10 ms·

HipChat is now free for unlimited users

333 points by rbres 12y ago

TallGuyShort 12y ago
My company recently started using HipChat and I really like it. I expected to prefer IRC because of the standard, open protocol and the choice of clients, but the HipChat application works much more smoothly on my Linux desktop than any IRC client I've tried, and it's been adopted more widely across my organization than IRC ever was - making it much more useful, even if that really just comes down to marketing it to appear more accessible. It's working really well.
- ixmatus 12y ago
  Hipchat runs smoother than XChat for you? That's a first. Hipchat isn't bad but I vastly prefer IRC, particularly with a good IRC bot.
  - technomancy 12y ago
    I use bitlbee with hipchat so I can connect from Emacs. It's a bit awkward to set up, but it's a lot better than the official client since it works inside tmux+mosh.
  - TallGuyShort 12y ago
    XChat was previously my client of choice, although I don't have much of a need for IRC on a daily basis anymore. Specifically, HipChat's integration with KDE's system tray and general look and feel is much more polished, IMO.
  - wlesieutre 12y ago
    Out of curiosity, what do you do with your IRC bots? I know HipChat can have bots, so I'd assume some similar functionality is possible. But Hipchat doesn't have decades of community developed bots, so IRC has a long head start.
    - rjbwork 12y ago
      HuBot and mmBot (a C#/.NET port) has an adapter for hipchat
      - NicoJuicy 12y ago
        And for Jabbr, which is a Jabber implementation on Signalr (a realtime thingy of .Net). It's actually pretty neat, you can try it out on : https://jabbr.net https://jabbr.net (+ it's opensource if you want to implement your own team chat )
    - StavrosK 12y ago
      I wrote a hosted bot service, to save you the hassle of maintaining one. Email me if you want to avoid the beta charge thing: https://www.getinstabot.com https://www.getinstabot.com
- wcummings 12y ago
  IRCCloud is nice and sits somewhere in the middle
- Nanzikambe 12y ago
  I have the opposite experience, HipChat runs like a dog: http://shiva.pw/hipchat_is_this_normal.jpg http://shiva.pw/hipchat_is_this_normal.jpg That's HipChat 2.1.1013 running on x64 in Vmware 10.0.2 w/ 8gb of a total of 32gb allocated. Oh yea, I'm doing nothing in HipChat, just idling in a single channel, with two inactive conversations with AFK people open. The chat window contains no animated GIFs or Youtube vids or anything wild either. I've been strongly considering switching to using a regular XMPP client especially since feature creep seems to be be bringing features I don't want (video chat etc) Edit: I should add the view is filtered, the CPU load + memory usage in the top is from an encrypted filesystem backup currently running
joeblau 12y ago
HipChat is probably under fire from Slack. That's why I think they are making this change, because I just made the transition a few weeks ago and Slack has been amazing. Once you go Slack, you never go back.
- adricnet 12y ago
  Would you mind linking to the competing service you mention, or perhaps a review of it? I've been advocating for Hipchat but haven't seen Slack yet.
  - saiko-chriskun 12y ago
    www.google.com
  - davidkuridza 12y ago
    https://slack.com/ https://slack.com/ We switched from HipChat recently, so far it's working fine. The only thing we miss are cross team notifications, but apparently they are working on it (can't find the link at the moment).
    - alexcroox 12y ago
      Does it integrate with 3rd party chat clients like Adium or are you forced to have their tab/client open too?
      - bcj 12y ago
        You can connect to it using an IRC client, but you lose the ability to view history or make edits to posts
        baddox 12y ago
        You also lose the ability to mention other team members, which is huge.
    - 12y ago
tomkin 12y ago
Is HipChat really a good thing? Constant distractions all day means I get nothing done, so I'm pretty much against any kind of constant stream of communication when you're trying to think. Call me crazy. On to the service itself: I can't join in on my client's conversation without creating a whole new account with a different email address. Annoying and incredibly short-sighted. I know that the people over at HipChat never work with anyone outside of their office, but unfortunately this is not the case for most people. Honestly, I can get an IRC server up and running in the time it takes to get a HipChat account activated. It's annoying that so many people are hyping HipChat, as if it were some groundbreaking thing.
- mutru 12y ago
  Flowdock has pretty much the same functionality, and supports multiple organizations with one login. https://www.flowdock.com/ https://www.flowdock.com/
- yaur 12y ago
  The way we used it. There was a dev+qa channel and a dev+support channel with no one above tech leads in either group and it replaced Skype for a lot of work the devs did with support. Though we ultimately didn't use it beyond the trial period the key value driver for us was that a dev could step into an ongoing issue and get a of context very quickly even if they didn't have HipChat running. This means that as an IC you don't need to have the client running when you are "trying to think". That, along with the lack of management types in the communication flow meant that it was minimally distracting and mostly used as intended. You can do pretty much the same thing with IRC, but getting HipChat set up on peoples PCs and phones is dead simple which is nice when you are dealing with remote QA and support teams.
  - pyre 12y ago
    With IRC, you need a bouncer (e.g. znc) to get the functionality of seeing history without having the client open (and technically the bouncer is just the open client).
- mrjatx 12y ago
OoTheNigerian 12y ago
Slack surely is putting HipChat on its toes. Competition is really good. I use and enjoy HipChat. The feature I love about it is the ability to temporarily invite someone (edit: a non organization person) to a room. It would be nice if it was possible to have it open all day and have it like an IRC. It would be perfect for having support rooms for an app. One thing i'd like HipChat to improve on is the timeout that happens to their desktop app. As long as it is open, I do not want to have to "reconnect". Nice one guys. And Nice one Slack. Surely, no slackers.
- tomkin 12y ago
  > The feature I love about it is the ability to invite someone to a room. Wow. Groundbreaking stuff here. There were chatroom perl scripts in 1998 that did this.
- baddox 12y ago
  > The feature I love about it is the ability to invite someone to a room. Which really means that you can force people into a room, and there's no way to say "leave this room and don't let anyone force me back into it."
- ghiculescu 12y ago
  > It would be nice if it was possible to have it open all day and have it like an IRC. It would be perfect for having support rooms for an app. You can do this. Intercom.io are an example of someone who does - this is their help desk for new customer setup https://www.hipchat.com/gAstw61gT https://www.hipchat.com/gAstw61gT
dahdum 12y ago
This is awesome, we've been paying $100+/month for our company but never use video chat or screen share (nor did we want them) and have turned off history retention since day 1. Sounds like we can downgrade and pay nothing now.
Fizzadar 12y ago
