talking about.
  - bgibson 9y ago
    I have no connection of any sort to Stride (or any chat app for that matter, other than a few I use, which doesn't include Stride yet). This aspect of chat has just been a point for me for years. Looks like Stride and Twistapp are both attempting to solve it, among others. Wouldn't surprise me if there were some Slack plugins to do similar things as well.
- dorian-graph 9y ago
  You might appreciate https://twistapp.com https://twistapp.com then.
jgh 9y ago
I don't know what it is about Atlassian's branding but it always feels uncomfortably corporate to use any of their software. I'm worried that if I start using Atlassian software I'm going to have to buy inexpensive business-casual clothes, commute an hour and 15 minutes both ways, make small talk with Janet from accounting by the coffee machine while my mocha latte brews, and get Greg my middle-manager my self-assessment by EOD.
- koverda 9y ago
  Sounds like they nailed it.
- atomical 9y ago
  The Atlassian blues.
- fusiongyro 9y ago
  The primary function of Atlassian software is to say "Access denied." You tell Greg he needs to give you permission to do whatever. Greg says he'll do that after he gets your self-assessment. He later writes on your self-assessment receipt that you're a whiner lacking self-motivation. I've used Confluence for two years. It's slow and the editor is buggy. The primary function is to prevent me from making a document public. I've used JIRA for 8 years. JIRA's primary function is to send email. I'd say your assessment is accurate.
  - hiccuphippo 9y ago
    Wait, people actually read jira emails? I just filter it to my 'ham' folder.
    - fusiongyro 9y ago
      80% of my coworkers do not read them. I read the ~5% of them that contain more than "Status: -Open- Assigned." Of my remaining coworkers, there are a dozen that reply from their mail client, which just makes everything worse.
  - 9y ago
junkscience2017 9y ago
If I am going to consider using something other than Slack, probably the only thing I would consider is a self-hosted open source solution to keep communication private (just having an on-prem closed solution would not be enough, I want to OWN the data, otherwise, I might as well go with the market leader). Otherwise, why use Stride instead of Slack? Most people I know have already used Slack and require no training. They probably even have the mobile app installed already. Stride just seems to be a me-too offering with no compelling reason to exist This is different in my mind than the market for VCS interfaces...in the end I still own my git repo
devhead 9y ago
it's safe to say this won't be killing slack in any meaningful way. wow, that's a terribly atlassian UI they plopped on there. no offense to the dev team(s), i'm sure they had no say in making it so cluttered. slack wins because they make focus on communication not mandatory UI components that have no place in a chat app.
- fredsted 9y ago
  What exactly is cluttered about Stride's UI, and how do you define "cluttered"?
- bhtru 9y ago
  I've not ever used Stride however I've now just tried it as a curiosity to see this UI that you find fault with. It feels figuratively just like Slack. I'm actually surprised just how similar it is in so many respects. So I'd love to hear your elaboration on the poorness of the Stride UI.
hkchad 9y ago
Long time hipchat user here (both DC and Cloud), the rollout of Stride rubbed me all kinds of wrong ways. They 'replaced' HipChat w/ Strie but didn't keep many of the same features/integrations and then FORCED you to switch by a deadline. I get upgrades and progress, but how about rolling upgrade, swap out the client, move everyone over automatically and not pain your users? For my team, we said screw it and 'migrated' to Slack. Give us a chance to switch, we switched.
- wwalser 9y ago
  Inaccurate. Data center has not been sunset. https://www.stride.com/help-center/frequently-asked-questions/stride-and-hipchat-data-center#faq-64bbd492-e920-4693-9abf-1688729a2bab https://www.stride.com/help-center/frequently-asked-question... I also don't think anyone was forced to switch but I could be wrong. An email requesting or encouraging some action is different from being forced to do something.
