We moved from Hipchat to Kato, mainly due to the bugs and frequent servers going offline.
HipChat is now free for unlimited users
131–140 of 207 posts
Re: HipChat is now free for unlimited users
#132I 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.
Re: HipChat is now free for unlimited users
#133HipChat 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.
The HipChat native client for OS X has been fantastic, plus there's an iOS client that pairs well with it, giving you push notifications for mentions. It's not clear if Slack has this too.
I wouldn't call Hipchat's OS X client native; it's Flash (Adobe Air). The Slack's desktop OS X and iOS apps, while they are html based, are an order of magnitude nicer to use.
Re: HipChat is now free for unlimited users
#134People 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.
What absolutely killed HipChat for our team was the fact that its not possible to use HipChat for multiple teams. Need to be logged into multiple accounts at the same time (i.e your own team and your client's team)? Not possible.
Their suggested solution is to use multiple different clients (i.e. one native, one browser) at the same time, which is beyond ridiculous.
I dont think that I have seen any uservoice votes above 6000 for any other product request before (see http://help.hipchat.com/forums/138883-suggestions-ideas/sugg...).
With no solution in sight, moving to slack or flowdock was a no brainer.
Re: HipChat is now free for unlimited users
#135Do you guys worry about confidentiality with these services?
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".
Re: HipChat is now free for unlimited users
#136We 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.
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.
Re: HipChat is now free for unlimited users
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
The HipChat native client for OS X has been fantastic, plus there's an iOS client that pairs well with it, giving you push notifications for mentions. It's not clear if Slack has this too.
I wouldn't call Hipchat's OS X client native; it's Flash (Adobe Air). The Slack's desktop OS X and iOS apps, while they are html based, are an order of magnitude nicer to use.
no it's not. their new OSX client is native. the old version is Adobe Air.
Re: HipChat is now free for unlimited users
#138We 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.
Re: HipChat is now free for unlimited users
#139Last 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 the…
I've found using hipchat with coworkers to be much nicer than using XMPP with coworkers mostly for it being closer to IRC: there are rooms where most discussion takes place, so you can get to know people by lurking there, and when you need to 1:1 message someone, you probably have some context about who they are, which makes a world of difference to an introverted new hire. The realtime team-wide chat just makes everything feel much more friendly, imho.
I'm sure it's possible to get that setup with XMPP, and it's definitely possible to get an equivalent setup with IRC (which I have an external server running ZNC for), but it's not out of the box, and there is something to be said for having a good configuration set up and working for everyone out of the box.
Re: HipChat is now free for unlimited users
#140We 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.
> That said, once someone includes video group chat (a la Skype) for free we will likely jump for whoever offers it.
Hangouts in G+?