We use HipChat at work, and I use Slack for some other projects; both pale in comparison to the simplicity, flexibility and client-options of IRC. But for those less technical it's a fantastic and easy to setup alternative. Pointless in an all-dev company, but anywhere else, priceless.
- gtaylor 12y ago
  > both pale in comparison to the simplicity, flexibility and client-options of IRC I can definitely agree on the flexibility part, but simplicity? No way. HipChat is easy enough for our completely non-technical users to be quite comfortable with immediately. The setup process is entering a username and a password. Ditto for the mobile apps. I love IRC, but it's a very different thing.
- eddieroger 12y ago
  I've set up an IRC server before and tried convincing a moderately technical team to install Colloquy and jump on. I will happily trade the features of Slack or HipChat for the simplicity of IRC. Persistent rooms alone (with zero config, no bouncers, etc) is worthwhile over vanilla IRC.
phamilton 12y ago
I've found Video Chat to be pretty terrible. I find it weird to market that as the upsell. Most of the time, we give up with Hipchat Video and switch to a Google Hangout.
- fixie 12y ago
  I think their video chat is or was recently in beta. I imagine their biggest upsell in their 'HipChat Plus' package is searchable history which is a pretty important feature.
JGuo 12y ago
Just moved our team to slack as well. Has definitely been a better experience.
Dorian-Marie 12y ago
I think they should learn from Slack and make all the integrations at least as awesome as them, and also have some kind of more modern interface.
latchkey 12y ago
Reminder: https://blog.hipchat.com/2014/04/25/hey-were-changing-our-terms-of-service/ https://blog.hipchat.com/2014/04/25/hey-were-changing-our-te... and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7649524 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7649524
- mrjatx 12y ago
  So what? If your company ever used Openfire/Spark or any sorts of private IM services they're able to view private messages. Some of you act like this is some mind blowing travesty. You should expect the possibility of your company monitoring their services and communications.
  - latchkey 12y ago
    Personally, I'm against their binding arbitration clause. This is a good reference. http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/arbitration-clauses-contracts-32644.html http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/arbitration-clauses-c...
- powdahound 12y ago
  Garret from HipChat here. The previous discussion on this topic made a lot of assumptions about this change, so I'd like to quote some additional detail from our help doc (http://help.hipchat.com/knowledgebase/articles/358098 http://help.hipchat.com/knowledgebase/articles/358098) before the same happens here; In order for an organization to access 1-1 chats occurring after May 27, 2014 or later, the organization will need to make a request by emailing support@hipchat.com. As stated in the HipChat-specific terms, the requesting entity must have consent from their affected users in order to obtain access to those users' 1-1 chat history. The typical way that an entity would have the right to access employee communications is through the entity's employee policy. It is standard practice among businesses to state in their policies that the employer has the right to access communications occurring on workplace systems. You should speak with your employer if you have questions about their specific data access policies.
  - 12y ago
ChikkaChiChi 12y ago
I just recently compared Slack and Hipchat and Slack seems to be the more advanced of the two at this point. The magic bullet in collaborative chat like this seems to be presence awareness. We used to use GTalk for this but since moving to hangouts we can't ever tell who is at there desk when we need them. Here's to hoping one of them gets it right; especially when you install on your desktop and your mobile device.
kolev 12y ago
My biggest issue with HipChat is the inability to run multiple organizations on the same client. The video and audio "premium" features are really a terrible idea as there's Skype, Google Hangouts, UberConference, and similar for that and they are free and core businesses and Atlassian cannot and should not attempt to compete with those!
- chermanowicz 12y ago
  Have you tried http://Kato.im http://Kato.im ? They're the only product which supports multiple organizations in the same client -- and it's done in a really powerful way that doesn't force you to switch between orgs. You could have one or four open and still communicate effectively.
  - mutru 12y ago
    Flowdock also supports multiple organizations in one client.
    - rekoros 12y ago
      It's true (and great!), but you can't see two conversations from two different organizations at the same time - have to click.
  - kolev 12y ago
    There's isn't much info about it - not even a single screenshot.
    - chermanowicz 12y ago
      http://www.appvita.com/2014/04/29/kato-leverage-group-communication/ http://www.appvita.com/2014/04/29/kato-leverage-group-commun... http://blog.kato.im/ http://blog.kato.im/ I guess the website is still getting redesigned ;)
      - kolev 12y ago
rdschouw 12y ago
We moved from HipChat to Slack. HipChat desktop clients on OSX were crashing all the time. Most notably after waking up from a suspend. Slack is much more stable. The transition was pretty smooth.
jedisct1 12y ago
I don't get the point of HipChat. It's a closed, proprietary Jabber server, with closed-source clients, intentionally no OTR support but the explicit ability to spy one-on-one conversations instead. And people used to pay for that?
- ashayh 12y ago
  What exactly do you mean by 'spy'? Edit: Looks like OP was referring to this: https://blog.hipchat.com/2014/04/25/hey-were-changing-our-terms-of-service/ https://blog.hipchat.com/2014/04/25/hey-were-changing-our-te...
- mrjatx 12y ago
  I haven't used Slack, but I've used all sorts of xmpp/jabber servers such as Openfire, generic jabberd, etc. Hipchat blows those away. I can quickly see what links and files I've posted or have been posted to me. I can open unlimited rooms, invite members to them and if I have a new employee start all I need to do is make them an account and they have everyones contact information. We previously used g-chat which was an absolute pain. Half of the employees I have on gchat I have their personal emails. And it was about $3/mo per user. Not bad at all.
- freerobby 12y ago
  We pay for HipChat because it makes team communication easy and painless on every device our employees own.
  - zo1 12y ago
    I'm sorry, I don't speak marketing. Care to translate what you just said for us non-initiated?
    - sosborn 12y ago
      >it makes team communication easy and painless on every device our employees own Is this sentence really that hard to understand?
    - 12y ago
smethod 12y ago
I know it sounds ridiculous but for me the one thing HipChat's got over Slack is the ability to have custom emoticons https://blog.hipchat.com/2012/05/21/custom-emoticons-everywhere https://blog.hipchat.com/2012/05/21/custom-emoticons-everywh.... Admittedly we use it mainly for banter and fun but its a sticky feature currently keeping me migrating over to Slack...
- kolev 12y ago
  It's not ridiculous. People like eye candy! And even pay for it (stickers and other ridiculous things)!
- nikhilpandit 12y ago
  Slack lets you add custom emoji too: https://twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/437028458627989504 https://twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/437028458627989504