  - hkchad 9y ago
    I was just saying I have used DC in addition to Cloud. We migrated to cloud from DC about a year ago, and was forced to switch last week.
- tahoemph999 9y ago
  Ditto. Too little, too late.
- bradgessler 9y ago
  Same. Stride is just a worse implementation of Slack with less features. They even got rid of the “good parts” of HipChat, mainly that the macOS client doesn’t idle at 5% CPU, and replaced it with a full blow Electron client that had the same problems as Slack. Honestly I’m a bit dumbfound how they are handling the transition. I bet they end up losing a lot of customers to Slack.
anfilt 9y ago
I don't understand the point of all these stupid chat apps... Discord, Slack ect... If you need real time there is IRC. Otherwise, just setup a mailing list.
- chapium 9y ago
  If you want both, there is Slack ;) Why separate your communication into two tools instead of one?
  - hiccuphippo 9y ago
    Luckily Attlasian has jitsi too so you can separate it into two again :^)
  - austincheney 9y ago
    Because one is a free and open standard where you actually own your data.
    - tortasaur 9y ago
      I think Riot/Matrix is a happy compromise. I've been hosting a couple of servers (one for fun, one for work) for about half a year now, and it's working well.
- u801e 9y ago
  > If you need real time there is IRC. The problem with IRC is that you cannot get chat history of a channel unless you configure a bouncer to do it for you. On that note, what's your opinion on XMPP? We used to use a XMPP server for internal company communication and the server was configured to replay the chat history to a client when it connected. > Otherwise, just setup a mailing list. That has a similar problem to IRC which is that new members cannot easily access messages sent before they joined. A better option would be an internally hosted NNTP server.
  - davidw 9y ago
asda22sdasd 9y ago
did they ditch hipchat?
shitloadofbooks 9y ago
Stride's WYSIWG editor is really unpleasant (and had several showstopping bugs which they're only just ironing out). I have an open ticket to have a profile option to disable it, but ...crickets.
jgalt212 9y ago
Hipchat 2017 works perfectly fine for a chat app (which @tootie said have been basically the same for 30 years). We have not been forced to migrate to Stride yet, but I am bummed about this can I keep kicking down the road. I don't care how much better Stride is, Hipchat is good enough for us.
lev99 9y ago
Did anyone else notice the Easter egg in Hipchat's web client when using js debugging tools?
crad 9y ago
Sad thing is there isn’t even baseline feature parity. Not sure what’s going to happen when they give my org a date to move by. Without some of the more enterprisey features, we can’t move to Stride. Oh and the FU on all of our existing integration use is cute. They should have released it as a UI improvement for HipChat, not a whole new ecosystem.
- Rychard 9y ago
  > Oh and the FU on all of our existing integration use is cute. I certainly didn't appreciate it. As someone who invests significant portions of time building integrations between various systems in our development team, I quickly hit the brakes the second I heard the Stride announcement. Since our organization is being forced to move from HipChat, we're reviewing alternatives rather than blindly continuing onward toward Stride. I strongly doubt that this will have any impact on Atlassian's bottom-line, however.
jakelarkin 9y ago
biggest gripe with Atlassian is all their products are slow as hell. Hipchat was sluggish and buggy but at least they were steadily improving. Now everyone has to start over on a new platform (?) Confluence, how freakin long does it take to return a static info page, Seconds? As if visiting the HR subdomain wasn't painful enough already. Heaven forbid you click on something makes a POST request in JIRA, RIP developer.
- throwaway5752 9y ago
  Agreed. If anyone from Atlassian is reading this, the changes to Jira and Confluence make me think something is wrong there. I have been a faithful Jira user for over a decade and it has gotten markedly worse as a product in the past year. Maybe it's more profitable with app/marketplace, but the experience with multiple integrated apps is dog slow. Navigability has gotten worse. HipChat had uptime issues to the point my company moved to Slack. I am worried for you guys.
