Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

HipChat is now free for unlimited users

blog.hipchat.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 207 posts

Re: HipChat is now free for unlimited users

#151

Post by uxp »

IgorPartola wrote: post #130
brown9-2 wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It needs some kind of justification, otherwise it will die. HipChat being offered for free may extend it's life, but I still don't see a point. Everyone has access to GChat, so 99% of the problems are already solved. The dev shops would probably rather use IRC especially since the experience for power users is so terrible. That does not leave room for HipChat in this world.

My company just moved from a GChat-centric XMPP system to an all-in HipChat system. We don't have Google Apps because we have our own Exchange server, so not everyone gets a sane email address that can also be used as their GChat handle, so we've all relegated to using personal or work-specific personal Gmail accounts.

Just last week we onboarded a new developer and instead of having to spread her personal GChat address all over the company and make sure that everyone has authorized her to speak to them, and worked out the kinks for the few (like me) who run their own XMPP server that play russian roulette on whether Google is going to allow federation today... we just sent her a link to a URL which allowed her to create a user and immediately started downloading a client that once authenticated, connected her to the entire company.

Granted, we could have used our internal IRC server (we actually do have one set up), but the maintenance behind it really started to get to us. In order to use it we had to VPN in and connect, and backlog wasn't available to people that aren't technical enough to understand shell clients (like our project managers). When we did decide to open up the security permissions we had spam bots connecting 24/7 trying to get into our channel, which we then had to password protect, which ended up being another piece of tribal knowledge that "you just had to know".

Still, I continue to have Campfire (Flint.app), HipChat, Adium with XMPP for OTR, Google Hangouts for multi-person conferencing, Email, irssi and Twitter open all day. I wish I could consolodate them all into one, but I can't because they all have specific use cases. If HipChat was to allow an OTR plugin and multi-person video chats and screen sharing, that'd get rid of 4 of my communications^W daily distractions, but it wouldn't get rid of all of them because they serve different purposes.

At the very least, HipChat being free is a much better argument against using Lync now.

Re: HipChat is now free for unlimited users

#152

Post by JesseObrien »

jacktoole1 wrote: post #141
JonoBB wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

For anyone else running into the same problem, I just copied my HipChat.app in /Applications, and ran the second hipchat next to the first hipchat (you can also change the second hipchat's icon for easy distinguishment). It's not perfect (upon logout/restart it still remembers the preferences for the other instance), but it solved 90% of my hassle.

You can also do in the terminal:

  hipchat --detach &

Re: HipChat is now free for unlimited users

#153

Post by ghiculescu »

OoTheNigerian wrote: post #5

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 h…

> 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

Re: HipChat is now free for unlimited users

#154

Post by StavrosK »

wlesieutre wrote: post #81
ixmatus wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

Re: HipChat is now free for unlimited users

#156

Post by julianz »

jedisct1 wrote: post #28

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?

Still do. Point me at the Jabber server that gives us cross platform/device group and individual IM, easy integration, it's hosted elsewhere so if our work network is ever hosed we can still communicate and doesn't require any mucking around to set up. No?

Re: HipChat is now free for unlimited users

#157

Post by ab »

joeblau wrote: post #3

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.

Honestly I can't imagine how we ever used HipChat. The Linux client is abysmal, and the IRC/Jabber integration is also terrible.

Slack is really the best I've seen.

Re: HipChat is now free for unlimited users

#159

Post by baddox »

freerobby wrote: post #48
joeblau wrote: post #3

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.

I disagree. We tried Slack on our 26-person team and left it after a week. It had a few fans, but most people found the interface to be more complex and noisy than HipChat. Lots of red icons and blue banners that could not be disabled. No ability to see at a glance who is in a room without clicking the list and scrolling through it. The integrations were nice and the search was amazing, but those things were less imp…

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

Re: HipChat is now free for unlimited users

#160

Post by baddox »

klausa wrote: post #40
joshma wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any thoughts/justifications for pricing? The only thing holding us back is that Slack costs 4x as much ($8 instead of $2). While this isn't a big spend at the end of the day, we're sort of anchored at $2. There's nothing terribly wrong with hipchat, seems to address all our (simple) chat needs, and switching to slack doesn't seem to give us 4x as much value. So far the best reasoning I have is that we're a mostly-dev…

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

Unfortunately, the IRC gateway causes a bad experience, not so much for the people using IRC, but for the people using the real Slack client. Slack apparently doesn't recognize username mentions ("@joe123") coming from IRC, so everyone needs to add their username to their list of highlight words so that the team members using IRC can mention them.
Post reply on HN