  - smethod 12y ago
    Oh cool, thanks I missed that update
- smasuch 12y ago
  This is possible in slack: https://twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/437028458627989504 https://twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/437028458627989504
- mitchellhislop 12y ago
  You can setup custom emojis in Slack!
larrybolt 12y ago
I wonder if this has at least a little bit to do with the recent post about HackerChat [1], since even though it wasn't by the people at Slack themselves, but by someone else (Gianluca and Steven), it's pretty much a very good way to get the word out about Slack. I actually couldn't think of a better way than what HackerChat did to show to developers, entrepreneurs and people that would need such tool "Here's how it works!". I don't think any landing page can do that. I think it's what some smaller businesses might do, or some people applying for a job: look what the startup/client does or needs, make something that's relevant to demo your skills/features and show it to them. [1]: http://hackerchat.co/ http://hackerchat.co/
aspir 12y ago
People are making the valid comparison of Hipchat and Slack, which is to be expected. But, this is a deeper move by Atlassian. Atlassian's business model is still "All roads lead to JIRA/Confluence." It's why so many of their products are free. This isn't as much a Hipchat v. Slack/IRC/Google/Campfire move, as adding another road to JIRA.
- callmeed 12y ago
  The beauty of Slack, IMO, is in the nice integrations with everything I already use. Does Hipchat/JIRA/Confluence do that? (I honestly don't know) For a small team, there's no reason (for us at least) to move away from Trello, GitHub issues, etc.
  - aspir 12y ago
    The integrations that Atlassian tools provide are optimized for large businesses. One bill, SSO, bulk administration of users, etc. From a usability perspective, I'm not a fan of the Atlassian platform over other stacks, but they cater to the people who tend to call the shots.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - david_shaw 12y ago
    HipChat has a nice API that allows us to shoot notifications from TribeHR, our Linux production boxes, code commits, Salesforce, etc. to our company-wide channels. It's a nice communication tool to use to keep the whole team on the same page.
  - semerda 12y ago
    HipChat integrates with Jira/Confluence/BitBucket/Bamboo et al. It is the only reason we are using it vs a host of tools sticky taped together with different interfaces. As your team growths you will see the value in having a single unified set of tools that cover a majority of your needs vs a host of different tools chained together each providing a different experience, education and logins.
bokglobule 12y ago
Do you guys worry about confidentiality with these services?
- hhaidar 12y ago
  That's pretty much what happened with us. We ended up rolling our own thing and deploying it on our VPN with LDAP authentication: https://github.com/sdelements/lets-chat https://github.com/sdelements/lets-chat It's been working pretty nicely.
- flurdy 12y ago
  They do offer an internal hipchat server as a beta: https://www.hipchat.com/server https://www.hipchat.com/server Not total confidentiality but better.
- njharman 12y ago
  Yes. Every company I've worked for that had established (read not startups/not tiny) companies as customers could never use any thing like this due to contracts saying we won't be storing/transmitting their "stuff" on servers we do not control. [everyone hand waves email delivery but we can't use something like gmail]. These are tools for small / startup companies were you need something to just work and don't have resources to spend on anything but getting "established".
  - tomschlick 12y ago
    They have a behind the firewall version of hipchat for security concious corp customers.
notwhyships 12y ago
Hard to imagine that Google isn't going to weigh in soon with its own offering.
EGreg 12y ago
We just use Hangouts and everything integrated into Google Apps. What is the advantage here?
- jsmeaton 12y ago
  Hangouts are really annoying for persistent rooms that others can join and leave at will. We found we had lots of different combinations of people in different hangouts, and the conversations were really fragmented. We use hangouts for group video, and hipchat for everything else.
mavci 12y ago
I'm still with Slack. Can't make a webhook with HipChat, it shouldn't be hard this much.
DanBlake 12y ago
It feels like they are pulling a amazon, ala diapers.com fiasco. * Only issue is, they are doing it to their core business vs amazon who was doing it with just one segment and could afford to cannibalize profits in that sector http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/10/10/amazon_book_how_jeff_bezos_went_thermonuclear_on_diapers_com.html http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/10/10/amazon_bo...
- te_chris 12y ago
  It would seem that you don't know much about Atlassian, JIRA and Confluence is their core business, not HipChat.
ak217 12y ago
We switched to Flowdock and never looked back. The SNR advantages of the integrated conversation threads and "email-like" inbox model are amazing. I never knew what I was missing with IRC/hipchat.
- akoumjian 12y ago
  Same here. We "inbox" everything from support, to social media shares, some analytics, as well as code pushes. Love the way Flowdock handles those items and lets you make reference to them while talking in the main thread.
- MartinCron 12y ago
  I came here to say exactly this. Flowdock is my favorite groupware chat I have used so far.
- JonoBB 12y ago
  Yep - the way that flowdock handles multiple "flows" and the nice simple interface was the selling point for us. Slack has a bit of a nasty interface that is just not "clean" enough.
ansimionescu 12y ago
Two questions, if I may: What are HipChat's advantages over other chat services? What's a good, mainstream-ish, secure/encrypted chat service?
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
gorax 12y ago
I wonder what the hosted pricing will be when it comes out of beta. At my work we will not even entertain something that cannot be hosted by us. Hipchat has saved 3 members of our 15 man team countless hours by integrating it into our workflow. I if slack could be self hosted I would consider it but Hipchat has our support.
jess1003 12y ago
Has anyone checked out Hall? It's chat, text, and file-sharing for teams. Free for teams for an unlimited time. But with the added bonus of being able to talk with ANYONE from ANY email address, instead of switching in and out of teams like on Slack. Try it out: hall.com
rahilsondhi 12y ago
That's great HipChat. Now can you do emoji autocomplete?
IgorPartola 12y ago
Last I tried HipChat, it was a terrible experience simply because I wanted to not run yet another application and instead use Adium. They do support XMPP but to get it working you have to do magic. After I did the magic, I had chat up and running but lo and behold: file transfers did not work. Thankfully, this is when our team decided the experiment was over. We went back to using IRC. What fundamental problem do these new chat protocols solve that are not already addressed by IRC and XMPP?
- EC1 12y ago
  The fundamental problem they "solve" is to be more hip and cool than the last, since no regular human being has heard of IRC, let alone many "hardcore programmers" that I know. I wish IRC was overhauled SOMEHOW and made more accessible to the common person.