  - atonse 9y ago
    I agree with this. In 2006 I was a huge fan of JIRA and it just felt like such a well designed app. Now it has some kind of Designer disease, where it looks beautiful (truly, I love the style and fonts and colors), but I simply can't find my way around it. And I get very frustrated trying to do basic things because the app is also really slow (clearly 500ms+ per request). It's clear that it's still a server-side app and not a SPA which is the kind responsiveness everyone expects nowadays. So our two person team went back to using Excel. Jira just takes too long to get things done with.
dasil003 9y ago
Just don't fuck up Trello guys, for the love of god.
- antoniuschan99 9y ago
  Trello seems to have lost it's use after it got made into a separate company. It seems to have gotten worse after it got bought out by Atlassian. No real intriguing features. Also, Atlassian used to be loved by developers, after it ipoed it just seems not loved
  - newfoundglory 9y ago
    Gotten worse? I haven’t noticed anything worse, hasn’t seemed very different at all. I don’t have a business account though - do you have anything specific in mind?
  - bovermyer 9y ago
    This is not my experience. Trello has continued to work just fine after its acquisition by Atlassian.
  - dasil003 9y ago
    "Lost its use"? What kind of bizarro tech bubble is this where something solid which works and has stayed true to its essence is considered bad, and instead we demand an unrelenting churn that results in limply overcooked products inevitably jumping the shark (JIRA redesign I'm looking at you).
  - sencho 9y ago
    from Atlassian last earnings release in Oct 2017: "Trello continues to grow its user base at an impressive pace with more than 25 million registered users in over 100 countries, up from approximately 19 million at the start of the calendar year" https://s2.q4cdn.com/141359120/files/doc_financials/Q12018/TEAM-Q1-2018-Shareholder-Letter-(1).pdf https://s2.q4cdn.com/141359120/files/doc_financials/Q12018/T...
tcit 9y ago
Sad to see no one's mentioning Mattermost.
notatoad 9y ago
everybody here seems to be griping about it, but from the overview on their website it seems like a reasonable alternative to slack, and the free tier includes group video chat and screen sharing. that sounds pretty sweet to me.
sjellis 9y ago
Michael Tiemann used to say that he wasn't interested in trying to pitch to a company unless he thought his product (Red Hat Linux) was four times better than what they currently had: the costs and risks of a switch can easily negate the value of changing to a product that is only somewhat better than the incumbent. Unless Stride does something massively better than Slack, I don't see how Stride can compete.
- pletnes 9y ago
  It’ll be bundled with other atlassian products. Less hassle to integrate with those, one less service to log into, one less monthly payment, etc. Slack is possibly better for someone who doesn’t use atlassian products. Also, many people use skype for business, and so slack faces the exact same problem.
- jpalomaki 9y ago
  Slack's challenge is that it's just Slack. It's an extra monthly cost, extra thing to the manage. Atlassian can sell you the integrated package. One price, one invoice, tight integration between products. I don't have any data on this, but I think one reason for Slack's success was that people could just start using it without going thorough the IT. I'd assume there's still a huge number of companies who haven't made an official choice on this space. Those might be tempted to go with offerings from Atlassian or Microsoft. Slack could be interesting acquisition for Dropbox (haven't thought out if it could work financially).
downvote_me 9y ago
"The modern workplace, after all, seems to have a need for an ever-increasing number of tools that provide constant interruptions." Nice one
cmaureir 9y ago
I didn't find any reference to encryption or security matters on Stride, anyone? I want to believe that keybase will be soon mature enough to compete against Slack and other similar services...

116 points by mansilladev 9y ago

tootie 9y ago

What happened to HipChat? It was already the same thing as Slack for less money.

salmonfamine 9y ago
I believe they are in the process of sunsetting HipChat. It was not successful.
- briffle 9y ago
  They say they are working to improve hipchat, but only for datacenter, no more hosted.
- 7ewis 9y ago
  They gave us a deadline to move (~2000 users). So we're just getting the Slack business case ready. If we have to move AND pay more money anyway, then why not just go to Slack?
  - ckorhonen 9y ago
    I thought Stride was the same price as Hipchat?
  - cjalmeida 9y ago
    I believe it's cheaper, isn't it?
  - taoistextremist 9y ago
    A quick look at the prices, Stride is under half the price of Slack. No idea if quality correlates with price here since I've never touched Stride.
  - notwhereyouare 9y ago
    have you considered rocket chat? It's a slack you can either have hosted for you, or host in house.
  - zie 9y ago
    You might also look at mattermost, if you are OK with hosting yourself (it's not hard, and upgrades are easy).
  - eridius 9y ago
    I don't know about Stride, but the quality of Slack has really been declining lately. Especially the quality of the desktop client. If I was in charge of the decision for what communication tool to use at my company, I would take a long hard look at every single alternative to Slack.
hartator 9y ago
Stride is just re-branded HipChat.
- patrickaljord 9y ago
  I know it sounds silly but I believe the main reason for HipChat failing is mostly because the name was so uncool.
  - xfour 9y ago
    Uptime wasn't the greatest at a critical moment when Slack was gaining market share as well.
    - el_duderino 9y ago
      Yeah. HipChat's stability was absolutely abysmal for quite some time. They seem to have finally gotten it under control. That or a majority of their user base went elsewhere.
  - bpicolo 9y ago
    More likely it's just that HipChat isn't a great product experience. As an example, the only way to edit a message is to use a sed-style "s/foo/bar", which is absurd. Because of this, you can't edit messages other than the most recent one, and if you want to edit one instance of "foo" but not another instance of "foo" you're out of luck. That's a terrible piece of UX even if you're in the only subset of users (software devs familiar with sed-style search and replace) where it makes any sense whatsoever
    - Fishkins 9y ago
      One time I was trying to correct and "its" that should've been an "it's", but I didn't realized there was a preceding, correct "its" in the post. I ended up changing that "its" to an incorrect "it's", while also leaving the following incorrect "its". It was inconsequential, but very frustrating. As a sibling comment said, the main reason my team abandoned Hipchat for Slack was Hipchat was hopelessly buggy and unreliable at the time we tried to use it.
ljm 9y ago
It seems it stagnated. There wasn’t a real competitor to it until Slack turned up and developed a fantastic integration ecosystem (I don’t think there would be such a focus on conversational UI were it not for Slack, whether or not they intended that). By that time it was already too late, HipChat is old school, Slack is the new hotness. Anecdotally, anyone working in a startup with an opinion on design will know how shallow a judgment has to be to switch to a competitor. App is functional but has 2008 design? The less functional equivalent with 2017 design is better because it looks up to date
- pavel_lishin 9y ago
  To be fair, Hipchat is missing a lot of features that Slack has.
  - ljm 9y ago
    That’s exactly the point, right? Slack turned up and offered more and HipChat didn’t respond in a meaningful way except to rewrite all their clients in JS. At that point they had a buggy client and fewer features, while Slack had an inefficient client with lots of features.
    - pavel_lishin 9y ago
      I was referring to the (weirdly opposed) example they mentioned with the better-looking-fewer-features.
  - tootie 9y ago
    Like what? 99% of usage is just chat rooms. I could hook in build notifications and post gifs. HipChat had voice and video years before Slack.
    - hrktb 9y ago
      Hipchat is not very good at notifications and chat though. 3 years in, and still randomly missing messages for a while until it’s somewhat synched. Whole ongoing conversations don’t appear on other devices if I don’t manually open them. Getting notified on my phone while I’m on my laptop. Lack of integrations is the most sailant thing to point st, but I think at its core Hipchap is also a very meh service.
encoderer 9y ago
Anecdata: The SaaS service I run has integrations with both -- Slack has literally 10x the number of integrated channels.
- asda22sdasd 9y ago
  You integrated slack 10x more in your SaaS?
  - lev99 9y ago
    My understanding was 10x more of his users integrate with slack than hipchat.
- rekoros 9y ago
  https://sameroom.io/status https://sameroom.io/status
rlopezcc 9y ago
I was really disappointed when noticed they didn't have a way to report bugs. They had some kind of "Suggestions box", so I used that to report mine: Images wouldn't upload correctly when the chat room name started wih a slash (/dev/null in my case). They deleted the ticket and a few days later it was magically fixed. You will find pretty annoyed people if you search for "report hipchat bug".
- wwalser 9y ago
  > "I'm annoyed they didn't use my wording. They did fix my bug but I'm still annoyed." In what world would one imagine that a suggestions box was in any way different from reporting a bug? "Suggestions box" is a bug report but renamed to be understood by Joan from accounting.
  - rspeer 9y ago
    The thing about the HipChat suggestions box is that you had to collect "votes" for your "suggestion" to be considered. So you could try to get their attention to the bug of "when you paste XML into a code block, it replaces it with subtly different, broken XML, my suggestion is to stop doing that", but it's going to be sitting several pages beyond "please add a left shark emoji!!!" You can try to get your whole office to stack the vote, but why? I only have to be one person to report a bug to Slack.
- ec109685 9y ago
  Slack’s /feedback is stupendous. You get a human response in minutes. And they have live chat too. Google for example makes it 1000x harder to give feedback and report bugs, which greatly limits the amount of quality feedback they get. Anecdote: hangouts didn’t let us accept external users into a hangout today. Google will never know that because I have no easy way to tel them that.