  - Karunamon 12y ago
    I never understood how IRC was somehow not accessible. Connect to a server, join a room, (usually from a helpfully provided list), enter text and other people see it. Those are the basics, and my gran could understand them. It's no more difficult than browsing the web.
- brown9-2 12y ago
  Persistence. It's nice to be able to see what conversations you missed while offline or overnight, especially if you have teammates distributed across the globe. Persistence also allows you to search through or link people to old conversations.
  - IgorPartola 12y ago
    So XMPP lets you do this too. Why invent a new protocol?
    - brown9-2 12y ago
      Because a company feels there is money to be made by offering a simpler solution to interested customers. Does every product really need a technical justification? If every person at your company is comfortable setting up email clients, IRC bots, and bouncers, then this isn't a product for you. If you would rather just pay someone $2/person/month to set this up for you, then this is the product for you.
Thaxll 12y ago
Is Slack cloud based? If so it's a big problem for a lot of compagnies, most of them don't want to host their chat service to an external provider, that's where Hipchat is very useful. You can host your own server in-house.
CMCDragonkai 12y ago
We moved from Hipchat to Kato, mainly due to the bugs and frequent servers going offline.
bmurphy1976 12y ago
I like HipChat but I really really wish it integrated with an irc client. I've spent hours trying to get a good experience with BitlBee and, well, it's anything but smooth. The single biggest thing they could do to help me and my coworkers out would be to allow our IRC clients to connect to the service. Other than that I love it.
gaoshan 12y ago
We use a bunch of Atlassian products (Jira, Bitbucket, Tempo, Sourcetree, IDE Connector, Jira Agile, ) but while HipChat never caught on with us, Slack hit a home run. That said, once someone includes video group chat (a la Skype) for free we will likely jump for whoever offers it.
- munificent 12y ago
  > That said, once someone includes video group chat (a la Skype) for free we will likely jump for whoever offers it. Hangouts in G+?
  - jsmeaton 12y ago
    We were using hangouts and google chat exclusively until we finally made the jump to HipChat. We still use hangouts for group video (morning scrum mostly), and hipchat for everything else. Group video in hipchat would be a killer feature.
programminggeek 12y ago
The biggest feature HipChat lacks is chat room sounds. That was my favorite feature of Campfire. Otherwise, HipChat is pretty cool, I guess. I really miss chat sounds. /sadtrombone
fekberg 12y ago
HipChat is great, but I've found myself much more often on JabbR (https://jabbr.net/ https://jabbr.net/) to be honest. Might be because I am a sucker for SignalR. JabbR is also free to use, you can have private team rooms if you so like and it integrates with a bunch of auth services.
mutant 12y ago
this still doesn't fix the fact that there is no longer private 1 on 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7649524 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7649524
machbio 12y ago
Slack has a problem with retrieving deleted team URLs, seems like they have not covered all the test cases for the signup process..
torbica 12y ago
What would be best HipChat alternative for self-hosting? At my organization we are not allowed to use any external service.
- veesahni 12y ago
  HipChat Server https://www.hipchat.com/server https://www.hipchat.com/server
Deestan 12y ago
Be aware that Hipchat are now rolling out a new "feature" in which the account admin can read all private 1-to-1 chat: http://help.hipchat.com/forums/138883-suggestions-ideas/suggestions/2757784-ability-for-admins-to-view-search-and-export-1-1 http://help.hipchat.com/forums/138883-suggestions-ideas/sugg... This could be a significant issue for some, both morally and legally. If you are using / are going to use Hipchat with this enabled, at least make sure you are aware of any legalities you need to conform to because of this. E.g. gather consent from employees.
- djim 12y ago
  if said service is provided by the employer, they own the data/communications and have every right to monitor the service. same goes for work email: employers have access to this. it isn't illegal for them to access these communications done on a work account.
  - mikeash 12y ago
    That depends heavily on local laws and you really can't make a blanket statement like that.
    - RobAley 12y ago
      And laws be damned, it's often employee moral that takes a hit when employers snoop without consent, and that can be just as costly (if not more so) than a court case in many companies.
    - 15thandwhatever 12y ago
      largely depends on the industry you work in. a lot of us work in small dev shops, where we really like our privacy. a lot of us also work in regulated industries, where if your employer is NOT logging, then your company gets fined by $government or $regulatingbody.
- truncate 12y ago
  I mentioned earlier in this thread, privacy was already kind of broken. Given your account was registered with organization email, admin could reset your password and look at your private chats (like when you leave a company). Doing that would perhaps be violation of terms, but I don't think many would care particularly in developing countries where legalities of such things are joke.
hoopism 12y ago
I tried to sign up. I really did. First I entered in my own details but neglected my lastname... didn't say I had to. It's a single name field. It rejected my submission and zero'd out the fields. Strike one. Then it asked for my team members names and email addresses. It had a skip button, that was nice. I added their emails and used again their first names... let them add their last name or preferred name. Again it failed and removed all the data I entered. Strike two. Then I attempted to download the client. It wouldn't let me till I verified my account. It will let me send solicitation emails to team members... but not download a client. Ok. Odd. I downloaded the client to my mac entered credentials and after about 4 minutes it failed to launch with a debug window displayed. Strike three. I did try.
hoopism 12y ago
I tried to sign up. I really did. First I entered in my own details but neglected my lastname... didn't say I had to. It's a single name field. It rejected my submission and zero'd out the fields. Strike one. Then it asked for my team members names and email addresses. It had a skip button, that was nice. I added their emails and used again their first names... let them add their last name or preferred name. Again it failed and removed all the data I entered. Strike two. Then I attempted to download the client. It wouldn't let me till I verified my account. It will let me send solicitation emails to team members... but not download a client. Ok. Odd. I downloaded the client to my mac entered credentials and after about 4 minutes it failed to launch with a debug window displayed. Strike three. I did try.
skizm 12y ago
Maybe I haven't read enough about HipChat, but what is the advantage over google's chat? That you don't need a google account? EDIT: ah, integration with other Atlassian products. got it.
jitbit 12y ago
The only reason my team prefers HipChat over Slack is because Slack doesn't have a Windows-client