bgibson 9y ago

Haven't used Stride yet but as someone who hates always-on chat I could see myself really appreciating its deep work oriented features: mute notifications, allow others in the channel to mark things as "task", "decision", "outcome" so you can go back and find important things you missed while deep working. https://www.stride.com https://www.stride.com

pavel_lishin 9y ago
Something about this comment feels very much like an ad.
- sotojuan 9y ago
  Especially because you can always mute Slack or use do not disturb as well.
  - bonesss 9y ago
    But can Slack help you rethink team communication, or redefine the way teams move work forward, together? I know I want a messaging tool that delivers results. https://www.stride.com/ https://www.stride.com/
- cortesoft 9y ago
  Probably the strange link at the bottom of the comment, linking to the site we are talking about.
- bgibson 9y ago
  I have no connection of any sort to Stride (or any chat app for that matter, other than a few I use, which doesn't include Stride yet). This aspect of chat has just been a point for me for years. Looks like Stride and Twistapp are both attempting to solve it, among others. Wouldn't surprise me if there were some Slack plugins to do similar things as well.
dorian-graph 9y ago
You might appreciate https://twistapp.com https://twistapp.com then.

jgh 9y ago

I don't know what it is about Atlassian's branding but it always feels uncomfortably corporate to use any of their software. I'm worried that if I start using Atlassian software I'm going to have to buy inexpensive business-casual clothes, commute an hour and 15 minutes both ways, make small talk with Janet from accounting by the coffee machine while my mocha latte brews, and get Greg my middle-manager my self-assessment by EOD.

koverda 9y ago
Sounds like they nailed it.
atomical 9y ago
The Atlassian blues.
fusiongyro 9y ago
The primary function of Atlassian software is to say "Access denied." You tell Greg he needs to give you permission to do whatever. Greg says he'll do that after he gets your self-assessment. He later writes on your self-assessment receipt that you're a whiner lacking self-motivation. I've used Confluence for two years. It's slow and the editor is buggy. The primary function is to prevent me from making a document public. I've used JIRA for 8 years. JIRA's primary function is to send email. I'd say your assessment is accurate.
- hiccuphippo 9y ago
  Wait, people actually read jira emails? I just filter it to my 'ham' folder.
  - fusiongyro 9y ago
    80% of my coworkers do not read them. I read the ~5% of them that contain more than "Status: -Open- Assigned." Of my remaining coworkers, there are a dozen that reply from their mail client, which just makes everything worse.
- 9y ago

junkscience2017 9y ago

If I am going to consider using something other than Slack, probably the only thing I would consider is a self-hosted open source solution to keep communication private (just having an on-prem closed solution would not be enough, I want to OWN the data, otherwise, I might as well go with the market leader). Otherwise, why use Stride instead of Slack? Most people I know have already used Slack and require no training. They probably even have the mobile app installed already. Stride just seems to be a me-too offering with no compelling reason to exist This is different in my mind than the market for VCS interfaces...in the end I still own my git repo

devhead 9y ago

it's safe to say this won't be killing slack in any meaningful way. wow, that's a terribly atlassian UI they plopped on there. no offense to the dev team(s), i'm sure they had no say in making it so cluttered. slack wins because they make focus on communication not mandatory UI components that have no place in a chat app.

fredsted 9y ago
What exactly is cluttered about Stride's UI, and how do you define "cluttered"?
bhtru 9y ago
I've not ever used Stride however I've now just tried it as a curiosity to see this UI that you find fault with. It feels figuratively just like Slack. I'm actually surprised just how similar it is in so many respects. So I'd love to hear your elaboration on the poorness of the Stride UI.