333 points by rbres 12y ago

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

ixmatus 12y ago
Hipchat runs smoother than XChat for you? That's a first. Hipchat isn't bad but I vastly prefer IRC, particularly with a good IRC bot.
- technomancy 12y ago
  I use bitlbee with hipchat so I can connect from Emacs. It's a bit awkward to set up, but it's a lot better than the official client since it works inside tmux+mosh.
- TallGuyShort 12y ago
  XChat was previously my client of choice, although I don't have much of a need for IRC on a daily basis anymore. Specifically, HipChat's integration with KDE's system tray and general look and feel is much more polished, IMO.
- wlesieutre 12y ago
  Out of curiosity, what do you do with your IRC bots? I know HipChat can have bots, so I'd assume some similar functionality is possible. But Hipchat doesn't have decades of community developed bots, so IRC has a long head start.
  - rjbwork 12y ago
    HuBot and mmBot (a C#/.NET port) has an adapter for hipchat
    - NicoJuicy 12y ago
      And for Jabbr, which is a Jabber implementation on Signalr (a realtime thingy of .Net). It's actually pretty neat, you can try it out on : https://jabbr.net https://jabbr.net (+ it's opensource if you want to implement your own team chat )
  - StavrosK 12y ago
    I wrote a hosted bot service, to save you the hassle of maintaining one. Email me if you want to avoid the beta charge thing: https://www.getinstabot.com https://www.getinstabot.com
wcummings 12y ago
IRCCloud is nice and sits somewhere in the middle
Nanzikambe 12y ago
I have the opposite experience, HipChat runs like a dog: http://shiva.pw/hipchat_is_this_normal.jpg http://shiva.pw/hipchat_is_this_normal.jpg That's HipChat 2.1.1013 running on x64 in Vmware 10.0.2 w/ 8gb of a total of 32gb allocated. Oh yea, I'm doing nothing in HipChat, just idling in a single channel, with two inactive conversations with AFK people open. The chat window contains no animated GIFs or Youtube vids or anything wild either. I've been strongly considering switching to using a regular XMPP client especially since feature creep seems to be be bringing features I don't want (video chat etc) Edit: I should add the view is filtered, the CPU load + memory usage in the top is from an encrypted filesystem backup currently running

joeblau 12y ago

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

adricnet 12y ago
Would you mind linking to the competing service you mention, or perhaps a review of it? I've been advocating for Hipchat but haven't seen Slack yet.
- saiko-chriskun 12y ago
  www.google.com
- davidkuridza 12y ago
  https://slack.com/ https://slack.com/ We switched from HipChat recently, so far it's working fine. The only thing we miss are cross team notifications, but apparently they are working on it (can't find the link at the moment).
  - alexcroox 12y ago
    Does it integrate with 3rd party chat clients like Adium or are you forced to have their tab/client open too?
    - bcj 12y ago
      You can connect to it using an IRC client, but you lose the ability to view history or make edits to posts
      - baddox 12y ago
        You also lose the ability to mention other team members, which is huge.
  - 12y ago

tomkin 12y ago

Is HipChat really a good thing? Constant distractions all day means I get nothing done, so I'm pretty much against any kind of constant stream of communication when you're trying to think. Call me crazy. On to the service itself: I can't join in on my client's conversation without creating a whole new account with a different email address. Annoying and incredibly short-sighted. I know that the people over at HipChat never work with anyone outside of their office, but unfortunately this is not the case for most people. Honestly, I can get an IRC server up and running in the time it takes to get a HipChat account activated. It's annoying that so many people are hyping HipChat, as if it were some groundbreaking thing.