hkchad 9y ago

Long time hipchat user here (both DC and Cloud), the rollout of Stride rubbed me all kinds of wrong ways. They 'replaced' HipChat w/ Strie but didn't keep many of the same features/integrations and then FORCED you to switch by a deadline. I get upgrades and progress, but how about rolling upgrade, swap out the client, move everyone over automatically and not pain your users? For my team, we said screw it and 'migrated' to Slack. Give us a chance to switch, we switched.

wwalser 9y ago
Inaccurate. Data center has not been sunset. https://www.stride.com/help-center/frequently-asked-questions/stride-and-hipchat-data-center#faq-64bbd492-e920-4693-9abf-1688729a2bab https://www.stride.com/help-center/frequently-asked-question... I also don't think anyone was forced to switch but I could be wrong. An email requesting or encouraging some action is different from being forced to do something.
- hkchad 9y ago
  I was just saying I have used DC in addition to Cloud. We migrated to cloud from DC about a year ago, and was forced to switch last week.
tahoemph999 9y ago
Ditto. Too little, too late.
bradgessler 9y ago
Same. Stride is just a worse implementation of Slack with less features. They even got rid of the “good parts” of HipChat, mainly that the macOS client doesn’t idle at 5% CPU, and replaced it with a full blow Electron client that had the same problems as Slack. Honestly I’m a bit dumbfound how they are handling the transition. I bet they end up losing a lot of customers to Slack.

anfilt 9y ago

I don't understand the point of all these stupid chat apps... Discord, Slack ect... If you need real time there is IRC. Otherwise, just setup a mailing list.

chapium 9y ago
If you want both, there is Slack ;) Why separate your communication into two tools instead of one?
- hiccuphippo 9y ago
  Luckily Attlasian has jitsi too so you can separate it into two again :^)
- austincheney 9y ago
  Because one is a free and open standard where you actually own your data.
  - tortasaur 9y ago
    I think Riot/Matrix is a happy compromise. I've been hosting a couple of servers (one for fun, one for work) for about half a year now, and it's working well.
u801e 9y ago
> If you need real time there is IRC. The problem with IRC is that you cannot get chat history of a channel unless you configure a bouncer to do it for you. On that note, what's your opinion on XMPP? We used to use a XMPP server for internal company communication and the server was configured to replay the chat history to a client when it connected. > Otherwise, just setup a mailing list. That has a similar problem to IRC which is that new members cannot easily access messages sent before they joined. A better option would be an internally hosted NNTP server.
- davidw 9y ago

asda22sdasd 9y ago

did they ditch hipchat?

shitloadofbooks 9y ago

Stride's WYSIWG editor is really unpleasant (and had several showstopping bugs which they're only just ironing out). I have an open ticket to have a profile option to disable it, but ...crickets.

jgalt212 9y ago

Hipchat 2017 works perfectly fine for a chat app (which @tootie said have been basically the same for 30 years). We have not been forced to migrate to Stride yet, but I am bummed about this can I keep kicking down the road. I don't care how much better Stride is, Hipchat is good enough for us.

lev99 9y ago

Did anyone else notice the Easter egg in Hipchat's web client when using js debugging tools?

crad 9y ago

Sad thing is there isn’t even baseline feature parity. Not sure what’s going to happen when they give my org a date to move by. Without some of the more enterprisey features, we can’t move to Stride. Oh and the FU on all of our existing integration use is cute. They should have released it as a UI improvement for HipChat, not a whole new ecosystem.