mutru 12y ago
Flowdock has pretty much the same functionality, and supports multiple organizations with one login. https://www.flowdock.com/ https://www.flowdock.com/
yaur 12y ago
The way we used it. There was a dev+qa channel and a dev+support channel with no one above tech leads in either group and it replaced Skype for a lot of work the devs did with support. Though we ultimately didn't use it beyond the trial period the key value driver for us was that a dev could step into an ongoing issue and get a of context very quickly even if they didn't have HipChat running. This means that as an IC you don't need to have the client running when you are "trying to think". That, along with the lack of management types in the communication flow meant that it was minimally distracting and mostly used as intended. You can do pretty much the same thing with IRC, but getting HipChat set up on peoples PCs and phones is dead simple which is nice when you are dealing with remote QA and support teams.
- pyre 12y ago
  With IRC, you need a bouncer (e.g. znc) to get the functionality of seeing history without having the client open (and technically the bouncer is just the open client).
mrjatx 12y ago

OoTheNigerian 12y ago

Slack surely is putting HipChat on its toes. Competition is really good. I use and enjoy HipChat. The feature I love about it is the ability to temporarily invite someone (edit: a non organization person) to a room. It would be nice if it was possible to have it open all day and have it like an IRC. It would be perfect for having support rooms for an app. One thing i'd like HipChat to improve on is the timeout that happens to their desktop app. As long as it is open, I do not want to have to "reconnect". Nice one guys. And Nice one Slack. Surely, no slackers.

tomkin 12y ago
> The feature I love about it is the ability to invite someone to a room. Wow. Groundbreaking stuff here. There were chatroom perl scripts in 1998 that did this.
baddox 12y ago
> The feature I love about it is the ability to invite someone to a room. Which really means that you can force people into a room, and there's no way to say "leave this room and don't let anyone force me back into it."
ghiculescu 12y ago
> It would be nice if it was possible to have it open all day and have it like an IRC. It would be perfect for having support rooms for an app. You can do this. Intercom.io are an example of someone who does - this is their help desk for new customer setup https://www.hipchat.com/gAstw61gT https://www.hipchat.com/gAstw61gT

dahdum 12y ago

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

Fizzadar 12y ago

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

gtaylor 12y ago
> both pale in comparison to the simplicity, flexibility and client-options of IRC I can definitely agree on the flexibility part, but simplicity? No way. HipChat is easy enough for our completely non-technical users to be quite comfortable with immediately. The setup process is entering a username and a password. Ditto for the mobile apps. I love IRC, but it's a very different thing.
eddieroger 12y ago
I've set up an IRC server before and tried convincing a moderately technical team to install Colloquy and jump on. I will happily trade the features of Slack or HipChat for the simplicity of IRC. Persistent rooms alone (with zero config, no bouncers, etc) is worthwhile over vanilla IRC.

phamilton 12y ago

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

fixie 12y ago
I think their video chat is or was recently in beta. I imagine their biggest upsell in their 'HipChat Plus' package is searchable history which is a pretty important feature.

JGuo 12y ago

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

Dorian-Marie 12y ago

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

latchkey 12y ago

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

mrjatx 12y ago
So what? If your company ever used Openfire/Spark or any sorts of private IM services they're able to view private messages. Some of you act like this is some mind blowing travesty. You should expect the possibility of your company monitoring their services and communications.
- latchkey 12y ago
  Personally, I'm against their binding arbitration clause. This is a good reference. http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/arbitration-clauses-contracts-32644.html http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/arbitration-clauses-c...
powdahound 12y ago
Garret from HipChat here. The previous discussion on this topic made a lot of assumptions about this change, so I'd like to quote some additional detail from our help doc (http://help.hipchat.com/knowledgebase/articles/358098 http://help.hipchat.com/knowledgebase/articles/358098) before the same happens here; In order for an organization to access 1-1 chats occurring after May 27, 2014 or later, the organization will need to make a request by emailing support@hipchat.com. As stated in the HipChat-specific terms, the requesting entity must have consent from their affected users in order to obtain access to those users' 1-1 chat history. The typical way that an entity would have the right to access employee communications is through the entity's employee policy. It is standard practice among businesses to state in their policies that the employer has the right to access communications occurring on workplace systems. You should speak with your employer if you have questions about their specific data access policies.
- 12y ago

ChikkaChiChi 12y ago

I just recently compared Slack and Hipchat and Slack seems to be the more advanced of the two at this point. The magic bullet in collaborative chat like this seems to be presence awareness. We used to use GTalk for this but since moving to hangouts we can't ever tell who is at there desk when we need them. Here's to hoping one of them gets it right; especially when you install on your desktop and your mobile device.

kolev 12y ago

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

chermanowicz 12y ago
Have you tried http://Kato.im http://Kato.im ? They're the only product which supports multiple organizations in the same client -- and it's done in a really powerful way that doesn't force you to switch between orgs. You could have one or four open and still communicate effectively.
- mutru 12y ago
  Flowdock also supports multiple organizations in one client.
  - rekoros 12y ago
    It's true (and great!), but you can't see two conversations from two different organizations at the same time - have to click.
- kolev 12y ago
  There's isn't much info about it - not even a single screenshot.
  - chermanowicz 12y ago
    http://www.appvita.com/2014/04/29/kato-leverage-group-communication/ http://www.appvita.com/2014/04/29/kato-leverage-group-commun... http://blog.kato.im/ http://blog.kato.im/ I guess the website is still getting redesigned ;)
    - kolev 12y ago

rdschouw 12y ago

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

jedisct1 12y ago

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

ashayh 12y ago
What exactly do you mean by 'spy'? Edit: Looks like OP was referring to this: https://blog.hipchat.com/2014/04/25/hey-were-changing-our-terms-of-service/ https://blog.hipchat.com/2014/04/25/hey-were-changing-our-te...
mrjatx 12y ago
I haven't used Slack, but I've used all sorts of xmpp/jabber servers such as Openfire, generic jabberd, etc. Hipchat blows those away. I can quickly see what links and files I've posted or have been posted to me. I can open unlimited rooms, invite members to them and if I have a new employee start all I need to do is make them an account and they have everyones contact information. We previously used g-chat which was an absolute pain. Half of the employees I have on gchat I have their personal emails. And it was about $3/mo per user. Not bad at all.
freerobby 12y ago
We pay for HipChat because it makes team communication easy and painless on every device our employees own.
- zo1 12y ago
  I'm sorry, I don't speak marketing. Care to translate what you just said for us non-initiated?
  - sosborn 12y ago
    >it makes team communication easy and painless on every device our employees own Is this sentence really that hard to understand?
  - 12y ago

smethod 12y ago

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

kolev 12y ago
It's not ridiculous. People like eye candy! And even pay for it (stickers and other ridiculous things)!
nikhilpandit 12y ago
Slack lets you add custom emoji too: https://twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/437028458627989504 https://twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/437028458627989504
- smethod 12y ago
  Oh cool, thanks I missed that update
smasuch 12y ago
This is possible in slack: https://twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/437028458627989504 https://twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/437028458627989504
mitchellhislop 12y ago
You can setup custom emojis in Slack!

larrybolt 12y ago

I wonder if this has at least a little bit to do with the recent post about HackerChat [1], since even though it wasn't by the people at Slack themselves, but by someone else (Gianluca and Steven), it's pretty much a very good way to get the word out about Slack. I actually couldn't think of a better way than what HackerChat did to show to developers, entrepreneurs and people that would need such tool "Here's how it works!". I don't think any landing page can do that. I think it's what some smaller businesses might do, or some people applying for a job: look what the startup/client does or needs, make something that's relevant to demo your skills/features and show it to them. [1]: http://hackerchat.co/ http://hackerchat.co/

aspir 12y ago

People are making the valid comparison of Hipchat and Slack, which is to be expected. But, this is a deeper move by Atlassian. Atlassian's business model is still "All roads lead to JIRA/Confluence." It's why so many of their products are free. This isn't as much a Hipchat v. Slack/IRC/Google/Campfire move, as adding another road to JIRA.

callmeed 12y ago
The beauty of Slack, IMO, is in the nice integrations with everything I already use. Does Hipchat/JIRA/Confluence do that? (I honestly don't know) For a small team, there's no reason (for us at least) to move away from Trello, GitHub issues, etc.
- aspir 12y ago
  The integrations that Atlassian tools provide are optimized for large businesses. One bill, SSO, bulk administration of users, etc. From a usability perspective, I'm not a fan of the Atlassian platform over other stacks, but they cater to the people who tend to call the shots.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- david_shaw 12y ago
  HipChat has a nice API that allows us to shoot notifications from TribeHR, our Linux production boxes, code commits, Salesforce, etc. to our company-wide channels. It's a nice communication tool to use to keep the whole team on the same page.
- semerda 12y ago
  HipChat integrates with Jira/Confluence/BitBucket/Bamboo et al. It is the only reason we are using it vs a host of tools sticky taped together with different interfaces. As your team growths you will see the value in having a single unified set of tools that cover a majority of your needs vs a host of different tools chained together each providing a different experience, education and logins.

bokglobule 12y ago

Do you guys worry about confidentiality with these services?

hhaidar 12y ago
That's pretty much what happened with us. We ended up rolling our own thing and deploying it on our VPN with LDAP authentication: https://github.com/sdelements/lets-chat https://github.com/sdelements/lets-chat It's been working pretty nicely.
flurdy 12y ago
They do offer an internal hipchat server as a beta: https://www.hipchat.com/server https://www.hipchat.com/server Not total confidentiality but better.
njharman 12y ago
Yes. Every company I've worked for that had established (read not startups/not tiny) companies as customers could never use any thing like this due to contracts saying we won't be storing/transmitting their "stuff" on servers we do not control. [everyone hand waves email delivery but we can't use something like gmail]. These are tools for small / startup companies were you need something to just work and don't have resources to spend on anything but getting "established".
- tomschlick 12y ago
  They have a behind the firewall version of hipchat for security concious corp customers.

notwhyships 12y ago

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

EGreg 12y ago

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

jsmeaton 12y ago
Hangouts are really annoying for persistent rooms that others can join and leave at will. We found we had lots of different combinations of people in different hangouts, and the conversations were really fragmented. We use hangouts for group video, and hipchat for everything else.

mavci 12y ago

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

DanBlake 12y ago

It feels like they are pulling a amazon, ala diapers.com fiasco. * Only issue is, they are doing it to their core business vs amazon who was doing it with just one segment and could afford to cannibalize profits in that sector http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/10/10/amazon_book_how_jeff_bezos_went_thermonuclear_on_diapers_com.html http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/10/10/amazon_bo...

te_chris 12y ago
It would seem that you don't know much about Atlassian, JIRA and Confluence is their core business, not HipChat.

ak217 12y ago

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

akoumjian 12y ago
Same here. We "inbox" everything from support, to social media shares, some analytics, as well as code pushes. Love the way Flowdock handles those items and lets you make reference to them while talking in the main thread.
MartinCron 12y ago
I came here to say exactly this. Flowdock is my favorite groupware chat I have used so far.
JonoBB 12y ago
Yep - the way that flowdock handles multiple "flows" and the nice simple interface was the selling point for us. Slack has a bit of a nasty interface that is just not "clean" enough.

ansimionescu 12y ago

Two questions, if I may: What are HipChat's advantages over other chat services? What's a good, mainstream-ish, secure/encrypted chat service?