Rychard 9y ago
> Oh and the FU on all of our existing integration use is cute. I certainly didn't appreciate it. As someone who invests significant portions of time building integrations between various systems in our development team, I quickly hit the brakes the second I heard the Stride announcement. Since our organization is being forced to move from HipChat, we're reviewing alternatives rather than blindly continuing onward toward Stride. I strongly doubt that this will have any impact on Atlassian's bottom-line, however.

jakelarkin 9y ago

biggest gripe with Atlassian is all their products are slow as hell. Hipchat was sluggish and buggy but at least they were steadily improving. Now everyone has to start over on a new platform (?) Confluence, how freakin long does it take to return a static info page, Seconds? As if visiting the HR subdomain wasn't painful enough already. Heaven forbid you click on something makes a POST request in JIRA, RIP developer.

throwaway5752 9y ago
Agreed. If anyone from Atlassian is reading this, the changes to Jira and Confluence make me think something is wrong there. I have been a faithful Jira user for over a decade and it has gotten markedly worse as a product in the past year. Maybe it's more profitable with app/marketplace, but the experience with multiple integrated apps is dog slow. Navigability has gotten worse. HipChat had uptime issues to the point my company moved to Slack. I am worried for you guys.
- atonse 9y ago
  I agree with this. In 2006 I was a huge fan of JIRA and it just felt like such a well designed app. Now it has some kind of Designer disease, where it looks beautiful (truly, I love the style and fonts and colors), but I simply can't find my way around it. And I get very frustrated trying to do basic things because the app is also really slow (clearly 500ms+ per request). It's clear that it's still a server-side app and not a SPA which is the kind responsiveness everyone expects nowadays. So our two person team went back to using Excel. Jira just takes too long to get things done with.

dasil003 9y ago

Just don't fuck up Trello guys, for the love of god.

antoniuschan99 9y ago
Trello seems to have lost it's use after it got made into a separate company. It seems to have gotten worse after it got bought out by Atlassian. No real intriguing features. Also, Atlassian used to be loved by developers, after it ipoed it just seems not loved
- newfoundglory 9y ago
  Gotten worse? I haven’t noticed anything worse, hasn’t seemed very different at all. I don’t have a business account though - do you have anything specific in mind?
- bovermyer 9y ago
  This is not my experience. Trello has continued to work just fine after its acquisition by Atlassian.
- dasil003 9y ago
  "Lost its use"? What kind of bizarro tech bubble is this where something solid which works and has stayed true to its essence is considered bad, and instead we demand an unrelenting churn that results in limply overcooked products inevitably jumping the shark (JIRA redesign I'm looking at you).
- sencho 9y ago
  from Atlassian last earnings release in Oct 2017: "Trello continues to grow its user base at an impressive pace with more than 25 million registered users in over 100 countries, up from approximately 19 million at the start of the calendar year" https://s2.q4cdn.com/141359120/files/doc_financials/Q12018/TEAM-Q1-2018-Shareholder-Letter-(1).pdf https://s2.q4cdn.com/141359120/files/doc_financials/Q12018/T...

tcit 9y ago

Sad to see no one's mentioning Mattermost.

notatoad 9y ago

everybody here seems to be griping about it, but from the overview on their website it seems like a reasonable alternative to slack, and the free tier includes group video chat and screen sharing. that sounds pretty sweet to me.

sjellis 9y ago

Michael Tiemann used to say that he wasn't interested in trying to pitch to a company unless he thought his product (Red Hat Linux) was four times better than what they currently had: the costs and risks of a switch can easily negate the value of changing to a product that is only somewhat better than the incumbent. Unless Stride does something massively better than Slack, I don't see how Stride can compete.

pletnes 9y ago
It’ll be bundled with other atlassian products. Less hassle to integrate with those, one less service to log into, one less monthly payment, etc. Slack is possibly better for someone who doesn’t use atlassian products. Also, many people use skype for business, and so slack faces the exact same problem.
jpalomaki 9y ago
Slack's challenge is that it's just Slack. It's an extra monthly cost, extra thing to the manage. Atlassian can sell you the integrated package. One price, one invoice, tight integration between products. I don't have any data on this, but I think one reason for Slack's success was that people could just start using it without going thorough the IT. I'd assume there's still a huge number of companies who haven't made an official choice on this space. Those might be tempted to go with offerings from Atlassian or Microsoft. Slack could be interesting acquisition for Dropbox (haven't thought out if it could work financially).

downvote_me 9y ago

"The modern workplace, after all, seems to have a need for an ever-increasing number of tools that provide constant interruptions." Nice one

cmaureir 9y ago

I didn't find any reference to encryption or security matters on Stride, anyone? I want to believe that keybase will be soon mature enough to compete against Slack and other similar services...