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

gorax 12y ago

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

jess1003 12y ago

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

rahilsondhi 12y ago

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

IgorPartola 12y ago

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

EC1 12y ago
The fundamental problem they "solve" is to be more hip and cool than the last, since no regular human being has heard of IRC, let alone many "hardcore programmers" that I know. I wish IRC was overhauled SOMEHOW and made more accessible to the common person.
- Karunamon 12y ago
  I never understood how IRC was somehow not accessible. Connect to a server, join a room, (usually from a helpfully provided list), enter text and other people see it. Those are the basics, and my gran could understand them. It's no more difficult than browsing the web.
brown9-2 12y ago
Persistence. It's nice to be able to see what conversations you missed while offline or overnight, especially if you have teammates distributed across the globe. Persistence also allows you to search through or link people to old conversations.
- IgorPartola 12y ago
  So XMPP lets you do this too. Why invent a new protocol?
  - brown9-2 12y ago
    Because a company feels there is money to be made by offering a simpler solution to interested customers. Does every product really need a technical justification? If every person at your company is comfortable setting up email clients, IRC bots, and bouncers, then this isn't a product for you. If you would rather just pay someone $2/person/month to set this up for you, then this is the product for you.

Thaxll 12y ago

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

CMCDragonkai 12y ago

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

bmurphy1976 12y ago

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

gaoshan 12y ago

We use a bunch of Atlassian products (Jira, Bitbucket, Tempo, Sourcetree, IDE Connector, Jira Agile, ) but while HipChat never caught on with us, Slack hit a home run. That said, once someone includes video group chat (a la Skype) for free we will likely jump for whoever offers it.

munificent 12y ago
> That said, once someone includes video group chat (a la Skype) for free we will likely jump for whoever offers it. Hangouts in G+?
- jsmeaton 12y ago
  We were using hangouts and google chat exclusively until we finally made the jump to HipChat. We still use hangouts for group video (morning scrum mostly), and hipchat for everything else. Group video in hipchat would be a killer feature.

programminggeek 12y ago

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

fekberg 12y ago

HipChat is great, but I've found myself much more often on JabbR (https://jabbr.net/ https://jabbr.net/) to be honest. Might be because I am a sucker for SignalR. JabbR is also free to use, you can have private team rooms if you so like and it integrates with a bunch of auth services.

mutant 12y ago

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

machbio 12y ago

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

torbica 12y ago

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

veesahni 12y ago
HipChat Server https://www.hipchat.com/server https://www.hipchat.com/server

Deestan 12y ago

Be aware that Hipchat are now rolling out a new "feature" in which the account admin can read all private 1-to-1 chat: http://help.hipchat.com/forums/138883-suggestions-ideas/suggestions/2757784-ability-for-admins-to-view-search-and-export-1-1 http://help.hipchat.com/forums/138883-suggestions-ideas/sugg... This could be a significant issue for some, both morally and legally. If you are using / are going to use Hipchat with this enabled, at least make sure you are aware of any legalities you need to conform to because of this. E.g. gather consent from employees.

djim 12y ago
if said service is provided by the employer, they own the data/communications and have every right to monitor the service. same goes for work email: employers have access to this. it isn't illegal for them to access these communications done on a work account.
- mikeash 12y ago
  That depends heavily on local laws and you really can't make a blanket statement like that.
  - RobAley 12y ago
    And laws be damned, it's often employee moral that takes a hit when employers snoop without consent, and that can be just as costly (if not more so) than a court case in many companies.
  - 15thandwhatever 12y ago
    largely depends on the industry you work in. a lot of us work in small dev shops, where we really like our privacy. a lot of us also work in regulated industries, where if your employer is NOT logging, then your company gets fined by $government or $regulatingbody.
truncate 12y ago
I mentioned earlier in this thread, privacy was already kind of broken. Given your account was registered with organization email, admin could reset your password and look at your private chats (like when you leave a company). Doing that would perhaps be violation of terms, but I don't think many would care particularly in developing countries where legalities of such things are joke.

hoopism 12y ago

I tried to sign up. I really did. First I entered in my own details but neglected my lastname... didn't say I had to. It's a single name field. It rejected my submission and zero'd out the fields. Strike one. Then it asked for my team members names and email addresses. It had a skip button, that was nice. I added their emails and used again their first names... let them add their last name or preferred name. Again it failed and removed all the data I entered. Strike two. Then I attempted to download the client. It wouldn't let me till I verified my account. It will let me send solicitation emails to team members... but not download a client. Ok. Odd. I downloaded the client to my mac entered credentials and after about 4 minutes it failed to launch with a debug window displayed. Strike three. I did try.

hoopism 12y ago

skizm 12y ago

Maybe I haven't read enough about HipChat, but what is the advantage over google's chat? That you don't need a google account? EDIT: ah, integration with other Atlassian products. got it.

jitbit 12y ago

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